At home in the Tower Of Babel

October 11 2005. Having the housekeeper here. Let me count the ways I'm blessed. I'm sitting here in the living room, typing this in anticipation of a modem being installed tomorrow morning (they didn't come as promised yesterday, more later), but why not hope for the best? Pot of tea, familiar classic tunes... Absent ironing board the maid's (Murni henceforth) sister was brought in to help Murni get ahead of things, and stands at my table with a mat ironing away, while Murni's in the kitchen (with Dino?) cooking... doorbell rings. Cable Guy. Over my shoulder I hear the loud "Blah blah blah jabber jabber jabber" of my Murni watching my back. Her sister got the door. This goes on for a bit, the building management guy chips in, too. This is how it went, me typing away with music going, nostrils and stomache awakened by the onions and chilis and garlic and other fun stuff coming their way soon (I get a week's home cooking for the price of one decent meal out...): "blah jabber bam blah jabber bam blah jabber bam... thank you" and two of them leave, and everything's going to be OK. Sorta like the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon where we hear what the dog, tail wagging throughout, hears: "Blah blah blah FOOD blah blah blah FIDO blah blah blah". I know from Poland that over time, with a little effort from me, the blah blah will form itself into meaningful soundwaves, but I'm enjoying the privacy in a crowd I get from only having a general idea of what's going on. Much more interesting being minimally aware of the sounds and tones of the language than maximally of the content of the words... do I really want to know what the housekeeper, her sister, and the cable guy are saying about the cable jack in my bedroom??? "blah jabber sis boom bah thank you" far richer melody. And tomorrow maybe I'll send this thing out as a result of that melody...

Seals and Crofts have it nearly right on my stereo: "Summer Breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the Jasmine in my mind". Except it's Darjeeling. But there has been a breeze for the last week, and "up on the roof" after dark (6:00 o'clock every day of the year) at the pool



(the only seductive one I've found here) it's a sweet breeze indeed to sweep away an hour with a good book. Brings in a bat or two, too, and they call up nights in a canoe on Tupper Lake many many moons ago. So I'm writing this and I'm making an island of calm around my chair in the middle of all this motion and noise. Apparently the locals thrive on noise and people (well, what else are they gonna do?), and never acquired a typical Westerner's appreciation of solitude. But clearly I have no legs on which to stand a complaint. I have this place, with its newly bargained for Persian carpets



and pics of loved ones missed back home (frames for the rest will soon appear),



to myself enough of the time. And while I started out sleeping like most folks here do:



I bailed quickly and went Western:

.

Sheesh, I've never owned bolsters before! New adventures in reading!

People Get Ready (Is a Change Gonna Come?/Walk this Way)
No question this lifestyle is easy to get used to. But there ARE a few things (like the sweat) that are gonna try me. Sweat's not a big deal, but... One of the big ones at this point is, well, the lesser of the big two is...

how can I put this tactfully?

I stand out in a crowd...
... I know a very little bit of what it feels like to be of color at a Springsteen concert (sad as that fact is), or in much of Concord NC. EVERYONE looks at me. There are a lot of people lounging about on or near the sidewalks without much else to do but stare. How much worse would it be as a woman? OK, so maybe I am more attractive and attracting than most of the dirt and rubble they would otherwise be looking at. Heck, the shopkeeper in the nearby "Oriental Rugs" shop (whence the carpets above) stared at me through his window while struggling to stay awake lying on the couch in his shop! His rugs are prettier than I am, I'm sure... but I stick out like a penguin in a flock of peacocks. Hey, I TRY to keep my head down, but there's only so much a guy can do. Walking through the University, all heads turn... these folks like to hang out in packs in common places and "blahjabber" and let their eyes wander. And no one's in a hurry (and no one sweats, either -- NOTE TO SELF: LEARN TO AMBLE...).

So I'm remembered. "Here comes funnylooking sweatyallatime allatimetrotting bigsmile guy again".

But that's where the similarity to racism American-style ends, of course. The rest of the experience is pretty much roughly the reverse. 95 percent of the time we all smile a lot (man am I getting a lot of practice at that), and it's nice and fun. But sometimes the eyes and faces don't smile and they are invariably weary, stained, tarnished, soiled and I wonder what they asociate me with. For folks who don't have a shot at making a go of it, even though most of them probably feel relatively lucky as heck to be living in Jakarta, even if they are literally at the dump (more later) than living most anywhere else in these parts, is it an envy or other negativity behind the stare, or just an emptiness and a disconnect, or a dispassionately thought-of meal ticket? I can't open the taxi window and give coins to every child that bangs a little percussion instrument at me... nor to the half-blind fathers that come with their children and sing at the window... nor the gangs of teens playing ukelele things in 8 lanes of stopped traffic downtown...

That's one of the things the traffic jams produce...

The Wild Ones (Kawasaki Let the Good Times Roll)
But what produces the traffic jams? Motorcycles. Like the flocks of pigeons taking aim in Trafalgar Square, like schools of sharks among the fishies, like something out of one of those midnight TV 70's b-movie hippie biker flicks, like schools of piranhas among the sharks, like those really annoying five-year old helmeted, stickless Austrian skikids who use your legs for slalom posts, these comprise the Mongol horde of Indonesian transportation, and they think they're riding Alexander's elephants.

Like dis: After 20 minutes in a single file line of cars waiting to go straight across a main street, your taxi reaches the interesection to see the hold up is a pack of bikers on the other side, momentarily prevented from turning right (British rules equivalent of a US left) across your lane. When the light turns red, they eventually stop flowing across the intersection, and the next batch filters to the front, readying the next pre-green charge, blocking oncoming traffic going straight. How brazen the gall! How wanton the temerity! And yes, how bronzed the gonads! No wonder there's such a business in self-employed traffic and parking assistants, the so-called "100 rupiah policemen" after the coin placed in their hands by drivers... With an arguable assist from a bewildering array of unsavory public transport options that seem to stop wherever and whenever any rider or hopeful rider wishes them too, these brigades ignore lights, traffic direction, pedestrians, the works... and EVERYONE HAS ONE.

Rio does business with Honda, and explained it to me. Honda alone sells 2 million a year from their one factory here, and they've been here four years, and the bikes last about five years. Honda's opening another one next year, and calculate they will have to open a new factory every four years to keep up with demand. The bikes cost a month's wages, while a car costs 2 years' wages (and let's not discuss a new car and its 200% luxury tax assessment). I've seen plenty of fathers driving PAIRS of preschool kids to school on them in this insanity... kids whose legs are too short to grip anything -- instead dad keeps them both between his knees... So do the math. Next year Honda puts 4 mil bikes into jakarta. And that's just Honda... It's a hopeless situation already... Half the bikers are taxi-drivers, too. On my five-minute walk to the Internet cafe, at least twice each way one of them shouts "hey!" to me, either from the street or having pulled onto the sidewalk to block my path... maybe one day. After all, they can't be beat, and you know what they say...