Night at the Wisma Bireuen Jaya

There is not a whole lot happening in Bireuen, a sleepy little corner of the east coast of Aceh where I have traveled down to for the handover of a few new schools to the community tomorrow, but the shinning light of town is the apt named Wisma Bireuen Jaya. [Tough to translate, but this means something like ‘extraordinary/transcendent guesthouse of Bireuen.’]

Seemingly modeled after the great American motor court, all pastel-painted cement and themed moulding, I initially described the Wisma as ‘less skeezy than expected.’ Check-in happens in a shallow, smoky room dominated by a massive slab of keys and tenderized by the radioactive glow and hypersonic drone of early evening Indonesian soap operas.

Checking-in being almost complete—facilitated by two increasingly incredulous looking women with hard eyes sunk into faces that exude an eerie pallor from the bleach (seriously, why do you want to be white? Do I look cool to you?) they rub into their faces each evening—when the proprietor, shirt open to his navel, mustache that kind of reminds me of the law enforcement fellow who always gets his pants cut open in ‘Zorro,’ descends on the business end of the room. Based on the amount of gold on his person, it seems reasonable to conclude that he does not trust banks.

As is a fairly common occurrence in Indonesia, the process will now need to be repeated, less efficiently and with greater confusion, to complete the operation. As the cigarette fused to his lip dwindles to a stump, keys are doled out, passports are ritualistically examined, voices are raised, and keys are snatched back again. The only thing that seems to obey any tug of time is the clay colored cigarette filter growing—at a pace that approaches imperceptibility—a salt and pepper crown not unlike the proprietor’s. I check several times in the free time I now have as the staff sorts out the conundrum of me and he seems somehow preserved by the air conditioning. Eventually the (still correct) set of keys is returned and one of the ladies of the manor escorts me to my room.

She forces the doors open with a polished lunge of the shoulder that, as I find out later, betrays less force than must actually be involved. Wielding a bazooka-imitating can of air freshener, I feel like I am on a ride-along police mission as the first imperative through the door (left, right, up, down) is to hit the entire room with a strong dose of the florally goodness. I somehow resist the urge to scream out ‘Clear, Sarge!’ now that all the room’s dirtiness has been dispatched.

Turning on the air conditioner, she prepares to give the room a killing dose of the other aerosol product included free in the room cost: the mosquito killing cloud. As much as I like bathing in something that causes immediate catastrophic neurological damage in insects, I managed to pull the Indonesian out fast enough to stop her. Genuinely stupefied, she graciously offers to leave it on my night stand (rather than across the room), presumably for my easy nighttime access.

As in many hotels, the bottom sheet and pillow shams are some sort of matching/themed affair (in this case that means…kittens!) and, based on the suggestion (as well as other tactile evidence) of the folded sheet on the pillow, not changed as often as the top sheet. Later, I sleep in the least favorite of my two sarongs, proving that I have yet to exhaust this wonderful garment’s many practical uses.

The bathroom will provide a crisis that yet again prompts the consideration of the slipperiest (and thus far, elusive) theoretical question of my life: Can and does soap clean itself?