Borneo to Run

Mama Nisa is 49 years old. She has had eight children with three husbands, her first at the age of fifteen. In the mid-90's, she worked as a maid in Madina, Saudi Arabia for two years, but returned home when her mother became ill. She liked Arabia. They ate bread. And rice. The pay was very good.

She tells all of this to me one afternoon with the same matter-of-factness as discussing the weather. We sit eating bowls of gelatinous coconut flour globs in red palm sugar, a treat she procured from the house. Nisa, her youngest daughter, 8 years old, lays in her mother's lap, playing with a pair of heart-shaped magnets.

"This is my only child from my current husband," she tells me. "He's a good husband. He helps out, goes to the market, works on the house, cooks sate."

"Do you like this work? Running a warung?" I ask her.

"Oh yeah. I used to have a warung at Loktabat in Banjarbaru, but people didn't come. This is good," she says, slurping the rich, sugary coconut mush, "I'm getting old, it's right outside the door of my home. My family's always around. It's making me fat, though," she raises her arm, tugging at the drooping skin.

Nisa, her 12 year old daughter, gets up to swat the flies from the food case. I tell Ibu I want her to teach me how to make soto banjar, the quintessential Banjar meal.

"Oh, so you can go back to America and open a restaurant!"

"Uh, maybe..."

"Yes, sure, I can do that, come back on Friday, bring a notebook and a pen."

As I leave, some customers arrive at the warung. I can hear Mama Nisa telling them loudly that I'm going to learn to make soto and bring it back to the U.S. to make it famous.

***

When I return Friday afternoon, she has a satchet of the spices I'll need already prepared, a reference for me when I go to the market.

"Nah, Daniil! Here, you'll need these," she begins, and takes me through the steps. Boiling water with star anise, cardamom, cinnamon, and an oily mash of garlic, ginger, and shallots. Blending two boiled potatoes with two eggs until extremely smooth ("at least ten minutes," she warns, "or you'll soup will be ugly").

When the broth is boiling, add butter and the eggy potato mixture. "Don't use milk or sugar! some of these Ibus add milk or sugar, but that's not the original way."

She tells me the recipe and walks me through the process as if proudly handing me an honorary set of keys to the Banjar kingdom. Throughout the lesson customers come, and as she serves them she tells them of my plans to cook soto banjar in America, make a name for the soup in my hometown, New York City.

She has me stir the boiling soup, noting the translucent yellow color, the odor of spices blended so as to release their own particular flavor to the greater taste of the sum of their parts. In both Mama Nisa's cooking and Indonesian food in general, this is a common feature. A strong flavor, but its components are blended and combined in such as a way as to hide their origin.

Mama Nisa ladles the soup broth into a bowl of sliced boiled duck egg, lontong, shredded chicken, and cellophone noodles. "Nah, Danil!" she smiles, "this is soto banjar!"

***

It started with a makeshift structure of wooden beams, bright green and white tarps hanging over it. As I rode my bike to the village store, a few kilometers from my pondok home down the one paved road in Cindai Alus, anonymous voices would call out from the shaded interior: "hello mister! mau ke mana!? (where are you going)"

As bursts of random greetings towards bulehs are as common in Indonesian villages as banana trees or motor bike exhaust, I waved towards the hovel, returning the greeting. Each day the bright plastic roof got a little taller, like a flag slowly raised against the sun and rain, and the wooden structure a little more structured.

Then I left the village for a while, street-streeting around Indonesia during my school's December exams, when I wasn't required to teach. When I returned, the tarps were firmly in place over a small, open-air building. There were a few tables and benches hugging the walls, and a handsome glass case displaying fresh herbs, a bowl of tiny local limes, palm-leaf packets of lontong, sate skewers of chicken meat, and platters of chicken pieces drowned in a blood red sauce.

The plain red sign out front proclaimed, in stenciled black letters: "WARUNG MAKAN MAMA NISA. Sedia Masak Habang, Ayam Panggang, Sate, Nasi Sop, Soto."

***

Upon my first visit, Mama Nisa and her daughters greeted me with the humorous curiosity I had become accustomed to in small town Kalimantan. I ordered masak habang ayam, "red cooked chicken," and as I took a seat on the bench, the ebullient Mama Nisa struck up a conversation, the first of many.

"Can you eat rice?" She asked, heaping piles of the refined white grain onto a glass plate.

"Of course I can eat rice. I like rice," I replied. This was perhaps the 347th time I've been made to answer this question. After five months of living in Indonesia I found the question utterly ridiculous, like asking someone living in the arctic if they could wear a warm coat. But after doing a bit of research into the social use of Indonesian, I came to appreciate the question for its hidden underpinnings of meaning.

It seems that more than asking "can you put rice in your mouth, chew it, and swallow it," the question is really asking something more along the lines of " can you jive with Indonesian food?" Can you live in Indonesia on our terms, according to our diet, or will you seek out bread, the food item that many Indonesians believe Americans consume on the same basis as Indonesians consume their rice.

"But in America, you eat bread, right, not rice?" Mama Nisa asked, placing a big plate full of rice and chicken pieces swimming in a sweet red sauce before me.

I gave my usual explanation: In America, I eat bread sometimes, rice sometimes, couscous sometimes. Sometimes no grain at all. I told her that there are many kinds of rice in America. To this, she flashed her brassy, lipsticked mother smile, her thin eyebrows inclining at the corners, and took a seat beside me.

That afternoon we made our way through the usual rounds of introductory chit-chat, the conversation volleying back and forth like a shuttlecock in an expert game of badminton. What city are you from? How long have you been in Indonesia? What are you doing in Indonesia? Do you like Indonesia? Where'd you learn to speak Indonesian? Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend? Do you have an Indonesian girlfriend? When will you get married? Are your parents still living? Where do they live? How old are they?

One of Ibu's daughters, who looked to be her in her mid-twenties, joined us on the bench, munching on a puck-shaped jackfruit cake, nodding along with the talk and making side comments to her mother. As the afternoon ambled on, a thick blanket of clouds rolled over the sun, dimming the light over the the warung, the family house, the concrete box that served as a pulsa stand as well as the married daughter's home.

The family home stood immediately behind the warung, a large concrete and brick structure from which young men with eternally smoking clove cigarettes between their fingers seemed to constantly emerge (I would later learn that these were Ibu's sons). Beside the warung was the pulsa shop/fishing supply store/random garment stand/living quarters.

Throughout the day, fishermen on their way to one of the area's numerous ponds would stop by, test the heft and snap of one of the many twelve-foot bamboo fishing poles that leaned against the building, buy a handful of small frogs from the wooden frog crate out back. Villagers would come to fill their pulsa, browsing the newly installed glass case of SIM cards, spare phone parts, wads of bras, panties, jilbabs, and women's sarongs.

What immediately set Ibu Nisa apart from most of my acquaintances in the village was her use of my name to address me, as opposed to the ubiquitous "Mister."

"Daniil," she called after me as I left, "stop by often!"

***

The food itself is very nice, a solid representation of timeless Banjar classics. The red spice sauce, with either chicken meat or livers and hearts, is sweet and tangy and vibrantly sanguine. The soto banjar is loaded with lontong, sliced egg, and chicken. And the ayam panggang (barbecue chicken) is consistently delicious. Bored with her standard menu, Mama Nisa sometimes changes it up for a little variety, adding urap (a Javanese salad of spiced, boiled coconut, cassava leaves, and long beans with shrimpy chili paste) or sambal hati goreng (chicken hearts and livers pan-fried in a sweet soy sauce).

Although it seems like standard fare, there's something in there that makes Ibu Nisa's offerings just a tad tastier than the rest. Perhaps it's that the food is made from scratch everyday in the courtyard hearth. Perhaps it's the dizzying quantities of MSG and palm oil.

***

In the afternoon, the warung is often quiet. "Santai aja lah," as they say, the unofficial motto of South Kalimantan, just relax, enjoy. I sit in its shade, sipping a glass of sweet, iced jasmine tea, watching the cassava leaves in the nearby fields bob in the wind, listening to Mama Nisa's rambling staccato with her daughters, her neighbors, her husband, herself. She is constantly in motion, wiping crumbs of rice and lime seeds from the tables, cooking up new batches of chicken, adding salt or soup leaves to the big pots of soto, tickling Nabila, her toddler granddaughter who spends most of the day wandering the yard.

Mama Nisa's family are ethnically Banjar, and I find the distinctive speech patterns of the Banjar language incredibly amusing. It is very closely related to Indonesian language, but spoken very fast and with the syllable stresses coming in very different places than the Javanese and Sundanese accents of my original Bahasa Indonesia teachers. It is a punchy, exclamatory language. Drawn out vowel sounds follow skittering staccatos of vowel/consonant/vowel/consonant.

No matter what, Mama Nisa and family always appear at ease. Like many village families whose assorted bicycles, both motorized and foot-propelled, rarely stray too far from the main road, they seem forever clothed in light cotton pajamas. Mama Nisa wears bright floral-printed mumus or a matching lime green set of pants and t-shirt, Bapak Nisa usually sports a plaid red sarong and white kopia, with a plain-colored polo stretched tight over the bulk of his belly, while Nabila and the little ones often roam around in little more than a diaper. The young women often don bright pink pajama suits or plaid dresses, and in the early afternoon, their faces are ghostly white with some kind of skin-whitening cream. As the day wears on, the cream fades, but it appears to harden a bit in the heat, leaving traces of chalky white scattered over their latte-colored complexions like grains of rice on a wooden table.

When the warung is busy, it's the closest I've seen in Cindai Alus to a hopping diner scene. The benches fill up with fellow teachers from the pondok, fishermen on their way to the local ponds, and hungry families passing through the village, chit-chatting while slowly savoring their teas, either hot or cold, after eating. While eating, however, most Banjar people tend to be very quiet, rarely talking if at all. It has been explained to me that in some interpretations of Islam, talking while eating is frowned upon.

On afternoons like these, Mama Nisa's daughters scramble from the house to the warung, cleaning plates, serving tea, feeding Nabila and the other assorted children, grandchildren, and neighborhood kids who amble around the yard. Bapak Nisa mans the grill, wafting the smoke from the sizzling sate skewers with a piece of cardboard. And Mama Nisa, captain at the helm of a squall-tossed ship, presides over it all, scooping rice into plates, chopping limes and tossing them on top of mounds of "red cooked chicken," laughing and chatting with whoever happens to be listening.


***


Glossary:

Warung: Usually translated as "small shop" or "small restaurant," this is an informal establishment that sells either basic goods or simple meals accompanied (as most every meal is) by rice.

Lontong: A moist, spongy rice cake made by filling a palm leaf packet with rice and then boiling for a few hours.

Ibu: Bahasa Indonesia for "mother," also used as a title for married women, like "Mrs," and a polite form of address. In this article, Ibu is used interchangeably with "Mama" (the Banjar language equivalent).

Soto: Bahasa Indonesia for "soup."

Sate: An extremely popular Indonesian food that consists of small cuts of skewered chicken, goat, beef (or even horse, frog, snake or alligator), that are grilled and then covered in a spicy peanut sauce.

Pondok: Literally translated as "pleasant place," or "garden hut," pondok, in reference to pesantren (Islamic school), denotes that the school is a boarding school. It is also the most common word to be used for the pesantren campus itself.

Nah: A common Indonesian exclamation, somewhat like "hey" or "ah" or "oh" in English.

Pulsa: Indonesian cell-phone credit. Phone planes are a rarity here, instead credit is bought on a pay-as-you-go basis and there are many small shops (almost every village has at least one pulsa seller) selling this throughout the country.

Jilbab: The Indonesian term for the Islamic woman's headscarf.

Sarong: An extremely common garment in Indonesia, a sarong is a long piece of fabric tied around the waist, worn by both men and women (although men's and women's sarongs differ and style and manner of tying)

Kopia: A round hat worn by Indonesian Muslims, usually decorated with silver arabesque motifs. Especially common in Java and in the heavily Javanized (such as South Kalimantan) portions of the country.

Bapak: The male equivalent to Ibu.

Sorry I haven't posted anything in so long. I guess I've been busy or lazy to post, can't quite decide which is more accurate. Anyway, here's something. There's more to come, insyaallah.

Idul Adha at Darul Hijrah

My students blow fire from the lit ends of torches, bang on metal buckets with sticks of wood, chant "Allahu Akbar!" Some, dressed in the long white robes, scarlet-checkered headscarves, and dark glasses of stereotypical Saudis, dance a jig, arm in arm. Others carry enormous replicas of the Qabba in Mecca, various Indonesian mosques, a pack of L.A. Lights brand clove cigarettes, and an effigy of Spongebob Squarepants. They parade down the road that runs through the center of campus and into the village, where spectators sit on their front porches waiting. This is the annual parade on the eve of Idul Adha, the Muslim holiday commemorating Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael as an act of obedience to God.

Why this seemingly austere holiday calls for a celebration of this caliber is beyond me. But, if there are any two things my students love, it's praising Allah and making a raucous. And if they can do both simultaneously, all the better.

The next morning Mi'raj wakes me at six, and, full of a schoolboy-on-Christmas-morning excitement, announces that the slaughter is about to commence. It is a Muslim tradition to slaughter an animal, either goat, cow, camel or sheep, on Idul Adha, commemorating Ibrahim's slaughter of the ram in place of his son. The meat of the animal is then shared with the whole community, with ample portions going to the impoverished.

With cameras in hand, we hurry to the courtyard where a large black-skinned bull is being held to the ground by a few young men. A gaggle of students, most of them wearing the round, velvety black hats made popular by Javanese Muslim men, look on as Pak Zufrula, dressed in a fine white cotton robe and purple prayer-cap, approaches with a blade. He says the requisite prayers and saws through the bull's dense neck. The blood leaps from the opened neck, the bull shudders and roars, the students giggle nervously, but their eyes betray a fear. Mi'raj furiously clicks away at his digital camera's shutter release.

Later that morning, a student stops by with a few hunks of beef in a black plastic bag. "For Mister!"

After the Idul Fitri vacation, I developed a relatively regular life here in Cindai Alus. Routines, customs, rituals. My joys and frustrations are, for the most part, those of the everyday. When engaging in basic interactions, buying groceries, greeting people, I no longer notice whether English or Indonesian is used. Besides my regular classes, which I usually co-teach with Mi'raj or Jahidin, I am the advisor of the school's English Debate Team, and I plan on starting an English Club and classes for teachers sometime soon.

I wake to the crowing of roosters, the children yelling outside my window, the enormous tubular schoolbell ringing. In the mornings I have Class 1, roughly equivalent to eighth or ninth grade. This is by far my most difficult class, as the students' levels of proficiency are vastly disparate. Some students finish an activity within moments, their work perfectly accurate, while others take fifteen minutes to understand the directions. Of course, this is, in large part, the fault of my inability to plan lessons appropriately.

The older classes have been working out much better, although my lessons seem to be consistently too simple or too complex. In addition to teaching new language constructions and vocabulary, correcting inaccurate language usage has become a crucial part of my job.

In Indonesia, English is frequently spoken as a direct translation of Indonesian. "I want to teach first," my fellow teachers tell me as they leave for class. "I ever have been to Java." "You like walking-walking?" There are great differences in the two languages' manner of construction. Indonesian, at least as I hear it being used, is an extraordinarily utilitarian, functional language. A language of things happening or not happening, operations either completed or yet to be completed. Past tense and future tense are conveyed by the use of words that translate as "already, before, yesterday" or "not yet, later, tomorrow." The fact that most of the teachers speak a heavily Indonesianized strain of English adds to the difficulty of breaking these established inaccuracies in speech.

Regardless, I've managed to establish a good rapport with most of my classes. Without exception, my students love competitive group games and lessons that involve visual aids.

After a lesson on the parts of the body, we play a game in which the students, broken into two teams, need to correctly guess the part of the body I am pointing to, or, alternately, to point to the correct part of the body that I name. The tension of victory and loss causes the winning team members to strut like chickens, shout "wayyyyy!," and high-five each other. Such fanfare over "neck," "wrist," "knees."

***

The teachers of Darul Hijrah have all previously studied at pesantrens. Most of them are graduates of Darul Hijrah itself, who stayed on and began teaching junior high as soon as they graduated from senior high. Most of these teachers are simultaneously taking classes at the University in Banjarbaru in the field they teach. The other teachers, the elders, are all graduates of Gontor, the most reputable pesantren in the country (perhaps the world), who all lent a hand in establishing Darul Hijrah. The Gontor-bred teachers' wives studied at Al-Mawadah (Gontor's sister school, both in East Java) or another popular Javanese girls' pesantren. The Darul Hijrah-bred teachers' wives are mostly former students of the Darul Hijrah girls' school 7 kilometers away in Batung.

Mi'raj calls it the "curse of Darul Hijrah." Oya, the treasurer of Darul Hijrah Putri (the girls' school, although putri translates literally as "princess") is soon to marry Saubari, an Arabic teacher at Darul Hijrah Putra (my school, putra meaning "prince"). Saubari is a recent graduate of Darul Hijrah. Oya studied at Al-Mawadah.

As has already begun with the elder generation, the teacher's children will take their education at Darul Hijrah, and, insyaallah, become the next generation of teachers.

This process has a wondrous snake-eating-its-own-tail incestuousness to it. Pesantren knowledge is a specialized lineage. Emmy and I are the only outsiders, the only non-pesantren educated non-Muslims teaching here.

Without too much influence from the outside world, specialized pesantren forms of foreign languages emerge. Their English is pesantren English, fully capable of communication within the extended family, but the grammar and pronunciation strikes a native speaker as disjointed in an oddly standardized way. Like a photo album in which all of the pictures are blurred exactly the same. "Where do you go mister? I ever have gone there."

***

The students are not permitted the use of cell-phones, MP3 players or other walkman devices, motorbikes (except with special permission), or cigarettes. They are not permitted to leave without specially approved permission. At night, student Watchmen guard the dorms, preventing any escape. The role of Watchman rotates on a nightly basis, and those who perform this work are excused from class the following day.

"Where is Iqbal today?" I ask Class 5B Science.
"Watchman! Watchman!" they chant, excusing him.

The students are also not permitted to speak Indonesian or Banjar languages. Instead, they are supposed to rotate between Arabic and English on a bi-weekly basis. Unfortunately, they don't really know how to speak these languages and they would like to communicate with each other. And teachers are exempt from these rules, permitted to address the students in Indonesian or Banjarese as they see fit.

To help enforce this policy, the school employs language spies. Certain students are chosen to alert the Counselors when their classmates or roommates are using a forbidden electronic luxury or speaking a language other than the proscribed weekly language. The language spies seem to work rather arbitrarily, as I rarely hear students using a language other than Indonesian or Banjarese. But if a student is caught transgressing (the students use this word of English; the guilty party is known as a "Language Transgressor"), he faces trial by a court of his superiors, mostly students from Class 5 or 6 and Counsellors. If he is then found guilty, he faces a compulsory shearing. On any given afternoon, one finds a row of boys on the porch of the Counselors' building, sitting in stiff-backed wooden chairs, heads lowered, razor buzzing, clumps of dark hair falling onto the floor.

I hear at Al-Mawadah, where a friend of mine is teaching, they make Language Transgressors wear jilbabs (the Indonesian Muslim headscarf) of gratuitous clashing colors. The enforcement of rules through shame. In a sense, this is the way every society operates, although in this case it is more obvious than usual.

It was only a few years ago that Darul Hijrah outlawed corporal punishment.

***

"Banana!" "Fried banana!" "This....what? In English language?" Tofu. It's fried tofu. Every morning after third period, the teachers take a snack break together. For a few weeks, I seemed to have this conversation every day. The identifying the fried food in each others' languages game.

We eat a snack of aneka goreng, or "assorted fried things" as it translates. Usually tofu filled with mung bean sprouts and slivered carrots, bananas, tempe, cassava, or cakes of cabbage and carrots and mung beans. And there's always a pitcher of sugary jasmine tea.

At first, I tried to speak Indonesian with the other teachers, but Mi'raj alerted me that this hurt their feelings. They wanted to practice their English. This slight reprimanding (Indonesian reprimanding is a slight thing, displays of anger, disappointment, or frustration are culturally inappropriate), in turn hurt my feelings. So for a few days I spoke with a Manhattan dialect, using fancy college words. I stopped when no one wanted to talk to me at all, and now we use a mixture of English and Indonesian.

Subhyan is the chemistry teacher. He is a slight man, boyish smile, short hair. In fact, most of the teachers could be described in the same way. But Subhyan is particularly friendly. Around election time he was reading a biography of Barack Obama, which he proudly showed me. "Obama! Good!"

His wife also teaches at Darul Hijrah, another branch of science, I forget which. She is a pretty woman, long blue jilbab, eager to teach me the personal pronouns of the Banjar language. "Bian" means "you" singular.

Sometimes they bring their son to school with them. He is four years old and a shy, shy cat, especially around me.

Zafrulla is a senior Arabic teacher, graduate of Gontor, and he speaks English as well as some of the English teachers. He sits on the wooden bench, smoking L.A. Lights brand clove cigarettes and lamenting the lack of discipline in Darul Hijrah's students.

"They must speak English or Arabic. But they do not! At Gontor we spoke English or Arabic." His son is Ahmad, the equivalent of class president for Class 5 Science. Ahmad is bespectacled, reserved, intelligent. A candidate for debate club, but he had to retire due to his other extracurricular engagements.

Zafrulla told me one day of his hobby, a photo studio in Banjarbaru. Then he clarified that his hobby was as much being a small business owner and reaping the financial benefits of this work as much as taking and developing pictures.

Yunizar is an English teacher at Puteri, but he likes to come by and say hello now and again. He is young and thin, with bangs that hang over his wide forehead. "What's up dude?" he says. Yunizar is fond of using American slang found in mass media exports. "That fucking sucks," he's been known to say on occasion. Also "dumbass!"

Zainal is a soft-spoken young man whose jetblack hair seems permanently moist. He will be getting married sometime next year. In addition to teaching English, he is a Counsellor. A devout young man, Zainal never misses a prayer call. He is polite to such an extremity that I have a hard time taking him seriously sometimes. Although at other times his manners are absolutely adorable. Apparentally, he is twenty-six, but he doesn't look much older than twenty-one. Maybe it's because he's always smiling. Unlike most of my colleagues, he is ethnically Bugis, his father being from Sulawesi.

One day he asked me for help with his University homework. A lesson on limericks. "There once was a man who was tall. He fell in a spring in the fall. It would be a sad thing if he died in the spring, but he didn't, he died in the fall," he recited stoically. "My lecturer says it is funny. Maybe it is Western humor? Can you help me? What is the funny?"

"Hmm....well it's not all that funny"

"Then what is the answer? What do I tell my lecturer?"

I explained the double meanings of spring and fall, which cleared up the meaning of the limerick, and, although I told him that this was the basis for humor, he still couldn't find anything too funny about it.

Dewi is a chubby, happy-go-lucky sort with an adorable babyface. He teaches Arabic, owns a truck, and chainsmokes Marlboro Reds. He is one of my favorite people at Darul Hijrah, always smiling, always inviting, he picks up English quick and doesn't mind speaking Indonesian with me. Because there is another Dewi at the school, everyone refers to this Dewi as "the fat."

Mas Bayu is one of his best friends, the school's computer consultant. A native of Jakarta, Mas Bayu has recently taken on a much more serious role at Darul Hijrah, moving in to the spare room in the teacher's office, starting IT classes, and spearheading the school's re-accreditation project.

In a place like Darul Hijrah, Mas Bayu's Jakartan ways are obvious. He's the resident cool guy. Jet-black hair reaching far past his shoulders, always clad in a stylish silk batik, he wears sunglasses inside and speaks a strain of Indonesian tinted with "bahasa gaul," roughly "cool talk." He's also in charge of downloading bootlegged movies for the students to watch every Friday evening.

Many of my fellow teachers mistakenly regard me as an expert in education. Sometimes, at night, when I'm using the wireless internet at the senior high school, Mas Bayu talks to me, in a mildly conspiratorial tone, about what can be done to improve the students' English. Apparently, Darul Hijrah is being reviewed for a designation as an "International Quality School" by the Indonesian Department of Religion. As he explained to me, his job is to get the students up to speed on computers and my job is to get them to speak English fluently.

As for the other teachers, I don't remember the names of most of them. There are a lot. They, for their part, don't make much of an effort to call be by my given name. Mister. They all call me Mister.

***

Once or twice a week, I hang out with Miss Emmy, the ETA at Puteri. We cook dinner or go to Banjarmasin, the big city a half hour away, or sit at a warung drinking juice and venting our frustrations about pesantren life.

Abal Hasan, a middle-aged Egyptian man, has moved in next to her. It's the native speakers' corner. Abal Hasan teaches at both Puteri and Putera. He teaches Hadiths, the collected sayings of Muhammed. According to my students, though, he doesn't actually do too much effective teaching. They say he sits in the front of class, reads from the Hadiths, and explicates their meanings in rapid Egyptian Arabic. He speaks only four or five words of Indonesian.

After Friday afternoon prayers, his voice bursts from the mosque's loudspeakers. Short, with a thick, dark mustache, and the white robes of a haji, Abal Hasan is what you'd imagine from an Egyptian Arabic teacher. When he sees me, he shouts "Danil!" squeezes my hand, exchanges pleasantries in Arabic. We seem to share a bond of foreignness, and he constantly reminds me to come to Egypt some day and improve my weak, Moroccan-inflected Arabic.

According to my co-teacher Jahidin, Abal Hasan goes through a whole chicken in two days. He never accepts the food that me and Emmy occasionally bring him, although he cordially invites us in, offers us tea. Often he sits in his house with his eyes closed, his stereo blaring melodic recitations of the Quran. Emmy says he likes to watch WWF Smackdown and soap operas that border on soft, soft porn, much to the embaressment of his female, teenage students who come to visit him.

Beyond Abal Hasan, Emmy's experience over at Puteri is quite different from mine. As it is in any society, but especially one in which the genders are so habitually segregated, I have no clue what life is like for pesantren women. Emmy says some of the women on her little street never leave their homes. They have no cars, no motorbikes, not even a bicycle.

Emmy hears rumors from her counterpart, Estih, that some of the pesantren women ask about her daily habits; what she eats, when she eats, what hours she sleeps, the regularity of her bowel movements, how often and at what times she bathes. Some of them have reportedly taken up jogging, as it is a hobby of Miss Emmy's. Apparently, her skin is so "fresh-looking"; it must be a result of her habits. And by replicating those habits.....

The Puteri school is surrounded by an eighteen-foot tall wall. Entrance and exit is through a gate, which is closed at night. Some of the students have taken to calling it the "holy prison."

***

Every room in my house has its own resident critter. The kitchen--the counter above the propane stove--is where the cockroach lives. He or she is big and shiny, the color of a stale raisin. He or she gleams. When I brush my teeth in the kitchen sink, we look at each other, her long antennae moving through the emptiness above her or him as if surprised there's nothing there.

We have a deal. He or she lives if he or she doesn't cross the boundary of the counter. No sink, no stove, absolutely no floor.

Then there are the cicak, the little lizards with pale green or coral skin. This world is theirs. They go where they want. On the walls, on the ceiling, the kitchen floor, sneaking through my dresser. They skitter on cheetah toes. Something about their presence makes a room feel protected. They eat mosquitoes and other small bugs, but they fear humans. And they're smart.

Sometimes I surprise them, stepping into the dining room as they nose around an empty plate that once held mango. They rush away noiselessly. At night they click. Staccato and pianissimo. It's endearing.

In the bathroom, the spiders, the tiny globes of their bodies suspended on spindly legs. They too eat mosquitoes. They used to live on the ceiling, kitty-corner to the toilet, but I think Mi'raj cleaned them out when I was traveling some months ago. Now, they've re-established their presence, but beside the toilet this time, lower to the ground.

Our last display is the animal on the roof that tries, on a nightly basis, to pry away the wooden boards of the roof and enter the house. I hear it scraping away. It's either a stealthy, wayward chicken or a stray cat. Or something far stranger. But probably not.

***

In debate club, I get the opportunity to get closer with some of my students, and to help clue them in on what the world outside of Darul Hijrah looks like. Their ideas about the world--politics, religions, economics, societies--are painfully simple and underdeveloped. They live in a dark room of unknowing, lit by the candles of Islamic faith and their "modern" education, and while they're experts on the subject of their religion, their "modern" education beyond that is lacking. They tell me there are civics classes, but I see no evidence of this. And these, the debate team members, are the cream of the crop. Their English is decent, their grades across the board are high, and they're clever kids.

There's Subhyan, the unofficial team captain. He's humble and quietly intelligent, passionate about science and math. In the thick of a debate, he stammers and displays his nervousness, but he's actually rather worldly for one of my students. He speaks Javanese in addition to Banjarese, because his parents run a school that taught Banjarese to Javanese migrants to South Kalimantan. He's been to Lombok, to Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Semarang in Java.

Then there's Ari, the resident jester. He has a thickish body, but is by no means chubby. He cracks jokes and rolls his head around on his neck, smiling. Dani is the cool guy. He likes to borrow my sunglasses and strut around. Sometimes he wears a purple and green t-shirt that says "I 'heart' yr mum last nite," and when he asks what it means, I tell him it's probably inappropriate.

Yanda and Yandi round out the team. They are the star debaters, the star English speakers, the star everything as far as they're concerned. Identical twins, their hobbies include winning, striving for success, and playing basketball. Especially when they're wearing their school uniforms, it is impossible to tell them apart. Although I think their hair styles differ slightly.

Despite their intelligence and their relative privilege (these guys are middle class by Indonesian standards), they know very little about the Suharto regime, the Japanese occupation, Dutch colonialism. So when they're asked to debate whether "Myanmar should be left alone" or whether "African nations should be forced to create an economic union," I wonder where to even begin.

One evening, as we discussed the negative arguments for the motion "all classes around the world should be taught in English," I asked the debaters to think of what happens to all empires and kingdoms. The three of them huddled, discussing quietly in Indonesian. Then they disregarded the question and started talking about other possible arguments.

I tried to bring them back to this point, which I thought was important to understand. "English won't always be so important. Other languages will be important too in the future. English isn't everything." They gave me a look like I made the kind of joke that tired Dads tell their kids, shook their heads, and started pawing through the enormous, two volume set of English dictionaries they'd brought with them.

When I accepted Mi'raj's invitation to his family's home for the Idul Fitri holiday, his eyes lit up like a little boy who just found out that he was getting a puppy. An American boy that is, most people here think dogs are filthy animals, but that's beside the point.

We were in the living room staring at the map of South Kalimantan on the wall, plotting our journey. From Cindai Alus I was to ride on the back of his lavender Suzuki Shogun Z25 to Babirik, his family's village towards the northern end of the province.

"Wow, I don't think a buleh has ever come to my village before," he said with an almost over-the-top smile of earnestness. The plan was to spend the first few days of the holiday with his family, then take off to Loksado, a reputably picturesque village in the foothills of the Pegunungan Meratus mountain range. Mi'raj wanted to go to Loksado to see if "there was really a beautiful place in South Kalimantan," as he explained to me. "There are beautiful places in Bali, in Java, in Lombok...." I told him I thought Cindai Alus was beautiful. "You really think so?"

In a sense, yes. Although Cindai Alus is now nearly a suburb, where newly built, identical, "little-boxes-made-of-ticky-tacky" houses take up much of the newly razed land closer to Banjarbaru, and old wooden farmers' shacks are evenly spaced along the village's one paved road, it exudes a certain glamorless charm. As does much of South Kalimantan's scenery; the quiet fishing villages and cities we passed through on the five hour ride to Babirik. It is not the Borneo of National Geographic fame, a far cry from the deep, mysterious jungles that crowd the imagination when one thinks of Borneo. Instead, it is the Borneo of salted fish drying on the road side as old sarong-clad women do the family's wash in a muddy river. It is the Borneo of long, flat fields of rice and grass waiting to be built on. The Borneo of gleaming silver mosque domes whose speakers broadcasted a seemingly endless stream of prayers at the holy time of our travels.

For Muslims, Idul Fitri is the biggest holiday of the year, a period of days upon which the rest of the year hinges. After the month-long fast of Ramadan, Idul Fitri is a time for families to gather, enjoy each other's company, and eat lots of food. Everything a good religious celebration should be. In Indonesia, the days leading up to Idul Fitri are the busiest travel days of the year. All of the newly-educated, newly-middle class or hoping to be middle class Indonesians who reside in the cities and their suburbs make their way to their village homes to celebrate. Flights are fully booked, ships overflowing with passengers, roads choked with motorbikes, cars, and standing-room-only buses.

***
We broke our fast at a warung in Kandangan with bowls of ketupat, the local specialty; rice-cakes steamed inside of palm leaves and served in a spicy coconut milk broth with hard-boiled duck eggs. Kandangan being the hub for travel to Loksado, we made inquiries into the best ways to get there. Everyone seemed excited to have this conversation.

At the warung, I was stared at with open curiosity, a common occurance in Indonesia, but even more pronounced than usual. The waitress and the middle-aged couple that sat beside us both asked Mi'raj about my presence, where I came from, what I was doing here, whether I can eat rice or not. Usually it annoys me when strangers ask Raj about me, instead of directing their questions to the source of their interest. My Indonesian skills are quite good enough to handle the usual inquiries. But Banjar people are known throughout the archipelago for speaking extremely fast in their own dialect, which, I've been told, is nearly incomprehensible to other Indonesians let alone those just beginning to learn Bahasa Indonesia. So in this case, I didn't mind.

"When exactly does Idul Fitri begin?" I asked Mi'raj as we bounced over a bridge's speedbumps. We were on the last leg of our trip, somewhere between Negara and Babirik.

"Uh, we do not know yet, I think tomorrow."

"So if it's not tomorrow, when is it?"

"The day after tomorrow. I think it will be tomorrow, though."

As he explained later, Idul Fitri can only begin at the first sighting of the new month's full moon, and the ulama who make the official pronouncement were unsure of when exactly this would be. This lack of an exact, pre-determined schedule is part of Indonesia's cultural fabric. Muslim holidays, of course, follow the Muslim calendar, a lunar cycle. Then there is the Javanese calendar, the Balinese calendar, the Chinese calendar, and the internationally utilized Christian calendar, each moving according to its own sphere of time, guided by differing interpretations of the cosmos. Here in South Kalimantan, however, the only calendars of import are the Muslim and the Christian, and the Christian only in an utilitarian sense.

By the time we pulled into the driveway of Mi'raj's family home, we discovered that Idul Ftiri would begin in two days, a bit of news broadcast from one of the many roadside mosques' loudspeakers. The family home was a large, one-story wooden structure, the floor of the its porch and exterior walls decorated with shiny white tiles.

We stepped through the door, past a little foyer, and into the TV room, where Reni, Mi'raj's older sister, and Fadil, her three-year-old son, greeted us. The house was quiet, the booming voice from the local mosque's loudspeakers the only sound. Rizqi, the little sister, appeared; a thin girl with spunky, short hair and round cheeks. She was visibly nervous in my presence from the moment we met, regarding me with large, suspicious eyes. Mi'raj told me she spoke some English, but when prodded by her older brother, froze up with shyness. Then she walked away somewhere and Mi'raj showed me to the room I'd be staying in, a room dominated by an enormous, mosquito-net enshrouded bed. Pictures of cartoon characters hung from the walls, along with class schedules and what appeared to be inspirational slogans in Indonesian. It didn't take me long to figure out that the family had given me Rizqi's room.

"Where are your parents?" I asked as we settled on the floor of the TV room with some cushions.

"They are at the mosque. You hear that voice? That is my father. He is the Imam at our mosque," Mi'raj replied, turning on the television. Reni came and served us cups of sweet tea and crunchy snacks made from rice flour, flashing me a quiet, "please-make-yourself-at-home" smile. Fadil paced around the room with a plastic toy-car, driving it over our shoulders and arms. The television showed a program about a devout Muslim woman saving a young non-believer's life with the help of her kooky, long-haired, guitar-playing male friend.

Mi'raj's conversations with his sisters were brief and relaxed, as if he hadn't just come home for the first time in months. They spoke in Banjar Hulu, a dialect of Banjarese that I couldn't begin to understand. I think the only thing I said to Reni that evening was "thank you," and "pleased to meet you." Nevertheless, the quiet in the house evoked a familial calm. Above the television hung a large poster of Mecca, a time-lapsed photo in which the Qabba was circled by a swirling mass of white-clad bodies.

Eventually, the prayers ceased from the mosque, and a half hour later, Muslim and Syamsyah, Mom and Dad, came home. We stood to greet them, Mi'raj taking their hands, one by one, into his and kissing them. Muslim welcomed me with aplomb, a broad smile across his face as he put to use some of the few English words he knew: "please, sit." He was a small man, wearing the white robe and cap of a haji, his face ennobled by a pair of thin-rimmed glasses and a thoughtful, focused tension in his eyes and forehead. Syamsyah was a thick, pleasant woman in a loose, long-sleeved kaftan and a long purple jilbab. The kind of lady whose presence exudes motherliness, forgiveness, warmth. Together we sat in front of the TV, drinking tea and talking. Perhaps due to politeness, they spared me the usual questions that first night, spreading the third degree over the next couple of days.

***

I woke the next morning with a slight guilt. The weather was as hot and humid as ever, like waking up in a sauna. And there I was, in Rizqi's bed, soaking the sheets with my buleh sweat. It was nine o'clock and I was amazed I had slept that late, with the noise from the kitchen starting around four and the children (there were two of them now, although I was still unsure who the second was) opening the curtain at the door of my room, peaking in, and laughing uproariously.

The last day of Ramadan. And for all the activity in the house, the atmosphere was calm. The women were busy doing the wash and preparing food for the feast. Muslim was back and forth between the mosque and home. Everyone seemed to disappear now and again, for prayers I assumed. This is an interesting facet of life for Muslims, the way days are measured according to the clock of prayer times. At Darul Hijrah, plans are made for before and after prayer times instead of using a specific hour of the clock.

Knowing that I was no longer fasting (I had fasted at the beginning of the month, but after a week in Hindu Bali had given it up), Raj fed me the leftovers from Suhur, the pre-dawn meal, and introduced me to Reni's husband, Syahruji, his cousin Siti, who had moved in with his parents after her husband left her, and her son, Fadil's playmate, Iqmal. Breakfast was rice, sambal (the ubiquitous Indonesian chili paste), and "salty fish," whole fish the size of one's finger that had been salted and dried. This stuff is a staple of the Banjar diet. It's like eating crispy slices of pure rock salt, only seemingly saltier than pure salt, like salt that has been salted. When the family left the kitchen, Mi'raj gave me a sly glance and popped a fish into his mouth, trying, unsuccessfully, to muffle its crunch. "I still think Idul Fitri is really today," he said, "don't tell my familiy."

It was a Monday, and since we didn't have anything to do, Mi'raj took me down the street to the weekly market. Outside, the heat of the sun was nearly suffocating. The market was a mass of bodies bustling beneath a roof of plastic tarps that hung too low, so that you had to raise them with your hands to pass through. They were scorching to the touch. Mi'raj was looking for some kind of traditional food, scanning the wares set out on tarps along the sides of the crowded walkway. There were clothing-sellers with t-shirts, jeans, jilbabs, underwear, the long, brightly-colored moomoos that most women above the age of 25 wear; displays of toothpaste boxes and toothbrushes, skin-whitening soaps and other beauty products, piles of batteries, jars of tiger balm and plastic toy cars; Meat and innards from chickens, cows, and ducks laid on wooden tables, gathering hordes of flies which the sellers brushed away with home-made flyswatters; the vegetable sellers with their enormous crates of garlic, chilis, shallots, various kinds of leafy green vegetables, cartons of sky-blue duck eggs, and little, bright-pink fruits I had never seen before.

As we slowly shoved our way through the marketplace, delirious with heat and bursts of claustrophobia, I suddenly noticed that, as we passed, everyone was looking at me, some with smiles, others with stares of confusion. Small children pulled at the hem of their mothers' dress and pointed at me, shouting "buleh, buleh!" Mi'raj never found the food he was looking for. On the way back home, we stopped at a stand to buy some drinks and the woman there addressed me in Arabic. "Isn't he Egyptian?" she asked Raj.

All was quiet when we returned. The kids, who had been riding their miniature tri-cycles through the house, throwing things at each other, and screaming all morning, were asleep in little hammocks. The adults were napping too; siesta time (or guring time to use the Banjarese). I spent most of the day reading and wondering if there was anything I could do to help out with preparations for the next day. Any attempt I made at lending a hand was promptly denied with a smile that said, "sorry, but you wouldn't even know what to do if you tried." And, of course, that smile was probably right.

In the family home, it was a pleasant change to not be the center of attention. Everyone was busy with prayer, preparing food, and taking care of the kids. Sometimes it can be exhausting to be a buleh in a virtually tourist-less area, especially as part of my official job here in Kalimantan is to be an emissary of peace and goodwill from the U.S.A. Even in a bad mood, I feel compelled to wear a smile, to wave at every snot-nosed kid that yells "hello, mister." It's like being a minor celebrity, but a polite celebrity.

In the late afternoon, after Ashar prayers, Mi'raj took me around Babirik on a sightseeing trip. We went to his elementary school, to the house in which he was born, and then to a spot along the river beside a big, incongruous looking building, maybe a warehouse of some kind. "This is where I bathed when I was small," he told me, a wistful glimmer in his dark eyes. "Now it is so dirty." Plastic wrapping and discarded soda bottles littered the murky water. Mi'raj explained that the building was built by the Dutch when they established power in this region, something having to do with electricity or an attempt at water purification, he wasn't sure.

On the ride home, we ran into a childhood friend of his, who just barely recognized him. It had been eleven years since Mi'raj left his village for Darul Hijrah, and in those eleven years, he said, so much had changed. The river was filthy, his old friends had moved on or started families.

That night, the village burst with excitement. This was it, the big night, the beginning of Idul Fitri. In Indonesia, it is an Idul Ftiri tradition to apologize to family and friends for anything one may have done in the past year. "Mohon maaf lahir dan batin," everyone says, "may you forgive me for what I've done within and without." The message was displayed on roadside billboards, on banners hung from mosques, and broadcast with nearly every commercial on television, especially those of the political figures up for election this coming June. Over the course of Ramadan, Muslims are expected to ask for God's forgiveness, and during Idul Fitri, their attention shifts to forgiveness from fellow humans.

We broke the fast with rice and "salty fish" that had been prepared in a sweet and sour sauce, the men eating first, followed by the women. Fireworks and shouts of joy could be heard from the street. Lightning flashed across the sky and the wind lifted tree branches in that way that promises rain. As Muslim and Rizqi took the green Kijang SUV to pick up a huge order of lapat (rice steamed in banana leaves, an Idul Fitri specialty), I accompanied Mi'raj as he went to pay his annual zakat, the compulsory charity that all Muslims must give by the end of the fasting month. Here, the zakat payment takes the form of rice, two big bags of it in this case, which we were to deliver to the home of a retired, widowed haji.

Thunder sounded, a light rain began. Outside of the village mosque, we ran into a parade. A battalion of drummers beating hand drums, a replica of the Qabba in Mecca, the size of a small sedan, carried at the front of the procession, and everyone singing, their voices amplified by a rack of speakers carried along by a wooden cart. As the parade passed, people left their homes and followed, lighting little firecrackers as they went, mostly young men and teenagers.

At the haji's home, we were invited to sit, and he fed us lapat with a sweet and spicy sambal, speaking with Mi'raj about me, about Darul Hijrah, about his family. He was a thin old man, wearing the white cap of the haj, his grayish eyes wide with curiosity or amusement or joy. Others came, paying respects to the haji, bringing their rice, sitting and drinking tea with us.

Back at the house, the family sat in front of the TV, whose satellite beamed in hundreds of channels from around the world. They were watching the Yemen channel, a performance of traditional Yemeni music and dance. When the sound of drumming and singing neared the house, I stepped outside to watch the parade.

Reni was sitting in a chair on the front porch, watching the rain, listening to the music. I felt like an intruder. Her gaze had the look of deep thought or wist or appreciation, alive with something anyway. But when she saw me she smiled and motioned at a chair. We watched the procession pass again, the rumble of the drums, the plywood Qabba crowned with colored Christmas lights.

***

It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at Grandma's house in Ammuntai. The first day of Idul Fitri began with a long breakfast, air full of that holiday morning calm, hushed and expectant. When Raj told me to try to be ready by ten, I knew he meant be ready by ten thirty. Or, as it turned out, be ready by one o'clock. By the time we boarded Muslim's big green Kijang, everyone was already joking about how there'd be no food left by the time we got to Grandma's house.

In the car, Muslim put on a tape of Quranic chanting, and Syamsyah passed around containers of a sweet, crunchy sesame snack, Our first stop was Muslim's family home. The usual single-story wooden building, the usual layout of rooms. To get there, he had to pilot the Kijang over a creaky suspension bridge, and, once in the village, Muslim stopped every five feet to shake hands with old friends or acquaintances. At the house, we were greeted with a flurry of handshakes, and I was bombarded with new, Banjar names which I promptly mispronounced and/or forgot. After a light meal of lapat and sweet or savory crunchy snacks, I followed the family to the backyard, where prayers were spoken over the blue and white tiled tombs of Muslim's parents.

Then back to the Kijang for the ride to Ammuntai, where Syamsyah's family awaited us. Despite the relative coolness of the cloudy afternoon, I was bleary with heat, barely able to communicate. I felt like a plastic bag carried along by the river of Mi'raj's family. They were in high spirits, everyone smiling, Syamsyah joking with me about Banjar food, a favorite topic. Along the side of the road, the mosques were holding fundraisers. Mostly old men and young boys, asking for donations over distorted megaphones, collecting money in hand-held fishing nets. Muslim tossed a ten-thousand rupiah note out the window with a cavalier laugh and a nod.

At Grandma's house, an assortment of Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, Sisters, and Brothers greeted us, as if they'd been waiting all day. Which they very well could have been; we were the bearers of the lapat and we were hours late. The sheepish look in Muslim's eye gave me the impression that even by rubber time standards, we were pushing it. The elastic band of punctuality was stretched near its breaking point.

After another round of introductions, hand shaking and hand kissing, we promptly walked to the backyard of a house down the street, where more of Mi'raj's relatives lived. We passed a tall patch of banana palms, towards the graves of Syamsyah's father and grandparents. A scene similar to the ceremony at Muslim's family home. Eyes lowered, a recitation of prayers, maybe asking forgiveness from the departed, hands brought together at the fingertips, the sounds of text message alerts punctuating the quiet.

Beside the grave of Syamsyah's father rested the tombs of her grandfather and grandmother, enclosed in a mesh wire fence. The graves inside were lavishly tiled. Mi'raj explained that his grandfather was an "orang pintar," a man blessed with supernatural powers, baraka as they call it in the Arabic speaking world. Orang pintar literally means "clever person."

For a brief time, we sat in the living room of the house, which belonged to someone in Mi'raj's family, the exact relation lost somewhere in translation. Between sea-green walls we ate sweet crunchy sticks and drank water made pink and sweet with syrup. Mi'raj told his family I was interested in Indonesian ghosts, sparking conversation.

"There are many ghosts in Indonesia, sooo many," said Ida, Mi'raj's aunt, who became the default speaker of the family as she spoke clearly and slowly enough for me to understand.

"Are there ghosts here?"

"Yes, of course, many!"

She told the story of Kuntilanak, the ghost of a young woman with long black hair who hides in a banyan tree, her dark eyes growing wide in the telling. For some reason, they assumed that there were no ghosts in America. Oh, no, I told them, and proceeded to tell the stories of haunted houses, graveyards, haunted forests, cornfields, skyscrapers. The conversation continued through the evening. Ghosts are an undeniable fact of life for many people in these parts. Especially for the family of an orang pintar.

Later, as we sat on bamboo mats, eating our Idul Fitri dinner in the dining area of Grandma's house, the conversation turned to the United States.

"How does Indonesian education compare to the education in America?" Ida asked. Everyone was lounging or sitting cross-legged, enjoying the lapat, rice, and assorted Banjarese cakes. Aunts, uncles, cousins, a room full of Mi'raj's various relations. In the next room, the children stomped and screamed, the TV blared its commercials.

"Well, in the U.S., there is no religious education in public schools." When I spoke, they patiently followed my stumbling Indonesian words. "American people are originally from all over the world, so there are many different...tribes...with different religions."

This comment sparked conversation among them, conversation I couldn't follow.

"You eat bread in America, nor rice, right?" This is one of my favorite frequently asked questions in Indonesia. I'm curious as to its exact implications. Do they have it in their mind that Americans ate like Indonesians, but substituting bread with rice? Because, here at Idul Fitri dinner, we ate rice. An enormous bowlfull of white rice, a platter of yellow rice, countless packets of lapat. On the side there was some sambal and a little bit of salty fish. A common question, when talking about meals is "what did you eat with your rice?" Even better is the question, "can you eat rice?"

I told them that we ate rice in America, but not as much or as frequently as Indonesians. They seemed impressed. Rice is life here. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes a snack.

From food, the conversation turned to American holidays. Ida asked whether we got together with our families for holidays like Idul Fitri. Of course, I told her, telling a little about Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Christmas. Then the conversation took an odd turn.

"Who are the native people of America? Where are they now?" Hmmm....Mi'raj's family has never met an American before, and it's quite possible they never will again. How was I, the sole representative of the U.S., to answer this question?

"Well, they're called Native Americans. There are many different tribes, like there are many different tribes in Indonesians. Umm...Most of them were killed by Europeans a long time ago. Now they mostly live on land that the government gave them to live on."

"Like what the Dutch did in Indonesia?"

"Kind of. Except these Europeans made the United States and never left." This was getting rough. The look in Uncle Amrullah's eyes showed a profound disappointment. What is the U.S. anyway? How could I explain it to them? "Our country began when a group of colonizers got sick of the taxes from their own country so they kicked out their own people and started a nation by forcefully expelling or murdering all the natives and enslaving people from Africa to build it into a prosperous country?" In order to explain, I would need to give an account of the past few hundred years of U.S. history in Bahasa Indonesia, a task I was not feeling up to. Mi'raj changed the subject, asking Ida about Loksado.

"Oh, Loksado..." she seemed excited again. "There are many ghosts in Loksado. And Dayaks! Why do you want to go there? Aren't you scared of Dayaks?"

"No. Why?"

"Because they eat humans!" she replied and the whole family nearly fell over laughing. When the giggles subsided, she fixed me with a mock fierce look and said "we are Dayaks." I looked to Mi'raj, who just shrugged. Everyone was smiling, some still picking at pieces of gelatinous green cake. "We are Dayaks," she repeated, "all of us."

Despite this comment, Ida still couldn't understand why we would want to go the jungle. Large portions of South Kalimantan have spent the past twenty years distancing themselves from the jungle, or cutting the jungle away from their homes, offices, new stripmalls. Urban populations are on the rise, and suburbs like Banjarbaru are developing at lightning speed. Nevertheless, her obvious fascination with ghosts, jungles, and Dayaks betrayed her interest in subjects so mysterious and "primitive," as one of Mi'raj's uncles and many other Banjarese people describe Dayaks.

And then, as frequently happens in South Kalimantan, the power went out. "Oooo," Ida laughed, "there are ghosts here!"

But no, not a ghost in sight. Just Syamsyah's family, lit by candles, lying around, idly chatting, stepping out to bathe, slowly falling asleep on the floor's mats and cushions. The children laughed and stomped in the other room. One of the cousins quietly played a song on guitar. As I dozed off, the comfort and normalcy of the scene hit me like a cool breeze.

***

By his own admission, Mi'raj is the least religious member of his family. "People in the villages are very religious," he told me one night, "because they have nothing else to do." And this coming from someone who has spent the last eleven years studying and teaching at an Islamic boarding school.

His Mother and Father have made the haj, Muslim is an Imam. Reni's husband Syahruji has a recording of the call to prayer for his cellphone ringtone. And they live a conservative life, by the book, jilbabs in public for the women, numerous copies of the Quran lying around the house, walls decorated with pictures of Mecca and famous Muslim clergymen.

Yet the thought of their presence in my life as intimidating or threatening is laughable. They are to Muslim Radicalism what most Americans are to the Bush Regime. Their respectful curiosity about America is touching. Imagine what the world would be like if Americans were as interested in Indonesia, or any foreign country for that matter.

This year, Idul Fitri happened to fall on the same day as Rosh Hashanah. I told Mi'raj about this, explaining the significance of the holiday for Jews. This was the first time I've disclosed my religion in South Kalimantan. A smile passed over his face, obviously pleased to be sharing such holy days. "Happy Rosh Hashanah," he said. When I told him not to tell anyone at Darul Hijrah, he seemed a little confused, but complied.

In general, my colleagues and friends at Darul Hijrah know little to nothing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most people I've asked about it have just said that they know it is "very bad." Yet, books about the Jewish money conspiracy and Jewish power in Washington are readily available at most bookstores.

On this subject, I'm torn. It's highly doubtful that any of these people will ever meet a Jewish person, except for me. Do I tell them my true religious identity, and show them what a real Jew is like? Or do I keep my mouth shut, as my cautious family has recommended, and not put myself in the path of any possible danger? Is there really a danger? It sure doesn't feel like it....

***

Looking for a beautiful place in South Kalimantan, we set out for Batu Benawa in Pagat on the second morning of Idul Fitri. The family said it was a beautiful spot, but very busy during Idul Fitri. They failed to mention exactly how busy it would be.

I knew we were getting close when the road turned into a sea of motorbikes. For half an hour we waded along at a crawling pace until we eventually parked in one of the many overflowing lots. Everywhere, people of all ages swarmed. Drink concessions and food stalls lined the sides of the road. I couldn't even figure out where or what the attraction was.

Syahruji, who acted as our tour guide due to his familiarity with the place, led us through a mass of people to the ticket booth, and then to the main gate, where we entered Batu Benawa.

Absolute pandemonium. Trails leading over a river and up to a lookout at the top of a rocky hill, packed to the breaking point with screaming children, clove-smoking fathers, old women in long black jilbabs. It seemed as if every millimeter of inhabitable land was taken. The river was barely visible through all of the bodies bathing in it. Shoved and jostled along the path, we headed in the direction of the hill. Warungs and small concessions were everywhere, full of customers joyously noshing chicken and rice or instant noodle soup, drinking cold glass bottles of iced tea or soda, relishing the end of the fasting month. Absurdly upbeat house dance music blared from somewhere, giving the scene a giddy, sugar-crazed sensation.

We were slowly pulled along by the crowd towards the hill, which was so full of people it seemed almost like an illusion. The same visual effect as when a cookie crumb is overrun by hungry ants. Mi'raj and I neared the hill and began the ascent, up stairs cut into the rock and then a ladder for the final thirty feet to the lookout on top. The whole way we were pushing or being pushed, caught behind an old woman or allowing small children to squeeze between us. Discarded snack wrappers, soda bottles and cans, took up all the space that wasn't occupied by people. And all the men seemed to be smoking. With each step we inadvertently took a drag of unfiltered clove cigarette. "I didn't think it would be like this," Mi'raj apologized, shaking his head.

On the ladder, a group of kids crawled over our shoulders. When we reached the top there wasn't even a patch of rock for us to stand on. We edged between people to occupy a miniscule clearing beneath a canopy. The sun was beating; I couldn't tell where my sweat ended and the sweat of the dude who's arm was wedged against my chest began. Feeling increasingly dehydrated, we made our way back down, careful not step on anyone's hands or head, and had a cold drink at a warung.

"I didn't think it would be like this," Mi'raj said again, obviously disappointed with my obvious disappointment and his own. We glanced about, taking in the vista. Shirtless kids in the river, women in long sleeve shirts, jeans, and jilbab, swimming with their children. Teenagers crammed into the little caves on the side of the hill, smoking and drinking cold, sweet beverages from plastic baggies. This was family fun time. Idul Fitri vacation.

Led again by Syahruji, we made our way along the river bank, looking for a spot clear enough for us to swim. A half hour later, I was changing my clothes underneath a sarong. Since we arrived at Pagat, I was the subject of stares, smiles, innumerable "hello misters," and sneaky or not so sneaky photographs. But now that my shirt was off and I jumped in the water, the attention came on stronger than ever. My pasty skin must have glowed in the immense light.

Someone swam up to me, said "yes, hello, no smoking, hello," and then, in Indonesian, asked me where I was from. America, I told him. He turned to the other side of the river, where his friends sat on a rock, and yelled "America! He's from America! He's from America!"

As I swam about with Mi'raj, I noticed the camera-phones turned on me. When I got out and dried myself off, I was approached by a secession of people, mostly young men and women, who took their photo with me. Dizzy with sunlight, I followed Syahruji up through the woods, a more discreet, less crowded path out. That Happy House music blared away behind us. I didn't look back.

***

On our return trip to Grandma's house we continued our sightseeing with a stop at the Great Ducks of Ammuntai. A sculpture of two enormous ducks on the banks of the river. Apparently, this is the town monument, where people come to take pictures. So that's what we did; Mi'raj and me and Syahruji and one of the cousins in a variety of poses and arrangements.

A middle-aged man pulled up on his motorbike and hoisted his toddler son up to me as I leaned against the hard white feathers. He took a picture, reclaimed his son, and was off. Happy Idul Fitri. Families, groups of teenagers, young couples came to the Great Ducks, snapped a few shots and departed. It had the feeling of ritual.

Maybe the ducks' popularity has to do with the way they speak to the collective imagination of the Borneo that I know. The apparent absurdity, the domesticity of their symbolism, the gaze of utter humility in their eyes. Mi'raj had said he wanted to go to Loksado to see if there was a beautiful place in South Kalimantan. That was the same reason we had gone to Pagat. But here, looking up at those awful ducks beside the river, their paint peeling in the sun, clouds assembling and dispersing above them, I nearly wept from the beauty of it. A couple was taking pictures of their son sitting in one of the ducks' yellow, webbed feett.

Human beings, when you think about it, don't really do much. They grow up, learn, work, fornicate, walk around, sit around, look around, create things, destroy things, and build monuments to the things they love and value. Some people don't need man-made monuments, their environment is a monument in itself. Paradise beaches, dramatic mountains. Others have to build them.

Back at the house, Grandma had slaughtered and cooked a duck and it was in the process of being consumed as we arrived. The meat clustered around the crunchy little bones was tender and delicious, served with rice and sambal. The atmosphere was sleepy. Uncles and Cousins were napping on the couch, on various cushions scattered around the living room floor. Some Aunts occupied the beds. I took a short nap myself, and when I woke it was time to go.

Outside, everyone was clean and all dressed up. It was photo time. Me and Mi'raj's family, in a variety of arrangements and assemblages, different angles, the cameramen rotating so that everyone could be in at least one of the shots. There must be at least twenty-three photographs from this session. Saying goodbye was an unceremonious affair, as if everyone planned to see each other again the next day. A handshake, a kiss of the hand, a brief wave. I was invited to all of the various Uncles and Aunts' homes if I ever happened to be in Rantau or Tanjung.

***

Mi'raj and I never did make it to Loksado on this trip. The morning of our departure, Mi'raj's parents discussed marriage with him. He is 24, a prime age for marrying in these parts. He is intelligent, a good basketball player, reserved, considerate, a little on the thin side, but handsome. His family seemed to think he should find a wife, and he seemed to agree. This is an ongoing point of conversation and thought for Mi'raj, as it is for most unmarried men I know. I am frequently asked when I plan to get married.

After Mi'raj and his parents seemed to come to some sort of conclusion, we were off. Again, a series of pictures taken with the family outside of the house before we left. Everyone was in attendance but Rizqi, whom I had tried to apologize to the night before, but I think I said the word for "house" instead of the word for "room." As we left, Muslim's handshake was as firm as his smile. "Please come back to Babirik sometime."

I came to Lombok for a specific purpose. To reach the 3,726 meter tall peak of Gunung Rinjani, Indonesia's second highest (and one if its most accessible) mountains, an inactive volcano surrounded by forest, with a crater that boasts a lake and a smaller, active volcano. And I would be embarking on this endeavor with four wonderful friends, all of whom are ETAs at various Indonesian high schools.

As the first of our crew to arrive in Lombok (I flew in from South Kalimantan while the others took a ferry from Bali), it was my unofficial responsibility to find a guide, porters, and transportation to and from the mountain, which sits in the center of a protected forest in the north-central portion of the island. Our plan was to spend five days and four nights on and around the mountain.

Immediately after departing the plane, I was questioned by the people at the airport's tourist desks. "Where are you going?" "To hike Mt. Rinjani." "Good, here are our rates for guides." His name was Supirman, a nondescript tourist desk clerk who took it surprisingly well when I told him I probably wasn't going to go through his hiking company. Everyone and their brother in Lombok's tourist areas is a good guide or is very close friends with a good guide.

Including the taxi driver who took from the airport to the beach resort town of Sengiggi, a fifteen minute drive, where I would meet my friends Andrea and Erin, the pair I had travelled with in Bali. It was two in the afternoon and I was beat. Woke up at 4:30 to catch the plane, couldn't sleep on the plane due to turbulance, preparing to begin a long, hard hike the next day. I was in no mood for hassles or touts.

I met Erin and Dre at a beachside cafe. They were eating breakfast and talking with Auggie, one of these tourist area "fixers," the kind of guy who speaks English like a real Australian, knows everyone in town, and is more than willing to arrange your trip wherever you'd like to go for a small fee. The sky was slightly overcast, the sea a shiny, metallic color, as if a million fish were floating a few inches below the surface. I decided to go to the office of the Rinjani Trekking Club, a company with one of the better reputations for leading Rinjani treks, and proceeded to down large bottles of Bintang beer, chatting with my friends and waving off the roving merchants who sold t-shirts, bootleg CD's and DVD's, cheap watches, beachside massages, necklaces with wooden pendants of geckos or elephants.

An hour and several Bintangs later, we made our way to the RTC office, a humble little room, walls plastered with various maps of Rinjani, Lombok, Indonesia. After a few minutes of haggling over prices and logistics, I worked out a plan with Ronia, the RTC's manager. He was a somewhat husky young man with short hair and a smile that made me feel like I was somehow getting ripped off or made the butt of some joke I didn't understand.

Or maybe I did understand the joke. Here I was, silly buleh, on the other side of the world from my home, preparing to put myself through strenuous physical activity in order to get a glimpse of a vista. What is this passion for climbing mountains, for being in high places? Of course there is the view from the top, and the requisite capturing of that view with a camera. But there is also a sense of victory, some old imperial impulse. Man conquers mountain. Man conquers his perceived inability to climb a mountain. Man conquers his own weakness. Of course, this wasn't really the case for us. We hired a guide to show us the way and porters to carry our tents, food, cooking utensils, the basic necessities of life.

But there was still the aspects of the sublime, the way that such stark natural forms can create in us a primal sense of wonder, and as far as tourism goes, this is a pretty good way to do it. Support the local economy and help preserve the glory of the natural world, a "commodity" that is always at risk in a place like Indonesia. Who knows what would have become of Rinjani and its surrounding forest if it wasn't for the promise of tourist dollars?

So I settled my business with Ronia, and Auggie took us to a quiet, nearby beach where we ran through waves and watched the sun plunge into the horizon, the tingle of cheap, crisp beer and good company doing to me what the sunset did to the ocean.


***

Mount Rinjani. An inactive volcano holy to both the Balinese and the Sasak people of Lombok, a place of pilgrimages, blessed hot springs, and one of the prime eco-tourism locations of Indonesia. We left the first morning, as we did every morning, a little later than our guide Haris, would have preferred. But, as he reassured us time and time again, "don't worry, man, it's your holiday...relax."

And so it was. We slowly clambered our way up and then down the mountain, through a variety of landscapes. Our porters were mostly middle aged men who made their living farming in the off-season. Clad in meager flip-flops, shouldering bamboo poles to which our supplies were fastened, and chain-smoking thick, handrolled cones of local tobacco, they effortlessly glided up and down the steepest mountain paths with the grace of mountain lions, their dark, wrinkled faces held in slight grimaces. Pak Edi, the eldest of the porters, had been working on the mountain for almost thirty years. Throughout the hike, they seemed hesitant to socialize with us, as if that broke some kind of professional pact. Most of them were in dire economic circumstances, having to be on the mountain for almost the entirety of the tourist season in order to make an adequate living for their families. Such hard work, such constant separation from the ones they loved. They lugged our necessities, cooked our meals, even set up our tents.

But at least they had jobs. On Lombok, an island without any major business or industry, one of the only ways to make a living is to do what one can in the tourist service sector. Unemployment is rampant. So our frivolous adventuring formed the basis of their employment...

Our guide, Haris, occupied a higher niche along the social ladder of Rinjani tourism. He had a tent to himself, whereas the four porters shared a single tent. He was a surfer dude, or at least the persona that he presented to us was that of a surfer dude. He had been climbing the mountain for almost twenty years, and giving surf lessons on the beach for just as long, having worked in Bali and Java in addition to Lombok. And, he once had a job teaching English at a pesantren.

As with the porters, our interactions with Haris were mediated by a sense of professionalism. There were walls between us, walls that could never be broken down. He saw that we were young Americans, so he frequently talked about smoking weed, drinking beer, and getting laid. His English was peppered with the slang and mangy vowel sounds of Australia, and every morning, in probably the most endearing exchange between us, he greeted us with a loud, friendly "good morning, dude! What would you love to drink this morning?"

It was strange to spend so much time with an actor playing a role. But that was his job, I guess, and he played the role well, keeping us safe on some of the more treacherous trails, helping us spot the elusive black monkeys on the forested trail down the mountainside. He didn't, however, seem very interested in telling us of the spiritual traditions associated with the mountain, or about the volcano's history. To be honest, it seemed that he just wanted to get up to the summit, then off the mountain and back to his family in Mataram, who he usually only saw for a few days a week, given the requirements of his livelihood.

A 37 year old Muslim surfer dude, who prayed five times a day and said he couldn't live away from the waves, leading five American Fulbrighters up a giant mountain...in some ways it was the joke that the set-up suggests. How many faces did he have as a guide? How would he have spoken to us if we were British yuppies or a middle-aged Danish couple? He was like the cover bands in Sengiggi, entreating the middle-aged bulehs to dance, joking about "transport, mr.," "don't worry be happy," his performance calibrated to the perceived wants of his audience.

***

We began the hike in the village of Sembalun Lawang, East Lombok. Arid landscapes of tall yellow grass, patches of leafy, bright red flowers, the occasional tree with oddly silver leaves. Slowly, we gained altitude, walking at an unhurried pace, joking, telling stories. In front of us, the enormity of the mountain was eclipsed by clouds.

We spent the night in an old lava flow, a hard bed of glistening black rock in between two ridges. Strange trees on the hills, stubby bushes, and over the next ridge, a patch of burnt earth, black with soot.

The next day, we hiked to the rim of Rinjani's volcanic crater, up the spines of ridges, into a patch of forest dense with billowing silver clouds. Temperatures dropped drastically as walked through mist, all vistas lost.

The crater rim, shrouded when we arrived. Clusters of Edelweiss beside the path, a significant flower for Sasak pilgrims who take bunches of them back to give their family and keep in their homes.

We made our camp on the rim, still enclosed in clouds, a little mystified as to what our summit hike, beginning at two in the morning, would look like. As the sun began to set, as the porters served us our dinner of fried rice, pineapple slices, coffee, and tea, the clouds started to lift, and we glimpsed for the first time Rinjani's summit, a steep slope of rust-colored rock jutting into the sky. Below us, Danau Segara Anak, the crater lake, glowed a spectral shade of turquoise in the descending light and the active volcanic cone of Gunung Baru, Rinjani's child, smoldered calmly. Here was our vista, the earth's gift to our sense of sight, bold colors and forms, enormous black shadows, stray strands of mist vanishing over the crater. I wondered how many times Haris and the porters had seen these views in various degrees of lightness and dark, cloud-clover and clarity. What did it mean to them? Was it a source of inspiration, of beauty, or did they react to this sight the same way I'd react to the sight of a computer screen or an English textbook? Or was it somewhere in between, some nuanced vision that I can't begin to understand?

***

The early morning ascent was grueling, trudging our way up steep slopes of loose granite and skree, a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward kind of hike. By the time we reached the final climb, a seventy-degree incline of pure skree and old volcanic ash, the sun was already beginning to rise. But at that point, we had stopped caring about the pristine sunrise from the summit, about the ultimate vistas and all that. We wanted nothing more than to make it up there, a task that seemed increasingly impossible. Kevin and Michaela had moved up ahead, Erica was behind us, slowly making her way, while Samson and I struggled with the loose ground below us, gasping for breath, severely underdressed for the achingly chilly winds with pairs of socks on our hands.

In the more frustrating moments of the hike, Samsom kept my spirits up with his endless silliness, strings of puns, Raffi songs. We huddled behind a big rock, eating granola bars and escaping from the wind for a moment. Fuck it, I thought. I'm not going to make it. But at that moment, Samson, who initially hadn't even wanted to climb the mountain, who joined us only because he wanted to spend time with his friends over his Idul Fitri holiday, said "ya know the guy in Seven Years in Tibet? His toe was frostbitten and it turned black; do you think he ate it?" "Well, he would have had to boil it first right, so it wasn't so hard?"

And then we were off, the ludicrous idea of likening ourselves to Brad Pitt ascending Himalayan peaks giving me the strength necessary to make it to the top, both of us trudging through the freezing mist more like out-of-shape barroom musicians or comedians than Hollywood stars (and certainly not real mountain climbers). When we were within feet of the summit, a group of middle-aged French hikers--with their hiking poles, boot-covers, thermal jackets, ear muffs, and fancy digital cameras--passed us on their way down, chuckling at the sight of our wind-burnt cheeks and floppy sock hands.

But then we reached the summit. The natural high of physical exertion and accomplishing something, the misty views across the whole island, the mountains of Bali visible to the West, a circular rainbow hovering over the crater lake as the clouds dispersed, the mountain's shadow like a great phantom triangle stretching to the East.

***

The rest of the hike was a walk in the park by comparison. Later that day, we made our way down the crater wall, to the banks of the lake. Another day entirely wrapped in fog, with no clue as to what lay ahead of us. When we got down to the lake, a group of a hundred or so university students from Jakarta were occupying the main campsite, and we hung out with them under a camping shelter as a rainstorm passed over us. They rolled us giant cone cigarettes, practiced speaking English, taught me some phrases in Bahasa Betawi, the local language of Jakarta.

By this point we were cold, wet, and nearing exhaustion, so we walked down the holy hot springs and took a long soak in the warm, sulphuric waters, letting the small waterfalls that fed the pool give us back massages.

Spent the night beside the lake, strong winds battering the tent all night. The next day we walked up the other side of the rim, and down the West side of the mountain, through forested hills, flora and fauna I've never seen before; giant Dr. Seuss-like trees; large black-furred monkeys hopping from branch to branch in the distance; quiet, friendly wild dogs following us at a distance and humbly begging food at our campsite.

At this point, the narrative loses steam. We were tired, happy, and could go for a beer and a shower. There are no literary dynamics, no tension or struggle, in the descent. When we reached the village of Senaru, a driver was waiting for us and his friends offered us breakfast glasses of local palm wine. We thanked our Haris and the porters, bought them packs of cigarettes, and said goodbye. The magic of the new paradise.

***

Gunung Rinjani National Park is a place that easily inspires the use of adjectives, all of those cliche words commonly used to describe sights of great natural beauty, because our clumsy language has no way of directly interacting with such physicality. Majestic, serene, glorious, immense, exhilarating, magnificent. Perhaps the most fascinating of these adjectives is "terrifying" a very close relative of "wonderful." The sheer power of the natural world, the grace (or brutality depending on how you want to look at it) of immense stones, the magma lurking silently (for now) beneath the cone of Gunung Baru, is quite a ferocious thing. In Indonesia, the ground we tread was created from volcanic activity, and volcanic activity could bring these islands back to a state of pure stone.

Oy, pure stone...too much, this attempt to diagnose the precise enjoyment of such a trip, the dynamics of our obsession with mountains, the sublime, pretensions of Annie Dillardish insight. Perhaps there is no correct way to convey the silly joy of luxury mountain hiking. Perhaps it'd be more honest in postcard terms: "Had a blast, good times with good friends, exhilarating experience, the views were majestic, serene, glorious, immense, wish you were here."

***

Back in Sengiggi, my friends returned home to teach after a couple days of sitting on the beach, drinking arak cocktails, and eating surprisingly good Thai and Korean food at Sengiggi's tourist restaurants. For some strange reason, my travel agent couldn't find me an earlier ticket back to South Kalimantan, so I spent another four days in Sengiggi, all alone in tropical beach paradise.

A sordid feeling crept over me, the kind of thing that evaporates in easy conversation in the company of friends. I felt misplaced, as if I was stepping beyond the "Do Not Enter, Installation in Progress" rope of a museum wing. But instead of a museum wing, it was an off-season resort town on a relatively impoverished Indonesian island.

During the days, I tried to utilize internet connections to catch up on world news, swam in the ocean, read. The bored staff members of the stores and restaurants half-heartedly called me over to their establishments. They sat around doing cross-word puzzles, playing guitar, sending text messages.

At night, I sat at the bar of a place called Papaya, listening to the cover bands' slightly schizophrenic choices of covers. Cheb Khaled's "Aisha" followed by "She Thinks She's So Pretty" by some obscure 90's pop band followed by the ubiquitous Rolling Stones' "Honky-Tonk Woman."

I did, however, get the chance to practice my Indonesian language skills, and met a fascinating assortment of people. By my last day in Sengiggi, everyone seemed to know me.

***

I am the Tourist. I come to consume, consume, consume. Give me gamelan, give me the barong dance! Present me with your finest rice fields, your highest mountains! I will photograph them, I will take them with me, I will craft my memories as carefully as a master wood-carver sculpts the wings of Garuda.

But, that isn't to say I didn't have a hell of a time in Bali and Lombok.

We live in a world of fun-house mirrors. A world in which the real and the representation have become so intricately intertwined that it's nearly impossible and probably not worth the effort to disentangle them, if there's even any difference between the two. So raise a glass of arak to your lips and listen to the waves' whispering on the shore, the sweet voices of the wandering masseuses chanting "massage, mister? I give you good price."

Or better yet, don't listen to me at all. My words here are just another distorting lens through which to view the world. To really get a feeling for a place and its people (or people and their place), one must go for oneself, no one can go there for you. And, in a sense, this is what we do when we travel; we step through the looking glass, if only for a brief, perplexing moment.

Every night, various venues in Ubud host cultural performances, the tickets sold by hawkers who crowd on the corner of Jalan Raya Ubud and Monkey Forest Road.  We buy tickets to the Kecak Dance from a kindly old woman.  She is glad we went for the kecak, the dance originally hails from her home village, she tells us. 

The performance takes place in a temple courtyard.  Fresh plumeria are placed behind our ears as we enter, finding our seats on one of the rows of bleachers that are on either side of the performance space.  A man, seemingly equivalent to a priest, steps out from the temple's innards and sprinkles holy water, consecrating the performance space.  Any guidebook will tell you that in Bali, dance, music, and artwork are deeply connected to ritual.  According to tradition, everything is indivisible from the spiritual realm.    

The Kecak Dance:  cak cak cak cak cak...a mass of men in a circle around a large flame chanting cak cak cak cak cak...the rhythms building and lulling, their bodies shifting side to side...cak cak cak cak cak cak...each with a different tone, minutely detailed, gamelan suara, voice orchestra, changes at the drop of the dime....a story from the Ramayana, Prince Rama is there, fighting the evil King Ravana...cak cak cak cak cak...camera flashes, camera flashes, what use spectacle if it's not captured...cak cak cak cak....Hanuman appears, white monkey-man, gleaming gold smile, bounds around, rhythms build speed.....cak cak cak cak cak....... something is accomplished in the narrative, dancers raise their arms, fingers twitching, volume builds climax....cak cak cak cak...and it is over. 

Audience applauds, reviews the new additions in their digital cameras' memories, maybe buys an official Kecak Dance t-shirt on the way out.  Nothing commemorates the transformative experience of a ritual performance like a t-shirt. 

***

In Ubud, the cynic in me realizes that a cultural form doesn't need to exchange its dignity for status as a tourist object.  Maybe it's an old-fashioned Orientalist notion that seemingly exotic, foreign cultural forms such as the kecak dance have any special sort of dignity that needs to be preserved in the first place.  Buy the ticket, enjoy the ride. 

According to Wikipedia's fathomless depths of knowledge, the modern form of the kecak dance, with its narrative derived from the Ramayana, is an invention of the early twentieth century.  German painter and Bali fanatic Walter Spies, who lived on the island in the 1930's, apparently helped develop the kecak dance we see today as an adaptation of an older trance-dance form.  One of his goals was to make this new kecak more appealing to Western tourists.  

***

Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, 8:30 AM.  In the faint, leaf-filtered light of  morning, a gaggle of Balinese macaques appear almost noble.   The thoughtful eyes, wise-old-man beards; picking bugs from the fur of their young, munching on the cassava root that the park's keepers lay out for them. 

But as soon as an unsuspecting tourist enters the forest with a bunch of bananas or a packet of peanuts, the image of nobility vanishes and the macaques swarm like touts at a ferry port.  They bound up on one's shoulders, tear the small bananas from one's hands, squabble and hiss and steal from each other in a mad scramble for bananas.  The park guidelines prohibit visitors from touching the monkeys, but the monkeys themselves adhere to no rules.  Turn your back on them and they will try to steal your camera from your hands, your sunglasses from your face. 

These macaques are no wild animals.  They live in a queasy symbiosis with humanity, seeming to take on some of humankind's worst qualities as their own.  Like adorable, humanoid pigeons.  Entering this small patch of forest at the end of Monkey Forest Road, however, one is nothing more than a guest in their home.  And it is a gorgeous home. 

Verdant forest criss-crossed with rivers, remnants of old temples, stone-carved demons guarding their entrances, monkey-deity sculptures covered in vibrant green layers of moss.  Butterflies of the speckled brown wing variety abound.

One of the Ubud area's greatest draws is the serene beauty of its landscape.  Walk for a few hours in any direction, and you encounter calm rice paddies, enormous skies, views of distant mountain peaks.  It is landscape as the fulfillment of a dream, one's sense of sight as if incredibly high on a strong euphoriant.  The blue of the sky is, like, sooooo blue.  And the clouds, perfect little tufts.  The rice fields, the palm trees, a shade of green not too loud or too soft, the shade of green that haunts the dreams of anyone living through a dreary gray winter.  Magic light. 

Of course, these impressions are fleeting, gleaned from three days of the dry season.  It'd be curious to return during the rainy months, see the trees and rivers and fields muted by grey. 

***

Hard as one may try, it's damn near impossible to fully describe Ubud and the surrounding areas, to give an accurate account of the Balinese pantheon, the precise meaning and function of every offering, the position of every temple, the significance of the hairy temple rooftops, the spirit who holds the ceremonial umbrella above the heads of the Gods.  This is Hinduism, a religion of variousness, multiplicity, canonized in Sanskrit.  A traditional story-telling performance lasts for hours.  The poems would take a forest of felled trees to hold their words.  Balinese Hinduism is an entire cosmos.  This is probably why the nightly performances are shortened to a palatable hour and a half, why the lush cosmology is condensed into carved wood garudas that can fit in the palm of your hand.  It takes a lifetime to learn the meanings of the forms, the ideas, the spirits, but only the briefest of glances to appreciate their beauty.  Tourism is an industry that caters to those glances. 

At Gunung Kawi there are ten seven-meter high shrines cut out of sheer rock face.  A blindingly lush green valley below them, complete with streams of holy water that spout from a waterfall a half-kilometer away.  In order to get there, we hired Ketut, one of the transport men found along Jalan Raya Ubud.  He took us along the scenic route for the twelve kilometer ride, past rice paddies, streams, patches of jungle green palms and vegetation, asking for help conjugating English verbs and wondering whether I could find him minyak pasak bumi,  some kind of spiritually charged jungle oil, in Borneo. 

What's remarkable about Gunung Kawi is the grace and simplicity of the shrines, the way they appear to sprout from the cliffside as naturally as the stream from the waterfall.  Supposedly dating from the 11th century, the shrines depict little more than thrones.  No excessive ornamentation, no representations of the Gods or spirits or kings who reside there.  Just a nice place for them to sit and relax when they come by, a good spirit-sit.  There is a haunting quality to this absence, as if the spirits are really there, watching us with our cameras, our careful poses, playfully sprinkling each other with holy water, enjoying the clean air, the blue sky, the green earth.     

***

From Ubud we left for Amed, a cluster of beach villages among the arid hills of the island's Eastern shores.  Known for snorkeling, sunsets, black sand beaches. 

Amed--the kind of beauty that is a stage setting for a luxurious romance.  We couldn't find any cheap, dingy hotels, the kind of places that catered to my state of mind.  So we stayed at Waeni's Sunset View Bungalows.  Perfect sunset, the sound of waves on gritty black sand, plumeria on our pillows, long white veils of mosquito netting. 

Futile without a lover.  If everything is indivisible from the spirit realm, you could say that I was visited by the Frustration Deity, his form like an enormous land-bound lobster with a pair of testicles in his claws, his voice like the whine of thirteen hundred mosquitoes, his wrath not so terribly wrathful just....terribly frustrating.  So we stayed a day, went snorkeling, passed the evening with strong arak cocktails, and left.

***

Munduk, Central Bali.  The town sits atop the ridge of an ancient volcanic crater that is almost impossibly lush.  Rolling hills, forests, plantations cultivating rice, cloves, vanilla, coffee, onions, spinach, cocoa.  We arrived on an overcast afternoon, the diffuse light turning the thick hilltop forest to a calm pastel green. 

My memories of Munduk seem as if formed of a different substance than the rest of Bali.  Maybe it's the change in climate:  cool forested hills, daily rain showers, scent of coco and cloves.  Maybe it's the lack of touristic bustle; only one person in the village asked us if we needed transport.

Our guesthouse, Guru Ratna's, offered Balinese cooking classes, palm weaving lessons, and guided treks through the countryside.   We chose the trek, leaving in the morning with our guide Putu, a young man with the shaved head, careful speech, and sedate demeanor of an ascetic. 

He took us up into the hills, to an enormous waterfall; across paths of stumpy, thin arabica coffee plants, cocoa trees, spiky pineapple bushes with tiny red pineapples; through rice paddies and vegetable plantations that smelled of fresh onion. 

When it began to rain, as it apparently does most every day in Munduk, we took shelter at a small warung among one of the area's farming communities.  The kindly old ibu of the house made us a plate of fried bananas coated in a bright pink batter of some sort,  and we watched the rain splashing against great palm leaves with her small son. 

Quietude, calm.  Putu explained that most of the people of Munduk are very religious, focusing their attention on the purification of thoughts, actions, and speech.  As the rain slowed, we headed up a hill to a 700 year-old banyan tree, one of Bali's oldest trees and a glorious testament to the notion that some sort of God  of Gods exist.  Huge, gnarly roots, twisted and curled together, an enormous trunk, long branches full of leaves.  We climbed into the tree, up through the roots, sat there a while.  The contentment of children fell over us. 

As we headed back to Guru Ratna's, rain came again, soaking us as we walked, reducing the rocky trails to slip 'n slide conditions.  When we returned, it felt amazing to enjoy the simple delight of being warm on a cool evening. 

I've been sitting at a table at the nearly deserted Taman Restaurant for about an hour now, fighting off mosquitoes and trying to get the overpriced wi-fi connection to work.  A mix-tape of nineties mush-pop hits is playing over and over and over again on the restaurant's speakers.  "My Heart Will Go On," "I Will Always Love You," "Unbreak My Heart," "You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings."  My ears are saturated with synthesized flutes, over-produced string sections, voices of pop culture past.  This is my third visit to this restaurant, and the same tape has been playing every time. 

Taman is a half-circular structure with a balcony.  Open-air, arranged around a courtyard, where a series of fountains spit water into a small stone pond.  Palm trees abound.  Behind me is Sengiggi's famous beach.   I don't need to describe it to you.  Just imagine the picture perfect beach.  Lurid sunsets.  Fine black sand.  "Discover the magic of the new paradise," says the Lombok postcard. 

In the garden, hot pink dragonflies buzz from leaf to leaf.  Motorbikes buzz in the street.  The young men selling bootleg DVDs or wristwatches or sun glasses pass by, disinterested or not permitted to enter here.  For now, it is low season, the days after the Idul Fitri holiday, only two tables occupied at breakfast time. 

Bali, Lombok.  The two islands are packaged together in the same guidebook, the same tours.  For many tourists, they define Indonesia, the way Cancun defines Mexico.  Bali is the undisputed juggernaut of the Indonesian tourist scene, a name synonymous with exoticism, palm trees, cold, brightly colored drinks with little umbrellas.  Lombok is the rising star, the younger sister in the touristic sense.  Its name means "chili pepper" in Javanese.  Unlike Bali, with its unique Hinduism, most people here are Sasak by ethnicity, Muslim in religious affiliation. 

Over the course of my Ramadan/Idul Fitri vacation, I spent a week in Bali and a week in Lombok, respectively.  I was the Tourist, snapping photos of forest monkeys, indulging in massages, tossing back cold Bintangs as the ocean and the sun set off their evening fireworks.  I was discovering the magic of the new paradise.

***

Pulsing lights, bumping bass.  Shirtless surfer dudes, tanned skin adorned with tribal designs in dark ink, sipping Bintang bombers or bright pink concoctions in enormous glasses, approaching the girls, tanned, wearing the scant bits of cloth that are endemic on dark dancefloors with smoke machines and overloud bass.  Gyrating hips, hands in the air, dance moves gleaned from years of watching MTV Spring Break.  Welcome to Kuta, Bali.  This is Paddy's, the new Paddy's, rebuilt after the 2002 bombing by Jemaah Islamiya, a militant Islamic radical group.  If they were trying to make it point, they picked the right target.  On any given night at Paddy's, one can find flagrant displays of almost every action considered haram by strict Muslims. 

Outside, Jalan Legian.  A few miles of nearly identical discotheques; souvenier stalls; restaurants with hip, dim lighting serving steaks, Western standards,  Thai food, "authentic" Indonesian dishes; fashion boutiques from Dolce Gabana to Quicksilver to batik.  But this is just the set, the scenery.  The heart of Jalan Legian is the flowing mass of touts and tourists.  If you didn't know any better, you'd think "transport, mr.?" was the local language for "hello."  Up and down the street, one hears this greeting with the frequency and fervor of an obscure ritual, which, in a sense, it is. 

Here, one sees more bulehs than Indonesians.  Roving in packs, everyone deeply tanned or lobster-claw red from sun.  Drinking on the street, obliging the transport industry folks, rudely denying the transport industry folks, looking to get laid, to get drunk, to get in a fight, to eventually fall into a stuporous slumber and awake to the waves and sunshine of the next morning. 

We were in Kuta for Andrea's birthday.  Erin, Emmy, and I, fresh from our first weeks of living in somewhat conservative Muslim areas, and Jewel, our unofficial tour guide, a former ETA who had stayed on to teach at an international school in Bali's capital city, Denpassar.  We arrived in time to watch the sun set into the Westward sea.  Started our night at Reunion, a hole-in-the-wall dive with a friendly staff and blaring karaoke.  By midnight we were in the throes of intoxication, an early night, not by choice but by the shock of alcohol in our newly clean systems. 

I slumped on a table in a dark corner of Paddy's, watching a platinum blonde and a spiky-haired dude in Billabong surf-shorts make out.  The dancefloor was a blurred frenzy of motion.  One of our crew had had too much to drink and was busy rectifying her innards in the ladies' room.  Another was busy with a tall, buff German.  On the dilapidated bar counter in front of me, a blacklight illuminated an offering plate, similar to the offering plates that are as ubiquitous in Bali as sunshine, the usual base of woven palm-frond with some red flower petals, grass, a stem, an unlit stick of incense.  Underneath it, there was a sign reading "Under Construction, Sorry For The Unconvenience."

***

Like the rest of the tourists on the island who weren't content with drinking until we fell down and waking up at noon to catch a wave, I was looking for something "authentic."  The Real Bali.  Rice fields and generosity and beautiful girls in brightly colored sarongs balancing fruit baskets on their heads as gamelan orchestras chimed in the distance and the sun descended in a million shades of violet and crimson, leaving orchards of brilliant plumeria colorless in its wake.  The Bali in the paintings.  The Orientalist's Bali.  Of course, I entered this game knowing there was no such thing.  I'm an American raised in the decline of the twentieth century.  We know firsthand that there is no real anything.  We practically perfected unreality before exporting it to the far corners of the globe.  More realistically, we perfected unreality before moving our unreality operations overseas to pay people in places like Bali almost nothing to make our unreality for us so that we could increase our profit margin in the unreality market. 

Downtown Ubud, Bali's other major center of tourism, catering to wandering hippies, cultural enthusiasts, and mid-life crisis American women who have just read Eat, Pray, Love.  The tourguides say Ubud is Bali's "cultural capital."  To which the intro to anthro professor would ask, "what is culture." 

Ornately carved spirits of protection,  demonic stone forms, eyes bulged, tongues lolling out of sharply fanged smiles.  Some serpentine, some humanoid, others quite simian.  They guard the gates of each and every one of the multitude of palaces and temples in this area.  As if in their own parallel village of stone, the spirit village. 

Offerings line the streets, both curbside and siting in artfully arranged offering posts.  Woven squares of palm-leaf filled with plumeria blossoms, bits of leaf and grass, crackers, individually wrapped Mentos mints, bougainvillea.

Sweet smelling incense, sanskrit, swastikas, shop after shop filled with sarongs, temple sashes, t-shirts depicting the monkey deity Hanuman, the lion-dog spirit Barong, wood-carvings of Garuda, a dragon-like incarnation of Vishnu and Indonesia's national symbol, a million varieties of artisanship, woodworking, furniture, paintings in modern, traditional and post-modern varieties, painstakingly woven ikat and songket fabrics, batiks, leatherware, silverware, baskets, keychains, bracelets, life-size offerings to the spirits of capitalism and commerce.  According to tradition, everything in Bali is indivisible from the spiritual realm.

At the village's central temple, a gamelan orchestra is practicing, the tones from each struck gong mingling, a quiet riot of overtones, a musical display of the most reverential form of frenzy.  Plumeria on the pavement.  Flies buzzing over garbage cans brimming with yesterday's offerings.  Tourists coming and going in their purposeful stride.  Men sitting on the hoods of their cars offer transport, some lackadaisically, most fervently, as if their livelihoods depend on it.  And, in most cases, they do.  A young, long-haired man in jeans says to me, in a solid American accent, "come on, man, let me give you a ride somewhere.  I need a job, come on, where you going?"

Now, after a brief two weeks at Darul Hijrah, Ramadan has begun.  The fasting month.  Prayers are chanted from the mosque's loudspeakers at all hours of the day and night, classes are shortened, and, on the tenth day of the month classes will be suspended for a thirty days, resuming only after the Idul Fitri (the week-long celebration following Ramadan) holiday.

 

It is a quiet time.  The atmosphere at the school is subdued, pious.  With only an hour or two of class a day and most of my friends and colleagues busy praying or resting, I spend my time reading, writing, learning new Indonesian vocabulary.  For me, the situation is ideal.  I've never had so much free time in my adult life. 

 

Over the break, I plan to visit my friend Ari and his family in the suburbs of Bandung, spend a week in Bali, and a week on the island of Lombok, hiking Mt. Rinjani.

 

***

 

Fasting during the daylight hours for a whole month makes one truly appreciate the sustenance that food gives.  This is obviously one of the points of the Ramadan fast, but it's easy to "know" hunger intellectually, another thing to experience it for oneself.

 

Every evening, as the sun begins to set, the campus (and probably the whole province) comes alive with the scent of spices and sweets.  People leave their homes, visit friends, pray at the local mosque, anxiously awaiting the sunset and the alarm that signals the time of "buka puasa," opening the fast. 

 

One afternoon, Zainal, one of my fellow teachers, invited me and Emmy to the Pasar Wadai in the nearby city of Banjarbaru.  Pasar Wadai translates to Cake Market, and that's pretty much what it is.  An avenue flanked by vendors whose tables and grills display the finest of traditional Banjar foods. 

 

It is said that the Propher Muhammed instructed his followers to break their fast with something sweet.  Dates are, traditionally, the first morsel of food to be eaten at buka puasa, as the dried fruits were Muhammed's favorite. 

 

While there is an abundance of dates for sale at the Pasar Wadai, the local delicacies are the cakes that give the market its name.  There are gelatinous circles of sticky-rice flour cakes flavored with coconut or banana or red palm sugar; white cakes, brown cakes, cakes the jungle green of banana leaves.  There is kelalepon, green blobs of sticky-rice flour dusted with coconut shavings and filled with palm sugar syrup so that the liquid inside explodes on the first bite; varieties of bingka, cakes made in the shape of a star with rounded points, composed of eggs, rice flour, sugar, and sometimes potatoes or coconut.  Their flavor and texture falls somewhere between flan and potato kugel. 

 

Besides the cakes, there is an abundance of savory foods and drinks available.  Chicken or duck grilled with sweet soy sauce; thin, bright purple grilled eggplants; fried tofu, tempeh, and bananas; a number of fish varieties either grilled of fried; plates of enormous river prawns in a coconut milk and chili sauce; nasi pecel, a salad of blanched greens and mung-bean sprouts served with a spicy peanut sauce or topped with shaved coconut and crushed chilies; and there are Indonesia's famous iced drinks, all served with an abundance of ice, palm sugar syrup, and sweetened condensed milk: es cendol features gooey bits of agar-agar (a type of processed seaweed); es campur includes large balls of green jelly, chunks of durian flesh, bright green pieces of seaweed, brown blobs of another variety of seaweed, and tiny pink orbs whose origin I cannot ascertain.  Es Kelapa Muda is my favorite.  Icy cold chunks of young coconut in its own natural juice, along with the aforementioned sweeteners.  The richness of the milk really exposes the nuttiness of the coconut.

 

At the Pasar Wadai, everyone is visibly salivating over the abundance of food.  The aroma of fried tofu and grilled meats fills the air.   

 

***

 

Nearly every day, about an hour before buka puasa, just as the hunger is reaching its peak, Mi'raj and I go to the store a kilometer down the road from the pesantren.  There's a little convenience store there, with a warung beside it.  At this point, all of the food in the store looks delicious, even the eel-flavored crackers.  I buy some cold drinks or some yogurt, kerupuk (crackers), cigarettes, eggs.

 

Mi'raj heads over the warung, a little wooden shack, where we sit on a bench waiting for our tahu goreng.  This is Mi'raj's favorite for buka puasa:  squares of tofu filled with stringy egg noodles, battered and deep-fried.  As we wait, an elderly woman plays with her tiny grandchild, cooing to her, bouncing her up and down in her arms.  A couple of cats play in what looks like a pile of discarded plastic.  The proprietress, a long, thin woman with sinuous fingers, wearing a brown jilbab and a loose, purple floral dress, prepares the sauce of shrimp paste, sweet soy sauce, and chilis.

 

From the amber light that falls on the banana trees, the jumble of ferns and pineapple bushes on the roadside, one can tell that buka puasa is near.  The sun is setting.  At this time of day, the fruits dangling from their trees take on a special intimation of tastiness.  The tiny, growing pineapples, like sweet armadillo plants.  The concentric rows of small green bananas hanging from their stem.  The bulbous orbs of jackfruit like strange growths hanging from their trunk. 

 

It is quiet, the electric quiet that reigns before a celebration.

 

***

 

The night before the students leave for their families' homes, I am invited to a farewell ceremony at the school mosque.  A handshaking ceremony, Mi'raj calls it, though, as with everything in this new life of mine, I am unsure of what exactly will take place. 

 

The mosque is humble, floors and walls of unembellished white tile.  In the front of the room, one of the senior teachers is speaking, but no one seems to be listening.  Teachers and students, wearing their finest sarongs and loose, traditional shirts lounge on the floor, chatting, sending and receiving text messages on their cell phones. 

 

Then the handshaking ceremony begins.  The teachers line up against a wall.  The unruly gaggle of students try to push their way to the teachers, but are prodded into an orderly line by some of the senior students.  The muezzin begins a chant to Allah that moves through the air like a faint breeze. 

 

And the students come, one after the other, receiving the hands of every teacher.  Some seem indifferent, a brief squeeze of the hand, barely any eye-contact.  Others make a show of their deference and respect towards their elders, kissing their hand, touching their hand to the cheek or nose or forehead.  Unconsciously, I bow my heads as the students do.  The other teachers stand erect, idly holding out their hands. 

 

When they see me, most of the students can't help but smile at the incongruity of the situation.  Many of them say "hello, Mr.," or "ok, Mr."  They come, one by one, moving as if riding a conveyor belt.  Some have the look of surprise in their eyes, others are obviously amused by the presence of my hand in theirs.  And the chant continues, students joining in as they shuffle along.  Some hands are softer, moister than others.  Some of the students wear sarongs and batik shirts screaming with color.  Others are more subdued, sporting Arab-style shirts, monochrome sarongs. 

 

One after the other, they come, bowing their heads in the traditional sign of respect, smiling at the goofy American in the poorly tied sarong.  I have only been here two weeks, not enough time to have established myself as a real person.  I still feel a caricature, although my persona comes closer to the dimensions of reality every day. 

 

Nevertheless, I fall into the rhythm of the act, one hand after another.  819 students later, the ceremony ends.

Tuesday morning, my first day of classes here at Pondok Pesantren Darul Hijrah Putra in the village of Cindai Alus, Banjar regency, South Kalimantan.  I finish the chewy remains of my mug of coffee, wondering where Mi'raj could be, and when our classes begin.  The coffee is delicious, arabica from Java, brewed by pouring hot water into a mug full of well-roasted, finely ground beans and stirring the grounds until they settle.  Powerful, aromatic, with hints of chocolate. 

Mi'raj suddenly enters the house with a folded piece of construction paper full of rice and two hardboiled eggs in a red sauce reminiscent of barbecue.  "I have brought breakfast from the kitchen," he says, and we eat.

As we leave the house for class, a group of junior high students who live in the dorm across the way shout to me, as they have every time I've entered or exited the house, "hello mister!"  Hopping onto the back of Mi'raj's motorbike, a lavender-colored Suzuki Shogun Z25, I give them a brisk wave.  And we're off, scooting away towards the school building, 150 yards away.

When I told Mi'raj I would be more than comfortable walking the negligible distance to the school, he raised his eyebrows at me quizzically, as if I had accidentally insulted him.  "No, I think it's better we ride the motorbike," he said, a phrase I hear with almost as much frequency as "hello mister" or "please, eat more." 

The road that runs through Darul Hijrah Putra divides the campus between mosque, soccer field, and school house on one side, and dormitories, teacher housing, and basketball court on the other.  As we ride along in the early sunlight, tufts of fat, lazy clouds lounge in the enormous blue sky.  Rows of fruit trees stand along the side of the road, bulbous lime-colored young jackfruits hanging idly from their limbs, clusters of coconuts clinging to the uppermost reaches of tall palms. 

Alongside us, a procession of students heads toward class.  As we pass by, they wave, shout "hello mister, how are you," or smile shyly, averting their eyes from my smiling, slightly awe-struck gaze.  They are all wearing their Monday uniform, white shirts with black paisleys and navy blue slacks.

At the school, I am greeted warmly by the other teachers, who try out their English with me.  Darul Hijrah is a pesantren, an Islamic boarding school, so there is obviously a huge emphasis on religious education, but, unlike other pesantrens, Darul Hijrah specializes in languages and sciences.  The teachers prepare their lessons in Arabic, English, chemistry, anthropology.  And Mi'raj and I enter Class 4X, roughly equivalent to tenth grade. 

There are about thirty students in the class, sitting in neat rows of two, smiling and whispering excitedly.  I have little idea of what English the students already know, what kinds of lessons will work for them, what I should say or do. 

Mi'raj quietly takes attendance and turns the class over to me.  Ok.  "Hello class," I begin.

"Hello Mister!"

***

Later that day, we visit Pak Syahrudi, the headmaster of both the boys and girls schools of Darul Hijrah. 

"Hello Mr. Daniel," he begins, rising from his patent leather office chair to shake my hand.  He is a mild-mannered man of medium build.  Wispy black and grey whiskers protrude from his chin.  His eyes are a placid sea blue. 

"We are very...happy to have you here.  Is...your housing...good?"  Of course, I tell him, trying to use as much bahasa indonesia as I can.  When he speaks English he furrows his forehead, searching for the correct words.  I am surprised by the lack of authority in his demeanor, he seems nervous speaking with me.

Yet, he is an overwhelmingly gracious host.  While I planned to talk about my teaching schedule, the conversation was focused on my comfort.  Was the bed ok, did I need a TV and DVD player in the house, or a washing machine? 

"We sometimes don't understand what you need to be...comfortable...western people...it is different...so anything you need...just tell Mi'raj to contact me," he says as we are leaving.  The next day we find that he has hired a cleaning woman to keep up the yard, do our dishes, and tidy up the house.


***

It was a humid, rainy evening, the night I first arrived at Darul Hijrah.  Exhausted from the sleep deprivation incurred from my last nights in Bandung, I slept for a solid nine or ten hours.  And when I awoke, I found a gorgeous day outside, full of tropical sunlight, large black butterflies sipping nectar from the tiny, orange, trumpet-shaped flowers outside of our house, black-feathered chickens scampering in the yard. 

Mi'raj took me for a ride around the school, down the one paved road that runs through the tiny village of Cindai Alus.  I still can't get over the flatness of the terrain and the enormity of the sky.  Trees, bushes, and assorted greenery are everywhere.  Hibiscus flowers, trees full of some variety of pink orchid, flowers I've never seen the likes of in my life.  And the fruit trees.  Mangos, papayas, coconuts, water apples, jackfruit, bananas, spiky pineapple bushes.

South Kalimantan is primarily inhabited by the Banjar ethnic group, some of Kalimantan's first Muslims.  It is, without a doubt, a religious area, but I wouldn't go so far as to say conservatively religious.  Banjar language is spoken fast, with a slightly nasal inflection.  And Banjar cuisine is supposedly renowned as the premier cuisine of Indonesian Borneo. 

I live in a house that is blue from ceiling to floor.  A shade of blue like turquoise splashed with seawater.  Even the floor is carpeted with a paisley blue plastic covering.  There's a kitchen with a gas range and a sink, dining room with a fridge and a water cooler, living room.  My room is plenty big, with a closet, desk, queen-sized bed and air-conditioning unit.  All in all, pretty cushy.

And I share the house with Mi'raj.  In the mornings and evenings we hang out, he teaches me bahasa Indonesia and I help him work on his English.  We talk about school, movies, women, whatever.  He's learning to use sarcasm and swear in appropriate contexts.  I'm learning to say things the Banjar way, which is usually similar to bahasa Indonesia, but much faster and shorter.

Living with Mi'raj is nothing but pleasant.  From his head to his toes, his demeanor is one of aloof gentility.  He has lived at Darul Hijrah for 12 years, first as a student, then as a teacher, and he loves his lifestyle.  He is afraid of monkeys and cockroaches, likes to play video games on his friends' Playstation 2, knows how to cook omelettes and instant noodles, prays five times a day.  He's like the college roommate I never had. 


***


For the next nine months I will be team teaching with both Mi'raj and Jahidin, a small man with beige skin and a subtle pompadour, who seems to be always smiling.

 "It is a boring life, to be a teacher," he tells me one day as he smokes a thin clove cigarette.  We are, as usual, late for class.  What would you rather be, I ask him, if you had the choice? 

"Oh, I don't know.  Probably still a teacher.  Maybe a lecturer at university." 

His vocabulary is voluminous, regularly using words like 'infrastructure' or 'polemic.'  Yet his pronunciation makes it sometimes difficult to understand even simple phrases. 

When we first met, he seemed, like everyone else here, overjoyed to have the opportunity to work with me, a "native speaker."  He spoke of the importance of making lesson plans, being organized, practicing conversational skills.  Yet, despite his good intentions and general conviviality, Jahidin's watch is permanently set to jam karet, a phrase that translates to "rubber time."   Apparently this is the norm rather than the exception here in Indonesia.  During orientation, I was told to expect almost anything, from a flight to an official meeting, to begin at least a half hour after the expected time.   

We sit smoking, already ten minutes late for class.  "I am a married man now, many problems, so I must smoke," he says, explaining why he's recently taken up the habit, and, perhaps, why he's been unable to make it to any of our scheduled lesson planning sessions. 

When I told Jahidin that I would be observing, not teaching, for my first two weeks here, he took it to mean that I would like to observe the students, not the teacher.  Consequently, I make an on-the-fly lesson, the same for each class.  I introduce myself, explain about AMINEF and what I'm doing here for the next nine months, and then ask the students to write down the answers to some questions, basic things like "where do you come from" and "what does success mean to you." 

And then, with fifteen to thirty minutes of the class period left, I invite the students to ask me questions.  Yet, they are surprisingly reticent.  Malu malu kucing, as they say in Indonesian: shy, shy cats.  Attempting, through this activity, to get a sense of the different classes' levels of fluency, I think I fail. 

Most of the classes ask the same questions:  "are you married?"  "do you have a girlfriend?"  "why do you want to live in Indonesia?"  "what is your favorite Indonesian food?" 

Their collective responses to my answers are almost identical.  When I tell them that I like to eat Soto Banjar, a regional specialty composed of a lime-infused chicken broth with cellophane rice noodles, compressed rice cakes, chicken, and mashed duck eggs, they erupt in shouts of laughter. 

When I tell them I have a girlfriend, their eyes light up, and they shout what sounds like "wah," the Indonesian equivalent of "whoah!" or "wow!" 

The next question is, usually, "what do you think of Indonesian women," which arouses giggles all around.  This is, after all, a boys school way out in the sticks.  I wonder how often the boys get a chance just to lay their eyes on a real, live girl around their age.  When they ask this question, the presence of stifled hormones sits up, bangs its fists against the desks and howls at the moon, like the cartoon wolf in the old Warner Brothers shorts.

***

My second day at Darul Hijrah, Mi'raj tells me that there will be a big "agenda" tonight, and the students would be very happy if I were to attend.  The evening's line-up would include skits, singing, dancing, a little comedy.  It was to be the big annual show put on by class 6, the graduating class, and it would be attended by teachers, parents, local villagers, and the girls from Darul Hijrah Putri, four kilometers away. 

Mi'raj, knowing that I could play guitar, invited me to play and sing "Munajat Cinta," one of the Indopop songs I learned in bahasa class, along with Emmy, the ETA at Putri.  Well, why not.  But, I told him, I would need to practice the chords first.  

So we hop on Mi'raj's bike and headed to his friends' place nearby.  Doni and Hesley had guitars and wouldn't mind if I used one to practice.  We arrive at their house and Mi'raj escorts me to their room.  Inside, the floor is littered with CDs and DVDs, old newspapers, sarongs, jeans, and t-shirts, empty soda cants that had been converted into ashtrays.  Feels like home. 

Doni hands me a guitar, a beat-up green guitar without a brand-name.  The strings feel and sound as if they haven't been changed in years.  He writes out the chords to "Munajat Cinta," and leads me through the tune on another guitar.  He is a bit impatient with my fumbling fingers, but eventually I get the chords right and we play the song together.  What should we play next?

Unfortunately, I have no clue how to play the American songs that he knows.  Like many of my new friends at Darul Hijrah, Doni is a big fan of Scorpion, Guns 'n Roses, and A Simple Plan.  Hm.  He seems a bit flabbergasted that I don't know any Scorpion.  But he teaches me "Smoke on the Water," and we play our way through that one, neither of us knowing the words, our guitars in tune only in the most dissonant, "experimental" sense of the phrase.

That evening, after much confusion over whose guitar I should use, when we will perform, and what the real chords to "Munajat Cinta" are, Emmy arrives at our house with Estih, her counterpart, and Estih's five year-old daughter, Putri. 

I couldn't have asked for a better American companion than Emmy.  A geologist who studied at Amherst College, she's the kind of person whose smile lends confidence, and is usually smiling.  The perfect accomplice for singing a song we've both just learned in front of an audience of hundreds. 

Her counterpart, Estih, is a young woman from East Java who just began teaching at Darul Hijrah Putri a month and a half ago.  She's quiet, perhaps because of her limited ability to communicate in English, but her dark eyes and thoughtful demeanor give one the impression that there lies a fascinating intellect beyond that facade.   

Together, we make our way to the soccer field, which has been converted into an open-air theater.  The students have erected an enormous stage, the finely painted backdrop representing the colorful interior of a building, possibly a mosque.  And, before the stage, perhaps a thousand on-lookers are making their way to their plastic chairs. 

Upon arrival, Emmy and I are ushered to the front of the audience and seated on a blue, patent-leather sofa between Pak Syahrudi and Pak Agus, the head of the boy's school.  The program begins with a formal introduction, two students in black suits welcoming us to the 22nd annual Class 6 performance.  Then two boys melodiously chant Quranic suras, invoking Allah. 

Next, Pak Syahrudi takes to the stage and delivers a long speech that I don't understand very well, but seems to be in the inspirational/Darul-Hijrah-pride vein.  The evening's performance is entitled Alabaster Luxurious.  Alabster Luxurious....As soon as I'm beginning to get a little disappointed with the lofty title and all of the bizarre images it conjures, a skit begins.

Four boys are drinking forties and starting a fight with some other boys in school uniforms carrying books.  The acting is overdramatic, as is the backing music.  The fight seems to be intensifying, and one of the drinking boys starts to perform some acrobatic breakdancing moves.  Then, all of a sudden, it happens.  Alabaster Luxurious comes to life.

First comes the breakdancing crew, doing handstands, headspins, the turtle, popping and locking.  Then the fireworks begin, brilliant showers of red and silver flames, shot over the audience from behind the stage.  Then the fireblowers, with the boys twirling sticks of fire coming shortly after them.  The scene is completed when a squadron of martial artists, decked out in red and white gees, joins the melee with their backflips, high kicks, and somersaults.  All of this is happening simultaneously, an extravaganza of movement, light, flames. 

Damn, I think to myself, my students are talented.  After the over-the-top first act, the evening's entertainment proceeds at a leisurely pace.  Nearly twenty acts in total, spread out over a five hour period.  In fact, there are so many scheduled performances that Emmy and I will be unable to sing our little song. 

There's the choir, singing traditional choir music; a bevy of skits that I barely understand, some in Indonesian, some in Arabic, some in Banjar; hip-hop dances to American R & B pop songs; displays of pencak silat (a traditional Indonesian martial art), karate, and tae kwan do; a performance of traditional banjar music; a lively pantomime involving ghosts and ghostbusters. 

When Estih, Emmy, and Puteri leave, I realize that it's already one o'clock in the morning.  After an hour more, I take off for home, just as the school's rock band begins their performance.  That night, the sounds of Guns 'n Roses' "Sweet Child of Mine," followed by "Smoke on the Water," accompany the usual chorus of insects as I fall asleep.

Not to be outdone by Putra, the girls' school stages their own performance a couple nights after Alabaster Luxurious.  Theirs is titled, Geranium Electra.  Again, Emmy and I are invited to sing, and this time it seems as if it actually might happen.  Again, we are ushered to the front row, seated beside the headmaster.  This time, however, the crowd is much smaller.  This is only the fourth annual performance at the girls' school.

As I make my way to the front of the crowd, I notice the hushed voices of teenage girls giggling and whispering "Mr. Daniel."  For the very first time in my life, I feel like a sort of heartthrob, a sensation at once embarrassing, enjoyable, and perplexing. 

Like the boys, the girls get their chance to play with fire too, their performance beginning with another fireworks display as a well-choreographed group of stylishly jilbabed students whirl flaming sticks over their heads.  Like the boys show, there are skits in a variety of languages, although the girls use more English in their performance.  There are songs, dance routines, comedy acts.  Yet the girls' performance is devoid of the slightly sexualized hip-hop dance that the boys performed, a style that emulates MTV videos of the Backstreet Boys and Beyonce.  The girls, fully clothed from ankles to crown, must be used to this, but to me, the double standard seems strange.  Perhaps this is just a result of the sexist dross of American culture hanging on the rafters of my consciousness like spiderwebs.  Perhaps the young ladies of puteri like it this way.  I have read many recent essays by Muslim women celebrating the veil for its power to protect women from objectification. 

On the other hand, Banjar culture is most certainly a patriarchy.  Puteri consistently seems looked down upon by some of putra's administrators and staff, there is definitely an insinuation that women are not as capable as men running through many comments I've heard from my colleagues.  Hmmm.....

Regardless of the indefinable delicacy of Banjar gender roles (roles that appear to be in a state of flux), Emmy and I did, eventually, sing "Munajat Cinta" along with another Indo hit, "Aaaa, OK."  Oya, one of the teachers at puteri, a relentlessly spunky, affable young woman, took us up to the stage and tried, in two minutes' time, to teach me the words and the tune to "Aaaa, OK," a song I had only heard once or twice.  As this lesson was going on, the music tech tried to help me tune his hopelessly out-of-tune guitar (the strings were nearly rusty with age), and students bombarded me with a slew of questions while taking their pictures with me.  Just one instance of the confusion that typified my first days at Darul Hijrah. 

So we sang the songs, our voices bouying the pleasant melody, as the guitar chords sank like a dingy in a squall.   Oya had to bail us out on "Aaaaa, OK," taking another mic from the side of the stage and picking up the lead.  Afterwards, slightly embarrassed and humbled, we accepted everyone's compliments with as much grace as we could muster. 

***

I wonder what my students and colleagues see when they look at me, especially now, before I've gotten the chance to get to know them and they me.  What do I symbolize?  Am I the "native speaker," reared from the same soil as Batman and Britney Spears, come to South Kalimantan to impart the magical ability to be successful in a global economy, a global culture? 

Surely, I am here to help with the English education, but I feel sorely incapable of living up to what it seems like my community expects from me.  Truth be told, I'm just a half-way intelligent college grad with an interest in education and Indonesia, who happened to have the chutzpah or ambition to apply for what seemed like an easy to get Fulbright.  But the more I hang out with Mi'raj and his friends, the more I feel like an expert.  And, by the virtue of nothing more than my birth, rearing, and education in America, I am a kind of expert in the area of American culture and language.  Successfully teaching that language and culture is another story.   

Regardless of my short-comings, my hosts are obviously delighted to foist their hospitality on me.  Pak Syahrudi has promised me the use of the school's van whenever other ETAs come to visit.  At break time, the teachers fill my plate with treats, constantly refilling my glass of tea.  "This is very good, fried cassava.  Now try this, fried tofu.  Here, have more, this is fried banana." 

Similarly, no one will let me walk anywhere, instead offering me rides on their motorbikes.  When I asked Mi'raj about this, he told me that if Pak Syahrudi saw me walking, he might get mad at Mi'raj for not taking care of me. 

***

Slowly but surely, I am finding my footing here.  In the afternoons I play basketball or badminton with some students and teachers, my absolute lack of skill apparently not a problem.  One day I went for a swim in the irrigation canal beside the house, surrounded by junior high students who swam beside me shouting "swimming, mister, swimming!"

It will still take some time to learn everyone's names, to become familiar with the different classes' interests and attention levels, to learn the local dialect, bahasa banjar.  But I am feeling more and more at home each day.

In the first week of class, my students expressed a great interest in learning American slang.  In fact, this was one of the only topics that got them active in class.  So I taught them the basics:  "what's up," "chillin'," and, instead of goodbye, "peace" or "peace out." 

Now, when I walk across campus, I am greeted by teenage boys in sarongs and batik shirts who smile broadly, flash the "peace" symbol with their middle and index fingers and shout "peace!" 

August 17, Indonesian Independence Day.  On a whim, I walk down a side street with some friends and we find a block party in full swing.  Children engaging in traditional Independence Day competitions, food vendors, drink vendors.  Everyone seems very happy to see us.  Amad, the neighborhood chief, I gather, brings out a wooden couch for us to sit on and watch the day's festivities.  He speaks with me about his desire to go to America, asks about the cost of living in New York City, asks about the ETA program.  He is a middle aged man in a blue Adidas cap, with dark, curious eyes, slurping on a glass of es cendol (palm sugar, coconut milk, and green rice flour blobs on ice).  As we talk, children crowd around us, asking our names, having their pictures taken with us, shaking our hands. 

The games include sack races, cardboard box races, and the kerupuk (cracker, usually made of shrimp paste and rice flour) eating game, in which a cracker, dangling from a string above the children's heads, must be consumed in a timely manner without the use of hands. 

After watching the games, we say goodbye to Amad and head over to a nearby school for the blind, where some of the ETAs have made friends.  There, in the large soccer field, we find a full-on barbecue.  Warungs have set up shop, grilling meats, serving noodles and bakso (meatballs); ice-cream vendors roam the crowd; children run about, flying kites; and a rock 'n roll band holds forth to a dancing audience in the hot mid-day sun. 

Here, I dance with a giggling middle-aged woman, have my picture taken with random people who speak a few words of English, and do the Chuck Berry with young Bandung rock 'n rollers, as the band, whose electric guitar player has obviously studied his Jimi Hendrix, plays originals, Indonesian hits, and the ubiquitous "Honky-Tonk Woman." 

By mid-afternoon, the grand-daddy of all Indonesian Independence Day games has begun.  Panjat pinang.  Take an Areca palm trunk, cover it in grease, dangle all sorts of goodies and prizes from a hoop that sits atop the palm trunk, and then send six to eight able-bodied young men up the pole to snag the rewards.  From what I could gather, there were two teams, one on each of the two poles.  As in a human triangle, the strongest of the team provide the ground support.  Their shoulders become the launching pad for the wirier, more graceful team members, who then provide the support for others.  Ultimately, there is a human chain of six to eight people, with the front runner anxiously grasping for the goods.  I say ultimately because this is an arduous game, to watch, and, I can only imagine, to participate in.  The crowd is patient.  They watch, chanting "let's go, let's go!" as their team nears the prize.  Yet, amid a great scrambling of limbs, the human chain slips back to earth. 

Forty minutes later, the victory seems anti-climactic.  Perhaps some games are just made for the joy of playing.  Or perhaps this game manifests some kind of oblique metaphor for Indonesian independence.  The collective struggle to the top, the ceaseless pitfalls and near-misses, the eventual victory. 

***

During our last week of orientation, AMINEF flew all of our counterparts (the teachers from our host schools who were to act as our guides) to Bandung in order to meet us, discuss team teaching, and engage in planning sessions. 

It was at the gala dinner in the Novotel ballroom, round tables with two sets of silverware, cloth napkins neatly folded into water glasses, giant orange ribbons tied to every other chair,  that I first met Mi'raj, my counterpart and colleague, the guy who I'd be living and teaching with for the next nine months. 

"I was so nervous, the past few days, to know how it would go to meet you," Mi'raj said.  We were talking over our fancy buffet dinner, trying to find common points of reference, topics that we could actually get into.  "I'm sorry, my English is not so good," he said.  He was obviously nervous, incessantly smiling, eyes shifting back and forth.  The same age as myself, Mi'raj was a lank man, as thin as a rice noodle, with wide, broadly set eyes and skin a shade darker than caramel.  When he crossed his legs, he effortlessly slipped his foot out of his sandal.  His smile was humble and reassuring, even though, at this point at least, it didn't seem to hold any real self-assurance. 

His command of the English language was actually pretty good, especially in comparison to some of the other counterparts, English teachers from around the archipelago, some of  whom could barely conduct a conversation in the language they taught.  Mi'raj, or Raj, as he told me to call him at the time (a decision he later reneged on..."Raj sounds too Indian"), talked about big plans at Darul Hijrah Putra, our school.  He mentioned me as a major motivator for the students to really practice their English.  He wondered if I could deliver a weekly address to the entire student body to bolster their enthusiasm.  He spoke of how lucky he was to be living with a "native speaker," a term I've heard over and over again since that day. 

After dinner he took at least a dozen pictures featuring myself, Emmy (the ETA assigned to Darul Hijrah Putri, the sister school of Darul Hijrah Putra), Estih (Emmy's counterpart), and himself in different configurations and poses. 

I felt good about working with him.  He was young, intelligent, goofy, a little on the sheltered side (he has spent twelve years of his life at Darul Hijrah, first as a student, then as a teacher), but ready to leave his comfort zone. 

The next night he came out with a group of ETAs to Sushi Tei, a trendy, upscale sushi chain in Bandung.  He had no idea what to order, having never eaten Japanese food before, so I ordered for him: a bowl of miso soup, seaweed salad, and assorted sashimi.  Waiting for our dinner, we discussed the appropriate uses of English swear words and how to detect sarcasm. 

But things took a turn for the worse when the food came.  Although he said he enjoyed it, I can tell he was a little hesitant about the miso soup.  And the sashimi, well, as it came out he told me that he doesn't eat fish, he's never eaten fish, he can't eat fish....at least he liked the seaweed salad, but that was all he ate.  I was a little concerned that a foodophile such as myself would be spending most of his time with someone who ate so little.  Later, after we had arrived in South Kalimantan, I discovered that Raj had a mean appetite, when he was in the right atmosphere.  "I don't eat a lot in Bandung, because it is too cold," he told me. 

That night we smoked shisha at a hookah bar, and Raj stayed quiet for most of the evening, listening, as he told me later, to the speech patterns of native speakers, trying to pick up on the slang-speckled, mumbly conversation.

Raj tried his first sip of beer that night.  He found the cold can of Bintang (Indonesia's #1 beer) in his mini-bar and, tempted by curiosity and, maybe, the influence of thirty or so beer-schwilling bulehs, tried it out.  "Oh," he said about the incident, "I took three sips and I couldn't sleep because of my stomach didn't feel good."
    
***

Yes, that last week in Bandung I did my fair share of partying.  Back in May, when I found out that I had been awarded the grant, I was a bit apprehensive about who the other ETAs may be, visions of "Fulbright Scholars" comparing their universities' crew teams and the celebrity status of their lecturers playing in my mind.  But, as it turns out, we had a stellar group, all intelligent, funny, fun-loving folks without a trace of pretension.  And together, before departing to our far-flung school sites, we had some fun.

Bandung has a lot to offer in the way of nightlife.  On a number of occasions we rode ojeks (motorcycle taxis) out into the hills on the outskirts of the city, to a bar called Cloud 9.  The bar was an open-air wooden structure built into the side of a mountain overlooking Bandung's bright city lights, popular with expats and hip, well-to-do Indonesians.  The beer was cheap, the DJ obliging, and the nights long.

Jalan Braga, a street closer to the center of Bandung, offered a strip of bars and clubs, most of them featuring live music.  At Roempoet, one of such bars, I heard a cover band perform Kelis' pop hit, "My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard."  Not an important detail in itself, but their take on the song was so dark, depraved, and deranged that I find it worth mentioning.  It was like having a waking nightmare to 2003's top 40 radio hits. 

My favorite of the Bandung watering holes was the parking lot of the Circle K convenience store across the street from Novotel.  Apparently, drinking in public is not a problem in Bandung.  Late at night we would join the youthful locals who hung out there, drinking beer, whiskey, or wine, and indulging in the occasional durian.  The guys who worked the counter listened to loud American ska and punk music, it was open all night, the cover charge was just right, it had open-air seating options, and was right across the street from our hotel.  What more could one want in a pub?   

***


It was sad to say goodbye to the other ETAs on the morning of our departure, but I was definitely ready to get to Darul Hijrah and get settled, to leave the limbo of the Novotel for whatever awaited me in Borneo. 

As our flight from Jakarta began its descent to the Banjarmasin airport, I looked out the window at the flat earth of South Kalimantan.  The land bore the scars of a forrest that had been victimized by the industry and agriculture of modern human life.  There were dark green patches of trees, lighter green meadows, plantations, and enormous, mud-brown rivers like huge snakes that had lain down among the greenery to die. 

Exiting the plane, I noticed the enormity of the sky, a feature of a landscape quite foreign to me.  The sky was clouded, it was raining, and the humidity was so thick that I felt I was wading through the air.  But, in stark contrast to Bandung and Jakarta, there was no smog.  And, I thought with an anxious smile, this was my new home.  

Orientation began at eight in the morning with Indonesian language class.  As Indonesia is one of the world's most linguistically diverse nations (the official count is around 670, second only to Papua New Guinea), the standardized national language of Indonesia is a relatively new innovation, based primarily on a Sumatran dialect very similar to Malay, although it contains loan words from many languages and bears a resemblance to most of Indonesia's regional dialects.  Luckily, it is a remarkably simple language to learn.

 

There are no verb tenses, no conjugations.  To make a noun plural, just say it twice.  Past and future tense are demarcated by context. Saying "before," "yesterday," "after," or "tomorrow" is quite enough to make oneself understood, and it is a joy to speak and listen to due to its percussive, rolling cadence.

 

My language teacher, Ibu Lily, was a sprightly woman with an impeccably cute Mary Tyler-Moore hairdo.  She was a good teacher, and, like most Indonesians I've met so far, loved music and singing, teaching us children's songs about brushing one's teeth in the morning as well as contemporary Indopop songs, songs that since first learning them, I've heard nearly everyday. 

 

The afternoons were spent in teacher training with Ibu Itje, a kindly woman with a broad nose and large, almost purple eyes.  She is an educational consultant, frequently hired by the Indonesian Ministry of Education to conduct research and make reports on the state of Indonesian education.  The class was long, usually four hours a day, but it dutifully served its purpose, especially as most of us had never before taught a high school class.  We were told that English teaching in Indonesia was done almost entirely by rote, that the teachers often barely knew how to speak the language, focusing on grammatical constructions instead of conversation.  We were told that the students nearly always sat in rows, chatting or sleeping or sending text messages for most of class.  Our job is to engage the students, we were told, to give them an opportunity to actually use the language, to apply the techniques of our educational system to the Indonesian classroom.  We were told that despite our lack of experience in teaching, we had plenty of experience in learning, and therefore, in the techniques that engendered productive, enjoyable learning.  

 

We practiced simple language activities, wrote lesson plans, discussed.  But we knew that in each of our schools, we would encounter a different situation, that we would need to tailor our lessons to the interests and abilities of our students.  The class was decent practice, but nothing would truly prepare us for teaching in our schools but patience, creativity, and attention to the students' needs. 

 

 

***

 

As a city, Bandung seems rather hip.  The air is relatively cool, there are buskers on every street corner playing Indopop songs on ukeleles and withered guitars for thousand rupiah notes and loose change.  Warungs (street-food stalls) line the streets, each with a different specialty, most of which are delicious and incomprehensibly cheap for someone used to Western prices. 

 

Everywhere, one sees young people dressed in stylish black hoodies and jeans, their t-shirts bearing the names of American punk and hardcore bands, their hair styled into faux-hawks, mullet faux-hawks and other interpretations of Euro-trash and punk looks.  In this city, several people were trampled to death at a grindcore show last year.  And, while I haven't yet had the chance to experience this for myself, Bandung is reputed for its art and music scene.  It played host to Helarfest, an arts festival with a "creative urbanism" theme that showcased local talent in both traditional and contemporary contexts.

 

It has also been a center of political and social radicalism through the years.  Students at the Bandung Institute of Technology, including Soekarno, the ultimate icon of Indonesian nationalist ideology, helped to form the Indonesian Nationalist Party under Dutch rule in the late 1920's, and this tradition has continued among Bandung's youth to the present day.  

 

In contrast to this, perhaps minority, element of counterculturalism, Bandung is renowned for its many malls, outlet stores, chic coffee shops restaurants, and hotels.  At one point in time, its glamor earned it the nickname "Paris van Java."  On the weekend many Jakartans come here to enjoy the breeze and the shoppping.  And yes, the malls are epic and crowded.  The stores are mostly the same old international standards:  Starbucks, Adidas, The Gap.  KFC is surprisingly omnipresent here. 

 

A strip of Jalan Cihampelas, known as "Jeans Street," presents an alternative to the malls.  Here, giant plaster sculptures of The Terminator, Dragon Ball-Z characters, the Marlboro Man, Batman, Aladdin, and other iconic heroes, stand guard over a plethora of stores specializing in blue jeans and brand name shirts and sweaters. 

 

***

 

In this city, the Rolling Stones are huge.  Their classic tongue logo can be seen on storefronts, decorating becaks (bicycle rickshaws), t-shirts, jackets, stickers, buttons, motorbikes. 

 

One night, I joined some friends for drinks at a chic bar called Score, located right beside the clean, ultramodern CiWalk mall.  At Score, we found an increasingly drunk crowd of mostly men, many of whom were decked out in Rolling Stones shirts and hats.  Some of them dressed in retro snakeskin, denim jackets, broad-brimmed floppy hats.  As the band took the stage, I realized that this was no coincidence.  They instantly launched into a rollicking version of "Jumping Jack Flash," as the crowd rushed to the dancefloor, shouting along with the lyrics, strutting and frolicking as if they had studied DVDs of Mick Jagger performances. 

 

And there was no irony in this.  The band legitimately rocked, better than any Stones cover band I've seen in the states.  The guitar player smoked incessantly, hunched over in a dead-on Keith Richards stance, his un-ashed cigarette perpetually hanging from the corner of his mouth.  They played "Honky-Tonk Woman," "Wild Horses," "Satisfaction." 

 

"May the Rolling Stones be in your heart," the lead singer said at one point, wishing a happy birthday to someone in the audience.

 

***

 

One afternoon after class, the Fulbright crew was invited to a karaoke party held by the Novotel staff in the ballroom downstairs.  Despite my general indifference to karaoke, I went along with some friends to see what the hub-bub was about.  In the ballroom, it was like Indonesian Karaoke Idol.  One after another, young men and women performed, music videos of their karaoke choice playing on giant screens at the front and back of the room.  Mostly Indonesian pop songs, but a couple did croon "A Whole New World" from Disney's Aladdin as two young men dressed in skimpy pink cupid costumes shot plush pink heart arrows at each other, to the audience's audible amusement. 

 

Erin asked if she could sing a song, but they said they didn't have much American music.  Would we like to play a song using the full-band's worth of instruments on the stage? 

 

Would we like to play a song using the instruments on the stage?  I immediately thought of the prospects.  In our group we had musical talent to spare.  Immediately I rushed to find Samson, a hotshot punk drummer, Eric, who plays mostly folk guitar, Chris, a music major who can play most any instrument.

 

After a few minutes of trying to find a song that we all knew, we decided to keep it simple and unabashedly American:  Woody Guthrie's "Union Maid." 

 

So, the buleh rock band took to the stage and proceeded to ramble through a speedy, mosh-pit inducing "Union Maid."  The crowd, encouraged by Samson's expert rock 'n roll abilities, skanked and moshed.  A young man in army fatigues stood on the stage, protecting Erin from the rowdy crowd of men roiling on the dancefloor.  We were even asked for an encore, "Rolling in My Sweet Baby's Arms," played loud and fast, just the way rock and roll is supposed to be played. 

 

***     

 

It would be silly and most likely inaccurate to say that Bandung is this or Bandung is that.  I know nothing of Bandung.  These are just shallow impressions, superficial renderings of my first days in Indonesia, days giddy with foreignness.  Yet in the writing, my voice betrays a dubious authority.  Perhaps this is the only way to write about a new place, new people, new sensations.  The only alternative would be to write pages of questions.  How presumptuous the travel writer is, to insinuate any real insight into experiences that merely graze his skin.   

 

***

 

If a culture can be at all interpreted through its physical manifestations, its "things," then it is important to look at the omnipresent things of Bandung:

 

Cigarettes.  Usually tobacco mixed with cloves, Indonesian brands such as Djarum and Dji Sam Soe and Sampoerna, although Marlboros are popular as well.  They even market a Marlboro clove cigarette here.  No-smoking sections in most public places are rare.  Consequently, clouds of sweetly perfumed smoke are everywhere.

 

Motorbikes.  This is the way to get around, in the cities and the countryside.  Traffic in Bandung seems a never-ending flow of motorbikes darting through a maze of cars, trucks, mini-vans.  As there are very few traffic lights, crossing the street is always an interesting endeavor. 

 

SMS, or text messaging as we call it in the States.  This seems to be the most popular form of communication.  It is done on the street, in the home, while eating, while driving a motorbike, during meetings and in class.  Some people are quite skilled at this, their thumbs moving nimbly over the phone's buttons like a dexydrine-fed fly picking at the remains of a plate of rice. 

 

Smoke.  Whether from cigarettes, roasting meat at a warung, or burning garbage on the side of the road.  At first I was confused by the prevalence of flaming piles of newspaper and fruit peels, but apparently this is the common method for getting rid of refuse.  Sometimes the smell is unbearable, while at other times it is nearly pleasant, similar to sage or marijuana. 

 

***

 

I was told many times that Bandung is the capital of Sundanese culture.  Like most human beings, Sundanese folks are proud of their culture and its traditions.  Random strangers met at warungs and bars told me about certain Sundanese dishes I should try, and Deden, a middle-aged man with a leathery face, impassive eyes, and a tight black leather jacket, attempted to teach me a wealth of Sundanese language one evening.  I happened to be eating at a warung he frequented, so he sat down beside me, and began the usual litany of questions.

 

"Where are you from?"  "What are you doing in Indonesia?"  "Do you like Indonesia?"  "Are you married?"  "Where are you sleeping in Bandung?"  These questions are standard operating procedure, asked by taxi drivers, acquaintances, and, as in this case, perfect strangers.  They are usually asked with a mixture of noseyness, curiosity, and genuine interest.  It is also customary to be asked, on a totally random basis, to pose for a photograph with a stranger. 

 

Deden insisted on speaking to me in Sundanese, although I told him I didn't know any, just a little Indonesian language.  This seemed unacceptable to him, so he stoically and methodically inscribed common Sundanese phrases into my notebook and helped me practice the pronunciation. 

 

When I left, he gave me his address and phone number and asked me for my mine.  This is also very common, like saying goodbye or waving.  According to previous ETAs, the sharing of  phone numbers is a regular occurance.  And, apparently, people call.  They recommended that I not give my number out at random unless I wanted a plethora of calls beseeching me to help practice English or just to say hello.  I declined Deden's request, unsure of what emotion I felt at the time, or what emotion was expected of me from this man, with his demeanor of statuesque friendliness.

 

***

 

On one of our free days, a warm Sunday afternoon, Rudi (the uncle of the girlfriend of fellow ETA and friend, John) brought a group of us to Saung Angklung Udjo, a place that holds traditional Sundanese cultural performances. 

 

At the entrance to the performance space, a giant Javanese fruit bat hung upside down in a cage.  It stretched its large wings, whose consistency were somewhere between leather and rubber, and rubbed its belly against the mesh fence of its cage, climbing up and down the fence with its irrelevant claws. 

 

Rudi got us tickets for the Indonesian price, nearly half the buleh price, and we entered the gift shop/cafeteria adjacent to the ampitheater where the performance was to be held.  With the price of admission, we were entitled to one free drink, and I chose bandrek, a specialty of the Bandung region.

 

Bandrek is the closest thing to heaven in a glass I've yet tried.  Very similar to Indian chai masala, it is a brew of black tea, cloves, ginger, chilis, cardamom, and black pepper, usually served with red palm sugar or sweetened condensed milk and chunks of chewy young coconut.  It is a drink that instantly warms.  One can feel the spice massage all the way down the throat and into the stomach.  Like a great work of art, it is the kind of beverage that demands energy from all of one's being in order to be fully appreciated.

 

So I took my bandrek to a seat in the ampitheater near the stage.  A gamelan orchestra wove its subtle percussive hypnosis over the chatty crowd, as people found their way to their seats.  The program began with a performance of wayang golek, a wooden puppet show with gamelan accompaniment.  A traditional wayang golek performance can last as long as seven or eight hours, but the brief, fifteen minute demonstration we saw was mesmerizing in itself.  A skilled puppeteer can truly make his characters come alive.  Subtle movements of the arms, the head, the torso.  The performance reminded me of a Punch and Judy show, lots of slapstick in a royal court motif.  The narrative, interestingly enough, seemed to be delivered by the dynamics and circular melodies of the gamelan.

 

The rest of the performance was focused around the children of the angklung.  The angklung is a Sundanese tuned bamboo percussion instrument.  And the children are the performers of Saung Angklung Udjo, which also functions as a boarding school for local kids from rough backgrounds, providing the usual classes (language, math, etc.) plus training in Sundanese performing arts:  the martial art pencak silat, traditional dances, and, of course, angklung performance.

 

The younger children played single note angklungs in a variety of contexts, while the older kids played giant anklungs with any notes.  They performed traditional songs from around the archipelago, Sundanese songs, the "do-re-mi" song from The Sound of Music, Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up."  And the kids were genuinely adorable in their shiny, silken garb, shaking their angklungs for all they're worth, swaying to and fro.   

 

Another part of the performance involved handing out single-note angklungs to the entire audience and leading us in a big group performance.  The mission of Saung Angklung Udjo is to "promote peace in the world through angklung art performance."  And, as we tocked our bamboo angklungs in vibrato patterns, leveled to the status of wide-eyed, giggly children, this mission didn't seem too unrealistic to me.  Imagine the leaders of the world, with their fancy suits and their grimaces, their bullshit handshakes and pretensions, sitting in a circle with a bunch of angklungs, following the simple directions of jubilant children in order to create a melody that is only possible using each of the differently tuned instruments.   "If the players play the instrument harmoniously," says the playbill of the afternoon's performance, "the beautiful melody of a song can be resulted...it is believed that everyone can play it melodiously."

In Bandung, AMINEF (the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation) put us up at the Novotel.  Thirty-five English Teaching Assistants in total, all recent college graduates or grad school students from across the U.S.  Upon first arriving at the hotel, after a lengthy nap over the evening busride from the Jakarta airport, I was dumbstruck by the plushness of our accomadations.  A wall of astro-turf flanked one side of the lobby's restaurant (po-mo interior design, check), a large but shallow swimming pool lay in the cool verandah behind the hotel, the smell of synthetic flowers was constantly refreshed by air-sanitizers that expelled a puff of chemy scent every twenty minutes or so. 

Moreover, we each had our own room, complete with queen-size bed, central air, 24-hour room service, overpriced mini-bar (is there another kind?), free high-speed internet, daily laundry service, and for those of us lucky enough to be placed on the eleventh floor, a view of the terra cotta roofs and endless traffic, and, in the distance, the rolling volcanic hills that became visible only when the curtain of smog rose at dawn and some lucky dusks.  It was as if I had awoken only to enter into another dream, stranger than the last. 

We were housed in this dream for three weeks, as we endured eight-hour days of orientation classes in the Unamuno-Lautze room of the Novotel, itching to explore the city or take a swim or nap.  It was a surreal time, spending our days in the perfumed lap of luxury (free shoe-shines!  fancy massages!  a room and a bed bigger than any I'd experienced before!) and our nights out in the cool city air, a transitory phase, the chrysalis of our Indonesian experience, one foot in the comforts of convenience, another in the flux and confusion of Indonesian city life. 

Each morning, we dined on an extravagant buffet of Indonesian and Western staples.  Every time I neared a door, a member of the hotel's incredible staff ensured that it was open before I even attempted to do it myself.  While the luxury of the Novotel was a bit overbearing, it was damn pleasant.  And it provided me with the opportunity to make good friends with other ETA's, to relax poolside playing guitar and singing with friends or take a hedonistic swim in the cool pool waters.  It allowed me to practice bahasa Indonesia with the friendly hotel staff, who, in turn, got a chance to practice their English.  We must have been quite the spectacle for them, thirty-five bulehs (Indonesian for "gringo" or foreigner) trying to speak Indonesian, asking about places to go for fun, calling up six taxis at a time to take us to a common destination.

***

On the first day of orientation, I met the AMINEF staff.  The cool, even-minded Rizma, the bespectacled, motherly Ita, the program director Mike McCoy (who proudly told us that if we did well our name may show up on, jeepers!, Condoleeza Rice's desk), and the infamous Nelly Paliama, who I had been in touch with through e-mail since I was awarded the grant in early May.

At our first meeting, we were asked for our religion, a piece of information necessary to complete the new extended-stay-visa paperwork.  Concerned with having an official document stating that I was Jewish in a Muslim nation that may or may not have the proper media outlets to delve into the complexities of Jewish-Muslim relations, I asked Nelly whether I should give my true religious affiliation or go with something else.  Apparently, Judaism isn't even an option as far as the Indonesian beauracracy is concerned.  Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Hinduism.  Atheism and agnosticism are just plain silly or ignorant, a notion emphasized by the fact that one of the Indonesian state's five principles is the belief in God.  But should I tell people that I'm Jewish, or is that taboo, I asked her.

"Well, many people here usually don't know the difference between Judaism and Zionism," she said, giving me an incongruously warm smile.  Ok...  "I knew you were Jewish," she added, "because you're always so nervous...Jews and Catholics are always very nervous.  All that guilt," she said, still innocently beaming.

Alright, so I've got some blog updating jetlag.  Much has happened in the past three month, so much that i haven't really gotten the chance to write much of it down yet.  So for the next couple days or weeks, I will slowly but surely catch up on all that's gone down, my impressions and recollections and approximations of experiences thus far in Indonesia........

I woke as Qatar Air flight number 683 began its initial descent into Soekarno-Hatta airport in Jakarta.  Coming down through a thick blanket of cloud (or smog), the earth became visible.  From the sky, verdant fields of rice, tall grass, and trees.  Yet broad plumes of smoke rose from all around, apparently some kind of farming technique.  My first glimpse of Indonesia.  

Outside of the airport, the sky was a dark presence that seemed to press against the ether, seemed to threaten the earth with its weight.  Of course, it was humid.  By six p.m., the sky was gone, full darkness had descended.  I slept nearly all of the bus ride to Bandung, where we were to stay for the coming weeks' orientation.  A long traffic-ridden ride.  I was told later that many Jakartans head to Bandung for the weekend, as it is a prime getaway due to the coolness of its location in the hills and its abundance of shopping malls and outlet stores.  

Varieties of palm trees, with their broad, fan-shaped leaves, lined the side of the road.  Motorbikes threaded their way through the cars, busses, mini-vans.  

Exhausted, I find myself sitting in a plush lounge chair in Terminal 3 of Singapore's Changi Airport, talking with my fellow English Teaching Assistants.  Terminal 3 was opened in January of this year and it shows.  Brand new Singapore airport.  One finds oneself saying things like "do those trees really need such thorough cleaning?"  They are being scrubbed immaculate.  We are one degree north of the equator.  In the outdoor smoking lounge, giant grasshoppers perch on huge green leaves.  That's just the kind of place this is.  Free internet terminals,  hyper-modern light fixtures, as many boutiques as an average American city.  But, after a sleepless night on the town, I finally got my noodles.  At the airport.  Not what I expected, but not bad.  Laksa, mediocre rice noodles, shrimp, fish cakes, and mung bean sprouts swimming in a vibrant red coconut milk broth flaked with chilis.  Not what I expected but not bad.  If there's anything better than food, it's spending a night and a morning in the company of wonderful people in SouthEast Asia's wealthiest island-city-nation.  Especially after an interminably long two days spent entirely within the confines of airports and airplanes.

The trip began at JFK.  Uneventful.  Terminal 7 was much smaller and quieter than others I had travelled through at JFK.  The flight to Dulles was a little turbulent but entirely without incident.  I found myself far more calm than I thought reasonable.  After all, wasn't I embarking on a long journey to a foreign land?  Most everyone on the plane had the look of passengers, traveling for some practical, pedestrian purpose.  Nothing like the excitement that permeated the stale air on the thirteen hour flight from Dulles to Tokyo.  

This flight, the longest thus far in my life, was full of nervous excitement.  I sat next to Kevin, another Fulbright ETA who had been living in Brooklyn and teaching at a special ed school.  We began the flight in conversation.  He would be teaching at Pontianak, near the coast of West Kalimantan.  I would be teaching in Martapura in South Kalimantan.  We wondered whether we would spend any time in Jakarta upon arrival in Indonesia or just head straight to Bandung to begin our orientation.  Kalimantan!  Bandung!  They were only words to us then, names that we tried to fill with images gleaned from guidebooks and travel websites.  They were words, entirely empty of any real content, words we would come to know, words we would inhabit in due time.

As the flight progressed, time seemed to bend.  We flew north into Canada and then West to the Bering Strait where we headed south for Japan.  The sun shone out the window all the way, although the flight attendants immediately attempted a simulation of Japanese time by turning off the lights and shutting all of the windows so the cabin was lit only by the dim glow of overhead lights and the tiny tv screens that are built into the backs of the chairs.  The time passed surprisingly well for such an epic flight.  I read, talked with Kevin, stretched my legs on occasion, and watched Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, which turned out to be the perfect entertainment for a long flight, evoking that warm Seussian feeling.  As I drifted between nearly inseperable states of waking and sleeping, I watched the progress of our flight on the TV screen's map.  Our airplane, which on the scale of the map seemed at least three times the size of Singapore, made its way into the northern waters of the Pacific, leaving a bright red line in its wake.  It is impossible to fathom the distance of such a trip.  The oversized, digitized airplane on the screen would move a few inches every hour, its nose slowly encroaching on Tokyo.  

We had expected Tokyo-Narita airport to be a bustling hub of big city life, reminiscent of JFK or Newark, but we were pleasantly surprised at what we found.  It was a rather quiet place, the men and women at the security checkpoints dressed in bright red fifties-kitsch flight attendant getups, smiling and almost comically polite.  The toilets in the men's room were equipped with electronic bidets.  A woman stood outside of the duty free store doling out samples of Johnny Walker Blue Label.  A pleasant place for a two-hour layover.

From Tokyo we flew to Singapore, where we were to spend the night en route to Jakarta.  Slept nearly all of the seven hours.  Upon arrival in Singapore, it took us some time to find Casey, our Singaporean "attache."  His role was to get all of us jetlagged ETAs from the airport to our hotel and back again the next morning, but he did this with impeccable style and comic timing.  Eventually, we assembled ourselves and, around 1:30 in the morning took off for our hotel, the Singapore Carlton.

All I had heard about Singapore was that it was ultra-modern and that the food was fantastic.  Excited by the prospect of the food (far more than the modernity), I had plans to hit the town, despite my jetlag.  But first, we checked into the hotel, probably the ritziest place I've ever spent the night.  The hotel restaurant, Cafe Vic, was advertising a multi-course meal featuring the in-season durian fruit.  Durian Heaven they called it.  Featuring a "traditional durian mousse cake" and a "whole peeled durian."  In the lobby, an enormous plaster replica of a durian, looking like a four-foot tall extra-terrestrial football, stood guard by Cafe Vic.  

Casey told us that there were some bars that would be open until four if we cared for a drink before bed.  In light of this information, twenty or so of us ETAs headed in the direction Casey pointed out to us.  

The first thing that strikes one about Singapore is its cleanliness.  The dark streets were lined with high society shopping options (keep in mind this is the part of time in which the Singapore Carlton resides) and name-brand eateries.  Italian, Turkish, Indian.....food of all sorts was advertised everywhere, but it was three in the morning by now and nothing was open.  We found our way to a giant mall by the Singapore River, replete with swank bars (all of which were closing) and a bevy of upscale restaurants.  The mall looked a bit like a giant insect birthed from the same soil as the monster durian.  The ceilings were a bubbly translucent plastic.  Every storefront was shining, shimmering, and splendid.  It certainly captured the sensation of a late-night Asian Disneyland.  

The convenient thing about Singapore is that nearly everyone speaks English.  After asking a few people where we could find somewhere that would be open, we were told to cross the river and look for an Indian pub with food and music that's open until 6 in the morning.  

3:30 AM.  Most of our group has gone back to the hotel, exhausted after a long travel.  It's difficult to discern exactly how long a travel given the jetlag, the time differences, the plethora of flights.  There are seven of us left and we walk along the paths beside the river looking for this Indian pub or anywhere that's open.  The streets are impeccably clean, save for some crickets that skitter over the pavement.  We give up on finding an open pub and buy some drinks at 7-11.  The Indian women behind the counter assure us that it's ok to drink openly on the benches by the river.  We buy bombers of Tiger beer (Singapore's best) and bottles of Kool T, iced green tea mixed with scotch, apparently marketed by the makers of Kool cigarettes.   

4:30 AM.  We drink the surprisingly refreshing Kool T beside the river and share our excitement about the months to come.  Our teaching locations, ideas for lesson plans, our individual histories.  The excited late-night chatter of young Americans catching a buzz in the cool night air.  Almost as if we were home.   

5:00 AM.  Walking back to the hotel, we notice a fire burning in the middle of the street.  A group of young Chinese men and women, dressed in hipster black are throwing handfuls of paper into the blaze.  After talking with them for moment, we find that it is a Chinese holiday, explained as being similar to Halloween.  The paper is brightly colored rice paper, patterned with ornate designs of hands and circles.  The paper is the symbolic embodiment of ghost spirits, and they give some to us to burn, to release the ghosts or to ward off ghosts in the next year.  It is very lucky to burn this paper, they tell us.  We toss handfuls into the fire, watching the thin sheets catch and writhe.  

6:00AM.  We find the Indian pub.  Women in long, bright dresses are dancing on the stage to what sounds like Bollywood techno.  The audience lounges on couches, sipping Heinekens, laughing, making eyes at the dancers.  For some reason I decide to buy a beer, which turns out to be the most expensive beer I've ever purchased.  Ten dollars for a Heineken.  huh.  Outside, the sun is rising.  We walk back to the hotel, unsure of the next move.  To sleep or to push on, get as much out of our 14 hour stay in this island-city-nation as possible.  Back at the hotel, breakfast has begun, and it is a buffet of epic proportions.  Dim sum, a variety of breads, chunks of fresh papaya, pineapple, watermelon, cucumber, some curries, pancakes, granola, yogurt, hard-boiled duck eggs, and gleaming dark preserved duck eggs to name but a few of the delicacies.  We feast.  

7:30 AM.  The hotel pool has opened for the day, and we go for an outdoor swim to awaken the senses.  The sounds of morning traffic buzz and roar around us.  The water is pleasantly cool as the sun crawls higher and the humidity grows.  

9:00 AM.  Outside, Singapore is buzzing.  Literally.  Dressed in neon orange body-suits, complete with face masks, city employees are weed-wacking the grass on the side of the road.  As if the weed-wackers are radioactive.  Stores and restaurants are beginning to open.  In the open daylight, Singapore's inconsistent assemblage of architectural styles becomes apparent.  There are hyper modern high-rises, smaller terra-cotta roofed buildings, gorgeous colonial hotels.  We are making our way to Chinatown, trying to find a temple or a cup of coffee, anything besides a shopping center.  Despite my sated hunger, I am still thinking of fried noodles.  Or noodle-soup.  Salty noodles in a thick curry broth or with soy sauce and plenty of chilis.  Maybe some seafood?  Apparentally, I am the only one with such notions and our time is limited.  We decide on the temple, taking a left into a Chinatown market and another left onto Temple street.

10:00 AM.  The Sri Mariamman Temple is the oldest HIndu temple in Singapore.  And it is majestic.  Intricate plaster sculptures adorn the doorway and are found throughout the temple, in shrines, covering the rooftop with their images of Gods and cows and ornamental flowers.  Spellbound by the sound of prayer and soothing chants, we remove our shoes and enter the temple complex.  Inside, worshippers bow in prayer, sit calmly on the temple floor, walk from shrine to shrine paying their respects.  Holy men place rings of flowers beside the idols.  Young children run about, playing tag, laughing.  Offerings are arranged, silver platters filled with yellow flowers, bananas, and mangos.  The constant motion of people in the temple mixes with the sound of prayer, crafting a soothing rhythm.  We are mostly ignored by the faithful, but some greet us with kindly smiles.  Why this gorgeous Hindu temple is in Chinatown is anyone's guess.        

11:00 AM.  Back at my room in the hotel, the Singapore skyline is dominated by the Singapore Flyer, the world's largest "giant observation wheel," an absurdly exaggerated ferris wheel that takes thirty minutes to complete a revolution.  After one sleepless night, I have no clue what to make of this city.  It is obviously a "Westernized" place, boasting over fifty Starbucks', yet it is still a place where ghosts are burnt on street corners as prayers are quietly spoken.  

12:00 PM.  On the bus to the airport, Casey cracks joke after joke.  "Your flight is Qater Air number 683.  That'll be row 5, row 5, not high 5, heh, yes."  Fires burn on street corners as more colorful paper is tossed in.  

2:00 PM.  And now we wait for our flight to Jakarta.  The last leg of the trip before we take a bus to Bandung and begin orientation.  Strange night in Singapore.  And all I have to show for it is this pilfered piece of Chinese ghost paper.