Friday, February 2, 2007

Rain and taxis



From Feb 1

Well I left LIPI to go to the Department of Police folks to get my "travelling papers." It took 30 mins by taxi and then I had to wander around the gigantic building for 15 minutes to find the place, but they processed the papers, EXCEPT that I didn't have head shots of myself on a red background. So later today or tomorrow morning I'll get those made, return to the Dept of Police to get my travelling papers, then back to LIPI for the final letter thing. Research visas take a lot of running around, though compared to what the US government makes visitors go through, it's not a big deal. The fact that it was drizzling rain all day didn't help, and the little store on the bottom floor of the LIPI building was "out of umbrellas."

So I left the Dept of Police for the long (one hour plus) taxi ride in heavy traffic to the house of my dear friend Chris Green, where I'm staying tonight, and where Bill has stayed with me on more than one occasion I think. I was exhausted after more than a day of travel and all the paperwork, but feel into chatting with the taxi driver, who turned out was from the south coast of Java and a member of the Sundanese ethnic group. We fell into a great conversation where I told him that I'd heard about the myths of the "Queen of the Southern Ocean" (Ratu Kidul) in that area, and he told me contempory stories about how she is real. He told a great story about a kyai (Muslim cleric) from the nearby city of Bandung who married a woman in the taxi driver's village, just 20 miles from the ocean. He went around telling people that believing in the Queen was against Islam. Then one day his only son was out in the forest with some friends, and he went into the river and disappeared - no body, no clothes, nothing. Then the Queen of the Southern Ocean appeared to the kyai and said that as a punishment for not believing in her, she had "borrowed" the kyai's son and he was living with her (for hundreds of years there have been stories about the Queen luring men into the ocean to be her consort). Once a year, the son returns to the kyai and the kyai's wife, but as a kind of intangible ghost; he says that he's happy where he is, he likes it there, but that he will return to the normal world someday.

After that we started talking about language and he started teaching me some Sundanese - how to count to five, how to say "where are you going?", and so on. He enjoyed being the teacher. We talked about my life in America a bit, that I'm a teacher and such, but he was more interested in telling me about his life than in learning about America, and I'm happy to listen (it's sorta my job). I never fail to be impressed by the amazing people I meet in Indonesia driving taxis!

Now I've had a lovely shower and lunch courtesy of Chris's servants, and I'm relaxing and waiting for Chris to return from Spiritia, the NGO with which he works that is a leading force in Jakarta and all of Indonesia for the care and human rights of people with AIDS. An amazing group.

So the hardest part of the trip is over, and it wasn't that hard! It was both fun and a relief to switch from speaking English to speaking Indonesian so easily: I'm so glad to be at the stage where it's not tiring or overly difficult.

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