7:45 PM: After checking in, checking my bag, and sitting at my departure gate for about an hour, a slow freak-out begins to set in. The ground feels unsteady. I think hard about shedding virtually every responsibility I’ve ever had, trading them in for a set of strange new responsibilities, how quickly the year will pass, what I’ll do when it’s over... I think about all of this so hard that I leave my last paycheck and an envelope full of cash just sitting there when I board the plane*.
Last looks:
The international wing of SFO is breathtakingly futuristic. Enormously tall, white, with long, tall aisle after aisle of ticket counters for airlines going everywhere. Strange people are jabbering away in their strange foreign tongues... I have stumbled into a spaceport. With three hours to kill, I hole up in the corner of a cafeteria next to a free electrical outlet. I watch Fight Club and eat cold Round Table pizza.
Saturday night lasts too long and rudely becomes Sunday without alerting any of us first. I spend the 12 hours between San Francisco and Taipei pinned in the window seat, except for the time I get up to take this picture:
Approaching Taipei we are greeted by an astounding lightning storm over the ocean. Lightning briefly illuminates the clouds far off to our side and the ocean far beneath us. It's an awesome image. [Caladan!] This is as close as I can come to capturing it with a camera through the airplane window:
As the sun comes up I listen to the new Grouper (you know, Dragging A Dead Ox Through Water Up A Hill?) for the first time and enjoy it quite a bit. We arrive at 5:00 AM Taipei time on September 1st [AKA 2:00 PM Portland time on August 31st] and –despite a few hours sleep coiled up in my seat- I'm definitely in that blotchy, wild-eyed "up all night" mode.
The Taipei airport is boring. The chic Taiwanese clothing shops in the airport play Linkin Park, Evanescence, and Mariah Carey. I sit on the floor, savoring my last Round Table slice. There is an enormous Vincent Gallo ad for Belvedere vodka:
The flight from Taipei to Jakarta is uneventful. I successfully resist the sick urge to watch the new Indiana Jones on the way. I catch most of it on my neighbors’ seat-back screens and fear that -even without sound- I have gotten the drift. That sadness passes quickly.
The plane drops out of the sky toward Jakarta and I stare into the murky green canal running parallel to the runway. Hmmm. No one meets me at the gate. No one meets me at the immigration counter. No one meets me at the baggage claim. I finally find the kids in the standard-issue bright blue Darmasiswa blazer waiting outside the airport exit. Then, as with all things that need to get done here, we wait around for another hour or so.
Cats roam the Jakarta airport. Cats and goats roam the sides of the road to downtown.
The land surrounding the airport is a strange mix of palm-lined orchards, tin-roofed shanty towns, and unidentifiable buildings that don’t appear to have been demolished so much as turned inside out, spewing garbage in all directions. It’s Southeast Asian Trailer Park Boys, except if Ricky and Julian get caught dealing hash here, they end up being publicly decapitated**.
The Darmasiswa Initiative puts us up at a youth hostel in Taman Mini, a theme park with areas based on all the different regions in Indonesia. [Disneyland scale, Enchanted Forest tech level.] All the participants fill several of these rooms with 20 bunk-beds:
The hostel is lousy with cats. Chickens too, but in the land where “BIRD-HUMAN-HUMAN” was/is still a reality, I presume it's best to steer clear of those. Thankfully they have the infected under strict quarantine:
On the second day, we go to malls. I see clusters of small shops selling identical merchandise, a clothing store that prominently features University Of Oregon Football t-shirts(?!!!) and the biggest, most offensive, ostentatious mall-shaped monstrosity I have ever seen. I emerge from this little trip with a cheap cell phone and bootleg copies of The Dark Knight and Carnivale: Season 1 for about $3 each.***
That night the mosquitoes eat me alive. 47 bites on my left arm and 55 bites on my face.
On the fourth day I wake up around 5 AM [right around the time morning prayer calls kick in] and finally get it together to go running. The park is deserted but surprisingly loud: buzzing insects, fluorescent lights, what I assume are bats, and distorted calls to prayer coming through the park’s PA system from all sides. Somehow the lack of sunlight amplifies the already-powerful odors here. I don’t make it much more than two miles in the heat and the stink, but I emerge feeling more productive than I have since arriving.
We meet with representatives from each of our respective universities later that afternoon. The ISI Jogja group is friendly and the meeting is very informative. Particularly informative is the part about how wayang kulit is not taught in Bahasa Indonesia; it’s only taught in Bahasa Java. [That is: It isn’t taught in the simple, notoriously easy Indonesian equivalent of Hochdeutsch that we all learn. It’s only taught in notoriously difficult Javanese, the one with different structure and sets of vocabulary depending on your and the person you’re addressing’s respective ages, social status, etc.]
Obviously this is the kind of important detail that would have been most helpful, I don’t know, SIX MONTHS AGO. Nonetheless, I have resolved to not worry and just roll with it. After all, I didn’t jump blindly into this thing because I thought it would be easy. It just turns out that there was room for my studies here to get even harder and more obscure. Bonus!
Next: Moving to Jogjakarta!
*Someone found it and turned it in. No worries.
**Kidding! I don’t think they do that in public.
***B- image quality, and you can’t turn the subtitles off. But only $3!
1 comment:
Really? You had to get a hipster bike?
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