honky tv

As is too often endemic to the human condition, Indonesians love watching television.

Evenings in the alleyways are bathed by the familiar blue glow of pixels whirring and winding their way through the spectral decrescendos of gratification. Come dusk it spills out of windows agape, bounces off murky mirrors, and slinks out under sentinel doors. Ceiling fan blades, mired in perpetualilty, bat it askance; everything from Champion’s League soccer to Hulk Hogan’s reality TV show to combination soap opera/ karaoke programs are cast out, anonymous velocity and terminal identity, into the tropical night’s hazy blue entropy.

My new favorite program on Indonesian TV is a garden variety, Animal Planet, crocodile hunting program. As you might expect it features nerdy, honky, biologist types wearing khaki zip-off shorts (I have been toying with the idea of dedicating an entire entry to the affinity of the white male to these, a highly disturbing trend: stay tuned) rochambeauxing around bodies of water in the dark and subsequently getting overexcited at 15 foot long reptiles.

I can not imagine what it must feel like to be the crocodile in this case: big meal, ensuing food coma, just relaxin’ at the top of the food chain and all of a sudden here comes a bunch of twiggy guys with a bright light and a cable loop attached to a pole. It makes you think twice before you again think that alien abductions are fabricated. I imagine all the crocs hanging out on the muddy shore, chomping game, and working to slap some ladies probably think ‘this guy’ is pretty crazy too.

Anyhow, the saving grace of this particular program is that it is dubbed. Indonesian programming is kind of a mixed bag: Scooby Doo is dubbed, whereas Eddie Murphy movies only have subtitles. In this case though, the dubbing is the main attraction. Crocs thrash about, our intrepid explorers jump in and out of danger’s clamp, hot and bothered biologists detonate the fourth wall with excited explanations, and all the while a breathless Asian voice tries to keep up with the action. Like watching a Kung Fu movie in inverse, it marks one of my giddiest half hours.

the italian bird

After some well-documented complaining, I have finally joined the a-motoring masses of the Indonesian road. However, before you think, ‘my, how quickly mas matt chucks his principles once he has already exploited an idea for its yield of sardonic observations,’ in my defense, I have done so on my own terms.

I am now the sometimes proud owner of 150cc of Italian engineered stylishness, a black 1962 Vespa scooter. It is both classic and sometimes practical. More importantly, it gives me an infusion of mobility and autonomy that has made me pretty happy. It is true that you cannot recapture your youth, but you can move to the developing world and buy a sexy scooter.
Aside from the fact that I now own something, in a foreign country no less, that requires maintenance (something that escaped my figuring at first), I am quite pleased by the whole operation. It runs well, still has plenty of power, and is completely original (although the speedometer has long ceased to work, a common affliction).

Buying the scooter was an interesting operation, because most bules that come looking for well preserved classic scooters do so only to turn around and export them and sell them to private collectors in the west for a tidy profit. Many people were completely against selling me a scooter of any vintage, and the good fortune of running into someone who really needed some cash (the owner’s teenage son looked completely despondent throughout the entire transaction and generally avoids me on the street) along with being friends with a few Vespa-owning Indonesians helped me pull it off. Those that would have dealt with me wanted a price three times greater than what an Indonesian might pay, largely because they were afraid that it would be one less scooter for Indonesians to enjoy in the future.

It is an interesting predicament to think about: Westerners who have both the purchasing power and hobbyism basically using the developing world as a salvage yard and in the process strip it of all the classic scooters, a stock that is, as funny as it sounds, highly important to the Indonesian Vespa aficionados that I know. Though, I must confess that I get a mildly perverse pleasure out of pulling into a nighttime scooter hangout and soaking up the looks of utter incredulity: ‘Seriously! Who the hell sold that one to whitey?’

I have become accustomed to the rules of the road here, in that there seems to be a set of general precepts, but adherence to them occurs on a purely voluntary basis. In that it is tough to really do anything wrong on the road, it is easier to feel up to speed with traffic norms than it is in the states. By far the craziest nuance is that the convention of right of way is completely inverted: the slower vehicle in front has the right of way. Therefore, when changing lanes no one looks first, and other vehicles simply adjust. If you can’t find a break to cross traffic when making a right hand turn, it is perfectly acceptable to drive up the wrong side of the road next to the curb until an opening presents itself. What is more, no one seems overly perturbed if some honky’s antique motor bike dies at an intersection. Whereas this might paralyze traffic in the states, everyone just kind of makes there way around the snarl and putters off on their way.

yogyakarta drift

For those of you that know me, no wind, rain, or Muslim country can keep me from my personal water of life. This verve salve that I am referring to is, of course, none other than the distilled thunderclap of Jimmy Beam.

Club Caesar, in this case was in a shuttered and predictably asian shopping palace; nothing gets you in the mood to club like driving out to the airport, into a below ground parking garage, and poking around for an elevator. Once engaged it opened onto a tube of neon lights at the end of which an unmanned metal detector guarded the club. Every person in my party set it off, but, as is the case at most airports in Indonesia, this proves scant reason to disrupt the flow of the line.
Perhaps owing to the abusive strobe (never have I felt so thankful at not being a small Japanese schoolchild—thanks, mom and dad) the bottle appeared before me on the black onyx pedestal masquerading as a table. I knew its boxy frame in an instant, and when I checked for the indispensably obliging signature (after all, by none other), I knew this was the genuine object, as pure as the dew on a Kentucky mare’s haunches.

I have never seen Jim Beam come to your table in a box, but I imagine my companions had never seen someone so enthusiastically dram it, and not yet interred by three inches of life-snuffing cola-colored earth to boot.

The house band—drummer, bassist, lead, and somewhere around four vocalists—entertained with medleys of hip hop covers from a stage worthy of prince at the super bowl while young dancers tentatively stalking the chrome pole placed in the midst of a grassland of glowing opaque plastic. An English girl hopped up on stage and gave it a decent twice over, most likely further confirming the ‘all western women are prostitutes’ stereotype held here, but she disappeared with a grizzled octogenarian, most likely to be plied with descriptions of ‘charming and picturesque’ East Millinockett.

ah, the birr of arrendments

Indonesian class has led me to conclude that America suffers from a catastrophic image problem. Now, before I come across as both oblivious and hackneyed, I fully expected this. However, I expected it to be couched in a general anti-imperialistic, pro-Palestine, anti- unilateralism, home of the stupid and obese rhetoric.

There is all of this, but what has shocked me the most is how little people know about the things that I identify as uniquely American. Every day I field a question from one of my teachers, educated people, along the lines of: ‘What is the state religion of America?’ or ‘What is this green statue doing in the middle of New York’ or ‘Which newspaper is the government newspaper?’ Stunned, and often on the urge of blurting out something along the lines of, ‘That is kind of the point of America;’ I find myself rattling on about the Bill of Rights (except for the second amendment; most of the world seems well informed of our national tradition of gun ownership) so often that I wish someone had made me take a refresher in civics with Mr. Flynn, his wife’s English, you know, before I left.

(It occurs to me that no one reading this blog will get that joke. I will leave it in.)

I just did not expect people to know absolutely nothing about all of the things that makes the American experiment so exceptional and the guiding principles that make it ultimately (as being away is helping me come to terms with) a force for good in the world. All of the freedoms that America embodies, and the core idea, one that at some point in history has touched every citizen, that anyone can make an American, are virtually unknown to everyone I meet here. Who knows how to fix this, but I cannot conceive of sprucing up our image around the world without addressing it.

keeping up relations with the community

Recently I have learned to drive a fully manual motor scooter (this will make sense at some future point in blogtime). Not an operation that is particularly difficult, the machinations of gas in the right grip, four gears in the left, and clutch on the left fingertips (not to mention brake with your right foot and hand), takes a little getting used to.

As with most things that I do, the scene created by the lanky, blond honky learning to drive a scooter provided plenty of entertainment for the neighborhood. Once I finally managed to start the thing, it took another 10 minutes for me to successfully put it into first gear with out stalling, and then a few more to get moving, accomplished by gunning the engine, letting out all the clutch, taking off at a sprint.

Finally, having bucked my way methodically down this checklist, I was so tired of everyone on the sidewalk laughing at me, that I decided to take a triumphant spin around the city center, rather than going down to the end of the street and turning around. Moderation is for pussies.

It was late at night, so the streets were largely empty, positive considering that it took me a little while to check my habit of drifting over to the right side of the road. I finished every turn with a wobble in the middle of the street fit for the forcible reverse birth of 7 years of traffic laws. Naturally I managed to stall the bike going over a speed bump at the furthest point on my circuit; it took me about 5 minutes to get it started again.

Returning to the neighborhood, I slipped a gear while coasting into the sidewalk. I must have been a frightening sight—clutch open, machine rearing and shuddering, not to mention bule—to the prostitutes sitting on a rug on the sidewalk (I live on the edge of the red light district), because they certainly scattered with a hustle that I did not think their plump middle-aged frames possessed. Crisis was averted (the prostitutes no longer proposition me anymore, we just wave and laugh) and as I stood around looking shamefaced, a guy about my age walked over to me and said in declarative but clearly excited English, ‘You…scared the ladies.’

Indeed.

love in the afternoon

Indonesians love soccer—unfortunately, they do not happen to be any good at it. It is quite the unfortunate case, especially as the sport verges on national obsession.

There is a national semi-pro league and every day around late afternoon you can turn on the television and find a football match. That is if the television is not already turned to the football and surrounded by chain-smoking, occupation-less men, as it usually is.

The game is a veritable zeitgeist object in that it is a frenetic, often out of control, clutching game that involves profuse sweating. All aspects of the league are heavily tied in with cigarette advertising (big business in Indonesia) and I am told that the players make, not only by Indonesian standards, a handsome living. I imagine that this accounts for the ‘Emersons,’ ‘Silvestros,’ or ‘Robertos,’ that every team seems to have a few of, what I imagine to be the football equivalent of the most miserable exile (a potentially smarmy book idea for anyone who knows more about the sport), resulting in hilarious after-match interviews when African-born players an Indonesian commentators try to cobble together some common ground in English.

For me, what Indonesian football lacks in polish, talent, or professionalism it more than makes up for in comedy. If you feel low in the afternoon, it is always there for a quick and easy laugh. However, my favorite thing about Indonesian football is watching it with Indonesians as the catch-all Indonesian word for basically anything good happening is sukses (sounds a bit like success). At the slightest provoking development they can be counted on to murmur, ‘sukses!’ which for some unknown reason delights me.

A few days ago, while watching a match after school, I saw a game stopped for fifteen minutes while the justice of a late second half penalty kick was pleaded, a scene that included the goalie running down from the opposite end of the field and repeatedly trying to give the referee the old high-school-locker-room-nut-tap-move until he was eventually restrained. Not only was the call in his team’s favor, but no cards were awarded.

When order was finally restored and the penalty struck the home team down a goal, the stands began to empty while the chain link fence around the pitch began to fill up with fans threatening to storm the field. Understandably, the officiating pulled a quick about face and the home team scored in the 107^th minute (another first for me) to tie the match. Sukses!

indigestion

The other night, my friend from Jakarta, the lady who essentially appointed herself responsible for shepherding me around during my first week in Indonesia, happened to be down in Yogyakarta. She gathered a sundry group of her friends, family, and me together and took us out to dinner.

I of course, managed to provide a rather bland occasion with some notable dinner entertainment. We went to a fish barbecue place where your plate is a banana leaf and most people forgo utensils. Basically the meal involved a table full of dishes and a big basket of rice (Indonesians believe that what constitutes a meal is rice, everything without is a snack), a family style affair.

With so much food before me and having lived with unusual moderation of late (more out of reality than choice), I had already decided to put down some food. When I started eating with my hands, the other people at the table looked bemused, when I started piling on the sambal (sauce made from stone crushed red chilies), they looked anxious, when I clumped the rice like the Javanese do, they looked admiringly, and when I kept moving for the rice basket after everyone else had pushed back from the table, a young waitress walked up to me and blurted out ‘I like the way that you eat.’

my personal savant

I looked up from my breakfast table the other morning as the everyman of my losmen (hostel-ish place that I live in) sat down to join me. The steam curling around his face alerted me to something out of the ordinary, and I looked down to see what he was packing.+

It turns out that he had brought breakfast with him, in this case a bowl of clear broth with the head and two feet of an unfortunately bisected chicken. Actually, in the employ of linguistic precision, one might never know for certain if you bought the matching and complete set, but I imagine you get the idea.

Seeing someone lay into a chicken’s foot before finishing the day’s first cup of coffee, let me inform you, is actually the preferred approach when you run afowl of such a situation, but nonetheless a generally unpleasant operation.

This struck me as worthy of your time not because I wanted to mention all the ‘totally gross’ (as the over-demanding Skeletor from Los Angeles staying in the losmen who asked me if she could drink the water from the tap might say) things that come with living here—the rats that look and, perhaps more disconcertingly, saunter like pensioners top the list—but because of an unusual confluence.

You see my friend, like a criminally over-serialized self improvement book, quite simply, drops the wisdom on you.

In a nearly unbroken and constantly reversing slipstream of Indonesian and English that apparently only I can understand (other guests and Indonesians remark that they find him unintelligible; flout the theory of me, muse), he will talk for an hour without interruption about the spiritual symbolism of batik color motifs or population economics in Singapore. Often, I cannot shake the vibe that all of these things are occurring to him for the first time, like I am living with a street corner savant.

I could not help asking, ‘what happened to the rest of the chicken?’

Last night, over tea in the street, he went thirty minutes on the etymological roots of the phrase ‘Yo, bro,’ a subject on which I would pay good rupiah to see him go the distance with one Michael Padgett.

my blue raincoat

Part of the rainy season is buying a raincoat and an umbrella. As you might imagine, when the changing of the seasons is marked by something as definitive as rain and then later it ceasing to rain for eight months, it is tough to fake it. Since it is difficult to either put your poncho into mothballs or recall exactly which stowage seemed most fitting for your umbrella to winter, everyone has to come by these necessities again, either by hook or by crook.

As the saying goes, there are two modes of acquisition, either schlep to the store like most god-fearing (from what I can gather a slightly less mellow and less personal god than we westerners might be familiar with) folk or steal it from the well meaning (and dashing) honky that lives in your alleyway.

Needless to say, as I was drying my raincoat across the handlebars of my bicycle (truly more of a tangle of sharp metal resembling a bicycle) my raincoat found a new home. I was able to find this new home almost as quickly as it disappeared, in large part because my poncho did not have to make a long trip.

Two days later—days, coincidentally, where I weighed and considered the rain like the miniature golf ball courts the windmill—I noticed on my way to school a rain coat about 25 meters down the alleyway that looked strikingly, down to the bicycle rust stains, like my recently departed one.

That afternoon, after spending an entire hour practicing and learning necessary vocabulary to dispute the ownership of a raincoat (yet to be covered in my studies, though the vocabulary necessary to set up a small business that makes banana chips—check) I set out for home on my bicycle full of resolve.

Indonesian language is basically organized entirely in the passive tense, so as to avoid saying anything outright and thereby never cause offense. Therefore, key sentences included: ‘My raincoat is no longer on top of my bicycle,’ ‘My raincoat looks similar to this raincoat,’ and ‘This raincoat, might it be from that house?’ It is the type of language where when someone stands on your foot in the bus, the proper thing to say is ‘My foot is being stood on.’ Anyhow, my teacher implored me to just forget about the raincoat, cut my losses, and call off the recovery mission: you cannot do this sort of thing here, people will not understand. I, muttering something about subsidizing raincoats for the whole neighborhood, refused to demure.

I managed to make it about halfway home before the windmill blade descended like a thunderclap (in actuality, with a thunderclap) and the rain opened up. You have scant seen rain come on with such alacrity and sheer power until you have experienced the monsoon. Water pours from the sky and the streets become sluices; this happens every day, seemingly without fatigue. With the élan that only a twenty-year-old bicycle built for someone about a foot shorter than me can emboss, I clattered off the road and under the awning of a roadside shop and, as the rain poured down, knew that I had been defeated. I fished through my pockets, bought another (identical, or soon to acquire the requisite rust stains) raincoat, and pedaled home, fully aware of Indnoesia's coquettish laughter all around.

very superstitious

As some of you may have heard, Indonesia has a few volcanoes. Sometimes, when mingled with Gods gone crazy you sometimes end up with a precarious cocktail. At press time, three volcanoes are stirring: one in Sulawesi, Kracatau—the super volcano between Sumatra and Jawa that supposedly produced the loudest sound ever heard on earth when it erupted in the 1800s,—and one in East Jawa, Mt. Kelud—the most impending of the group.

I got to thinking about volcanoes for a few reasons. The first is that I want to let it be known that I live no where near any of these volcanoes. If one of them erupts in the near future, please do not worry. True, there is a volcano about 30km from where I live, however it is the type of volcano that behaves more like your garden variety baking soda and vinegar science project volcano than the volcanoes you see on the History Channel. If something happens, either there or farther a field, my present residence is metaphorically quite far from the kitchen floor.

Secondly, I saw an interesting article in the Jakarta Post last week covering local soothsayers’ predictions for the eruption of Kelud. Basically, vulcanologists could not narrow down a date and so the paper consulted the people who live near the volcano and communicate with it by bringing it rice and chickens and whatnot. I mention this because the piece was not, as it might be in the Western media, a weekend edition type fluff piece.

This case—of an ostensibly western media outlet reporting on a very traditional but very mainstream belief—illuminates the dissonance that comes with living in Indonesia. On the one hand, Indonesian life bears many of the offspring of modernity, and yet it is a culture that is widely influenced by what a westerner would call ‘superstition.’ People are aware of and understand, in a word, science but, where important and immovable things are concerned, believe that bringing a cauldron of molten earth rice in exchange for its secrets is not only a perfectly reasonable, but most likely better, method.

Indonesians keep up a near constant cohabitation with spirits (the soothsayers, by the way, agreed on the verdict of within a week). Part of the reason I find it so strange that radical Islam has gained even its meager foothold here is because Indonesians of all stripes believe in a vague and pervasive mysticism that can overpower human beings. From time to time you hear about robberies of wealthy homes where the housekeeper claims that someone came to the gate and cast a spell that compelled them to open the house. Most people accept this as an unexplainable but completely reasonable occurrence. Many Indonesians would never dream of going out at night alone for fear of being waylaid by a ambling spirit.

A few evenings ago I met, as I often do, one of the employees (and one of my closest Indonesian friends) from my losmen on the street. He exhorted me to join him for tea at a roadside cart, as he loves practicing his English with me (he really is quite the street corner philosopher) and I, with nowhere to go and Indonesian to practice, sat down. We wandered onto the topic of violence in Indonesia and began talking about the Madurese people.

The Madurese, depending on how you look at it, either incite or happen to be on the victimized end of most intra-ethnic conflicts in Indonesia. Hailing from the island of Madura off the East Coast of Jawa, Madurese are nearly universally noted for, among other things, their sate and pugilism.

Anyhow, my friend mentioned how the Madurese never bother Javanese people because they know from sampling their blood what they are up against. Now, there actually have been well documented cases of Madurese people (and Dayak, an ethnicity from Borneo) drinking the blood of adversaries that they have killed. However, that you can divine the soul of a people and therein sense them whenever you meet them thereafter by developing an ethnically diversified palate for blood, struck me as far more powerful. At this point my friend, someone who is fairly modern, city bred, and not outwardly cowed by any sort of mysticism, basically told me, you may not think so, but this is completely true. And as the cart’s gas lantern whispered to no one in particular except the glowing charcoal beneath the kettles, it was plain that he truly believed it.

pastiche

To say nothing of its placid lanes, devout populace, and proximity to public transportation, the private sector of the quarter of P--- was wholly devoted to its children. Sometime between the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions endemic to the neighborhood, two separate vendors peddling mobile children's attractions chose to pedal their businesses up and down its moderately shaded streets. None of the residents could pin down the why or the when of the phenomenon and, as a general rule, inquiries of any sort were regarded with the same air of the heaping helpings of rice chips that the locality's other capitalists, the food stall tenders, piled onto plates of lotek or soto every lunch hour.

The first, a mustachioed man with a near perfect half circle void rotted between his two upper front teeth, spent his days steering, from underneath a greasy baseball cap, a mobile version of the sinusoidal ridable animal attraction such as one might see in a shopping mall arcade. His contraption had two sets of pedals, one that drove the whole mechanism and another set that could be engaged to set its mighty team alee. These pedals also provided the power for a small speaker that played a small catalog of 'children's favorites,' musical accompaniment that during the height of the day's heat often cracked and hiccuped for want of power as the legs of it enterprising operator struggled to keep up with its greedy demands. By many impartial accounts, this was more of an attraction for adults than children. The casual passerby, non-indigenous to P---, might note the concerned and in some cases terrified look of the treated tots, but the music always clutched to a halt, like a phonograph going quite reluctantly over a cliff, money was exchanged and all parties moved on their way.

The second, a mustachioed man with a voracious appetite for dark clove cigarettes, had somehow come into possession of a pastel steel half-cart with benches, such as one might be in during the visit to the amusement park when first realizing dirt's capacity to transcend the visible light spectrum. The operator sat at the front of the cart on a pedaled contraption that was retrofitted to resemble a locomotive. The whole mechanism had been rechristened 'Fantasi Train' and its main attraction was the deluxe car alarm wired to its roof. The 'train' would creep through the streets (owing to the immense weight attached to the pedals) blaring a loop of the car alarm's greatest hits at 83 decibels (a short debate had erupted when the local Muslim Homeowner's Association (PIsCO) had claimed the decibel scale in the name of the holy and this value was a compromise, whereas the mosque was allowed to continue operations at the round number of 85) and make a round of the neighborhood before depositing its cargo of concerned looking youngsters back at their homes.

It was a truly lovely little place to live and an even better place to bring up children. What no one could ever explain was the near spontaneous appearance as well as equally mysterious withdrawal of the tallest child anyone had ever seen--actually, owing to the bright sun, no one ever got an honest look at him--standing in the lane asking quietly to ride the 'fantasi train.' Most people are sure he did not exist, but a few contend that his inability to roll his 'r's was unmistakable, irrefutable evidence to some sort of durability.

november the 1st and its raining...culture!

My plan was to avoid making snide cultural observations that delight in the misappropriation of Anglo-American artifacts. After all, gleeful reportage along the lines of ‘look at this hilarious grammar!,’ or ‘every handshake finishes with a somewhat ungainly gang-inspired clasping and rocking that expires so aimlessly it feels entropic’ is both fairly uninspired and well-worn territory as well as the further perpetration of a cultural urbanity that most Americans would be well off to outgrow.

Lofty sentiment, but things changed this afternoon. I came home to the losmen where I am presently living (a losmen is basically an inn, but with minimal facilities), a place that serves in some ways as the de facto art command post for the quarter. The owner of the place is a painter (the entire place is decorated with his pleasing, albeit very heavy on psychedelia and Eden-esque themes, paintings) and the place is the most westernized losmen in the neighborhood. Sometimes there are batik painting courses held here for whiteys who happen to be passing through.

Batik painting is a very Javanese technique that involves painting on cloth with different colors of heated color wax. The wax congeals and between each color application the piece is washed, leaving a colorfast cloth with an interesting and aged quality. It is a huge industry in Yogya and the people here are very proud of it (admittedly, it can be very beautiful); it is nearly impossible to walk down a street without being showered with invitations to batik galleries (and special one day, once in a lifetime sales). One of my favorite ruses is to offer tourists a ridiculously cheap flat fee to hire a becak for an hour long tour of the city and then take them to all the batik galleries that offer commission, where the owners are predictably good at laying down the hard sell.

Anyhow, the soundtrack of choice for the Javanese batik guru was ‘November Rain’ by Guns’n’Roses. Not that there is a problem with Axl and the boys, but I must say I was expecting something a bit more in the vein of traditional gamelan music (or at least IndoPop).

Besides the surreal qualities of the whole scene, it got me thinking what determines this crapshoot of cultural diffusion. What determines the sundry cultural bric-a-brac that makes it to the developed world? Is the fact that everyone responds to my saying I lived in Boston by inquiring if I know the New Kids on the Block or that people casually ask me how many ‘Twisters’ I have lived through (in reference to the highly realistic film of the name and a question often punctuated by ‘bccccssh’ and ‘boooms’ that celebrate its destructive faculties) completely haphazard?

Since I cannot believe that Indonesians love the saccharine melodies of NKOTB, but feel like Too Live Crew just really is not their style, there must be something more. ‘Twister’ was great, but I thought ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was a tired rehash of that same old apocalyptic blockbuster. Seriously, who is in charge here? If we are going to act as cultural imperialists should not we at least set up some sort of vetting committee to disseminate an accurate portrait of American life? You know, one where we all settle our scores with automatic weapons and pursue our maidens through lush jungle foliage.

orange crush

Americans may get a bad rap the world over, but lately I think this reflects the difficulties of the superpower rather than its uncouth children. My losmen is consistently filled with Germans and especially Dutch people and much of their time is spent to enumerate their complaints: no one speaks English, no one possesses the ‘skills’ or ‘abilities’ to help them, its ridiculous that you can’t travel smoothly and with total convenience, people on the street never have the right information on plane departures or bus fares. It seems as if these people feel genuinely inconvenienced that such a country is not set up for their leisure and comfort—and they sulk accordingly.

Just last night this fellow was absolutely abusing one of the employees of the losmen where I live with condescension because the airline had lost his bag, whereas the staff member had merely generously offered to liaise with the airline (because, of course, this fellow does not speak a whit of Indonesian).
I hold my tongue, but I often want to pipe in to point out that they are choosing to come to someone else’s country where they do not speak the language (and do not go out of their way to try) and where time, culture, and custom move differently than in Europe. These things happen when one signs up to travel in the developing world, after all.

In fact, they just whined, ‘Next time we should just go to Germany.’

Now I know that perhaps I have a bit of a non representative sample on my hands here, however, all of the Americans (and the number is few) that I have met here have without dispute been the most upbeat, flexible, friendly, open-minded, and most willing to try to insinuate themselves into the local rhythms. Truly, this was one of the last things I expected.

What is more, I have never seen such an unflattering portrait of Dutch people and I cannot help but wonder if this is rooted in the colonial experience. As an American, I have quite a different bent on colonial heritage, and one that is substantially less contemporary. The Dutch, on the other hand, were fighting to remain here as recently as 1945 and really only capitulated when the UN pretty much dictated their marching orders to them. Say what you will about imperialism, unilateralism, and proxyism but the fact that America stands essentially alone in the developed world (callously overlooking our neighbors to the north, I know) unstained by the legacy of colonial patronage truly resonates.

It is one thing to complain about the vagaries of travel, but quite another to go to a country that, by the way, your country exploited its natural resources and culture (as an aside, Dutch colonialism is fascinating: they basically bought off the local royalty, setting up a complex patronage system that ultimately buckled under its own weight after a downright impressive run) for 350 years and once there act superior and gruff about the absence of European style efficiency and the fact that no one speaks a language you understand.
Strange days.