It seems there was no earthquake, just rising damp caused by this years exceptional monsoon. You have had snow, we have had rain. Today we were supposed to be picked up at seven to go to a graduation ceremony but the car did not arrive and we kept receiving messages giving us a later time. Finally Wani turned up at about ten thirty, the show officially closed at eleven, in tears and making profuse apologies but by then no one wanted to go as we had missed the official bit we were supposed to attend. A wasted morning but I pressed on with my assignment - journal review - and have almost completed it, though I think I could go on making improvements for ever. Later in the afternoon Bonita, our landlady, arrived with workers and pembantu and the floor tiles were taken up filed down and replaced. I left to get a meal and use the internet but by the time I get back the floor should be back to normal. As we are not going to Ponorogo (not Ponogorro as I have been calling it) I can have a lie in and apart from a couple of hours to finish the assignment, a lazy day. Assuming there are no more rats, earthquakes or other incidents. Hurrah!
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Today started early as a rather dull form filling and work day. I have a 1500 word review of two papers relating to my study topic to write.I cannot write directly in Indonesian so had to read the material and draft it in English. I was prepared to spend the day locked in my room writing and that was case until about eleven o'clock when excited cries made me rush out into the living room. The girls, Maddy, Lisa and Benita (who is staying until she moves into her kos.) had discovered the skink sleeping on the net curtain. I dislodged it but it moved too quickly to be caught safely and soon fled out of the open door into the garden.
All was quiet and the girls went out to a gym they have discovered within walking distance of the house. I was made aware of their return by more strange cries outside my door. This time it was the floor. A line of tiles had raised itself a few centimeters and stretched from the middle of the room to the doors into the garden. It was as though the ground has shifted very slightly, though I heard and felt nothing while I worked in my room. The line of tiles followed the very course the skink had taken and the rat was later to take. The rat was the third major incident of the day. Even louder cries, cries that verged on screams, brought me once again rushing out of my room to find a rat in the kitchen. It was an average size - not a jumbo rat - and rather attractive rat but it had to be chased out into the garden. A rat in the kitchen is, when it comes down to it, a rat in the kitchen, no matter how friendly it looks. Bonita -not to be confused with Benita - our landlady was away for the weekend when I called her about the earthquake or whatever moved our floor, however her cousin came over to check the damage and workmen will be around to replace the tiles sometime soon. After having slaved away on my review all day and being prepared to stay up most of the night in order to finish it before our trip to Ponogorro, I was casually told the trip was off as it was a longer journey than anticipated and there was not time to make it. Actually I am glad I was not told earlier as I would not have completed the English draft and now it is out of the way and I can concentrate on translation. I cannot help thinking that the girls attempt at exercise by performing something called 'lunges' is at the root of it. The very name 'lunges' suggests something that could cause floors to shift and houses to collapse. It may also arise from their addiction to The L Word and the fact that after watching for three solid days they have all decided to become lesbians. I suspect but as yet I have no proof. I can see a tenuous connection between 'lunges' and lesbianism but cannot yet work out how it destroyed our living room floor. Perhaps some of you may have ideas about how this could happen. As promised here is a picture of the Malang Giant Rat (Isn't there a reference in Sherlock Holmes to The Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra?) and I would like your opinions. Real rat, fake, other kind of rodent, new species? Anyway I'm sure you all agree that this 'unknown animal' far outclasses the poorly faked footprints of the so-called Kingscliffe Yeti.
The headline, if you are wondering, reads Start crying. The jumbo rat creates panic among citizens of Malang. Classes are finally over, all that remains is for us to meet our Pembimbings (advisors) and get our passports back from the Immigration Office. Both tasks are harder than they sound, some Pembimbings have a reputation for avoiding all contact with students and we spent a long fruitless afternoon in Immigration yesterday. It seems that our passports are here - though that ay be a fib - but some accompanying documentation cannot be found. All this for a simple move between towns. On Sunday we have a tedious graduation ceremony to attend and then we hope to accompany Lisa to Ponogorro tosee a dance that was once supposedly ‘stolen’ by the Malaysians to use on a tourist advert. Lisa is studying the cultural war between the two countries. The are around the house is very different from that of Jalan Flamboyan and though there is a smart café, Confetti,, and warungs and shops with n walking distance there is not the same cluster of small shops, laundries, warungs and coffee places that made Flamboyan so pleasant a place to live. Malang centre is pleasanter and greener that Jogja but it has no single busy thoroughfare like Maliobro and no huge open alun-alun for holding public events. It does have some excellent shops and restaurants and the anggkot bus system is cheap efficient. I have even seen HP sauce and bacon here! Bacon sandwiches may be summoned up in times of crisis and despair. There is no one domination volcano like Gunung Merapi in Jogja, instead the slopes of the massif that makes up Mount Bromo and several other peaks dominates the skyline. Bromo itself is a volcano within a volcano, or rather within the crater of a huge extinct volcano and to reach Bromo itself one has to cross the old crater floor, commonly called the Sea of Sand. The views are supposed to be amazing and among the natural Wonder of the World but I will be leaving visiting Bromo until later in the year when the monsoon rains have passed. What else? Although the small group of munias still come to the garden every day I have seen no other birds. We have the skink, a couple of house geckos and perhaps the green fence lizard is still hiding somewhere in the garden, but there is not the variety of animal and insect life one would meet in an ordinary English garden. I forgot the ants, we have plenty of ants, tiny sugar ants that threaten to take over the kitchen, some larger black ants and a few solitary red ants. Still, Java sometimes feels like an ecosystem on the point of collapse and compared with the profusion of life that exists in the tropical forest it is a desert.. The lack of insects is particularly strange, mosquitoes flies and ants and a few butterflies but very little else. I have seen only one mantis since I have been here. Is this the result of agricultural pesticides or something else. I sit in my room writing as the rain pours down outside while the girls sit hypnotise by DVDs of an American TV series called The L Word. I have seen a little and it is rather like putting one’s head into an oven and baking it at a low heat. Something to be avoided in most circumstances unless you love watching Americans agonising over their identity' for hours and hours and hours and .... We are finally in the new house. I have a large bedroom and bathroom and Maddy and Lisa have the two other smaller bedrooms; mine faces out onto our strange rock walled garden. I also have the luxury of hot water and am looking forward to my first bath in almost six months.
The UMM campus is quite away outside town on a hillside dissected by a small deeply cut river. The buildings are white concrete blocks build around ponds and trickling streams. It is more immediately attractive than the functional leafy campus of UGM in Jogja. For the first two weeks we have to attend classes on the local culture and the problems and method of doing research, all for the most part pretty dull. On top of lectures we have had to attend the opening ceremony, an official dinner and have our photos taken in the UMM uniform of red blazer and cap. Thankfully we were spared the caps. We are also being filmed by a small but intrusive film crew who have now taken so much footage that unless ruthless editing takes place any audience will need to bring packed lunches. There are new people too, Benita who is currently sleeping on our floor while she searches for somewhere to stay and Brooke who has returned to Malang for a second time to do further research. The town of Malang is smaller than Jogja and lacking attractions like Borobudur and Prambanan, thankfully, has nothing to compare with the crowded tourist trap that is Maliboro. The few tourists who are here seem to be Dutch searching for their colonial heritage. The town was a kind of Dutch hill station with wide tree lined boulevards; today it still has some remnants of the colonial era, including the the splendid Oen's coffee house. I am writing this in another coffee bar, Confetti, drinking orange juice and eating red soup; Confetti may be the replacement for Cheers in Jogja, it is clean, bright, has wi-fi, a marvellous ice cream menu and.... best of all.... it sells beer and wine! At the time of writing I am locked out of the house, or at least partly locked out, my gate key does not work. We spent a lot of time yesterday searching for an ahli kunci locksmith, without much success, the places we found were either shut or the locksmith was not there to cut keys. Eventually while Lisa went into a shop to collect some photos I went over to a shifty looking group men and asked if they knew an ahli kunci. 'Yes, he's one.' they replied pointing to one of the group in a red shirt. 'Ha, ha! Now where's the real locksmith? I replied not going to be tricked by a gang of scallywags. 'He really is!' they cried and he was. He had a tiny stall on the other side of the road cutting keys with only a vice, files and some blanks. Actually the problem was with our lock rather than the keys and we had to have him come to the house and fix it. Unfortunately one of the bad padlock keys for the gate is on my set, so I have had to climb over the fence to get here. You can see some photos of the house on the Photos Page under those of Thailand. I'll put up more of Malang over coming weeks. While I am sure I can produce the 10,000 words in Indonesian needed for the research project I am depressed about my poor hearing. I think in the UK I was able to compensate for a lot by understanding context and tone that does not work here, either with Indonesian or American and Australian. The other day Benignity asked where the alcohol was and I heard 'apples' instead of alcohol. As you can imagine the possibilities of misunderstanding in Indonesian are even greater. My poor conversational Indonesian is also frustrating, often there are common colloquial words that I have never come across, even though a year in Java is part of the degree there was no preparation for the common use of Javanese words and phrases and the abbreviations and colloquialisms in common use. The emphasis was on 'correct' Indonesian. I have a copy of Durham/Umpire in Indonesian lent to me by a lecturer at UMM. Thanks to all those of you who tried to find one for me. I immediately took mine to the photocopy shop just down the road and had two copies made form myself. Photocopying whole books is common practice here. I have not had a chance to read any of it yet as today, Sunday, is the only day off we have had so far and there have been so many other things that have needed doing, cutting keys, getting the gas stove to work and so on. How many kinds of lizard live in the garden? You must have been asking yourselves this by now. There is a green fence lizard – though this may be a less common species, I'm not sure – and a large slink, about six to eight inches, and one or two house geckos. Geckos do not seem as common as they were in Jogja. Perhaps because of the cooler climate. The only birds I have see in the garden so far are a small flock of Mulingg (Sp), that come for berries. If you were to enter a British laundry and see two pairs of legs sticking out from behind the counter you would assume at the worst something very terrible had happened and at the best something very disreputable was going on. That is one of the differences between Europe and Indonesia – I cannot speak for the USA or Australia -, in Indonesia it is perfectly natural to lie on the floor of one's shop to take a rest on the cool tiles, or in this case to watch TV. While in Jogja I had been instructed to go to the Speedy laundry to see if they had found Maddy's missing beha – don't ask. Look it up. And no smart comments either. - The task stretched my limited power of Indonesian but I succeeded in carrying out the task with great sensitivity and tact, even aplomb, despite the fact that in Indonesia a man does not go into a laundry and ask for an unmarried girl's beha unless the circumstances are exceptional. I think I managed to convince the laundry girls that the circumstances were exceptional and that the rest of Maddy's stay in Indonesia would become a kind of living hell without her beha, and besides we did this kind of thing all the time in Great Britain. I spent the night in Gang Renggali now occupied by two young Australians, Nikkola and Joel. Aside: Who seem to have bought an extraordinary number of shoes with them and little else. I had grown rather fond of the place so it was a sad business loading my huge case with books and the rucksack with various other stuff. Another small rucksack, the juicer in a box and I was ready to go, except it was barely possible to lift the case. As I left the house was being tidied up by Pak Agus and a helper, a new extractor fan among other things and my wild garden had tamed. Luckily I had insisted that the spider be left alone when I passed over the house. I had come to feel a degree of affection for the spider, insofar as one can feel affection for spiders, it had hung motionless it its web for the whole six months I had lived in the house, growing from a handsome middle sized spider to a magnificent huge spider. I would wish it, 'Good morning.' or tell it the latest news from home the way one does to the creatures one lives with, children, 'significant others', dogs, cats, rodents dan lain lain atsah.* Naturally it did not reply but I appreciated the silence and immobility that it returned to my babbling. The crickets and grasshoppers would have flown away from the garden which is now mostly thick leafed succulents, not succulent to them, the geckos would have vanished the way only geckos can but the tiny skink..... Then I saw it dart between two ugly plants. Pleased that it had survived I said goodbye to the laconic spider and was off. Which brings me to Sponge Bob Squarepants. I had hoped to get the afternoon train but in the event I could only take the one am night train, which left me with most of a day in Jogja. With a helpful team of porters I stowed my luggage and as it was starting to rain spent most of the afternoon reading the papers and New Scientist online in a shopping mall coffee bar. Then I browsed the pirate CD stalls and bought a collection that includes Beethoven, Shostakovitch, Bizet, Vivaldi and others. Classical music is rare on the stalls ad takes a lot of searching to find the odd one or two CDs. Then back to Cheers for more coffee and internet, then up the road to Wilayah, the first place I visited when I first came to Gang Renggali, to recharge the laptop, eat some good chicken and rice and start writing this. Sponge Bob. I had also browsed the bookshops that afternoon and noticed several collections of European cartoons, Tintin, Lucky Luke, that French creature with the impossibly long tail and several others. This led me to wonder about the popularity of Sponge Bob in Indonesia. To start with how would you translate his name. Sponss Bob Persegiempatcelana -assuming you stick with Bob and don't change it to Agus or Din – doesn't sound right. Why do Indonesians, and others throughout the world, accept this cheerful, talking, trouser wearing sponge so easily? Richard Dawkins is right, I believe, these things just spread. Dawkins has been criticised for his concept of memes but to me it seems the best explanation we have for human culture. What else explains the presence Sponge Bob in Jogjakarta? I have had no trouble with the food on Indonesian railways, but I have to agree railway food is always a risk. There are now some photos of Thailand on the Photo page. * As they say round here. I am impressed by Indonesian trains, they are better than expected. When doing railways in the history class at UGM the Dosen was very dismissive of modern Indonesian rail ways but the Jakarta/Malang train is far better than many I have travelled on, albeit I can afford the best class which has a plug for my laptop. There are reclining seats and plenty of leg room. My one complaint is the big screen TV which is always on playing banal Indonesian pop music, but that is better than the tinny scream of an mp3 player from the passenger next to you, or a loud drunken conversation about the afternoon's football match. The usual irritants on a UK train journey. The music and TV were turned off later on, so it did not blare out all night long like the music on some buses I have ridden. Outside it is raining again and out of the window I see rice fields, the green shoots pushing up through brown water. The sky a uniform pale grey like those long Lancaster winters. On the way here we could see the volcanoes of the Bromo massif but today all that is distant is hidden in cloud and rain. The rice fields are divided into small rectangles, not much bigger than an allotment, and surrounded by a low mud bank, just big enough to prevent the water overflowing and making one big flood plain. Around groups of these fields are larger dykes, planted with banana, coconut or papaya. Rail staff offer me chicken in gravy and bakso (meat balls), they are carrying plates of the stuff through the train, so I can see what's on offer. No restaurant car, the food comes to us. This is another thing I would change if I ran the country. One jolt of the train and passengers would be showered with meat balls, gravy, chicken, rice and what ever is on offer. Tea is also on offer. I know because I have just bought a glass, real glass – dangerous! - of it covered with a metal lid. This is more than the clichéd 'accident waiting to happen', this is engineering for accidents. Have now bought nasi goreng to eat with tea. Situation critical must stop typing..... Some minutes later. It would have been a lot easier to eat fried rice, chicken and fried egg if there had been a pull down tray on the seat in front, as they have in airlines. Luckily my laptop served as a handy tray but I do not want to encourage readers to serve tea off their laptops, it is asking for trouble. So do this in emergencies only. My tea by the way was the sweet milky kind they serve survivors of shipwrecks, avalanches and the like. Rather comforting like cocoa. Next came the problem of what to do with the plate. I was holding it in my lap until the girl sitting next to me told me it was OK to put it on the floor. It is obviously not OK to put plates on the floor of a crowded passenger train, but I did anyway and have resumed writing. Time now for one of those short complaints about the modern world (I'm sure I would have complained about the ancient world too, 'Dammit, why does this carriage have nowhere to plug in a laptop?') that have to be voiced now and then. I think having a TV on but with the sound turned off as well as bland background music is not just an Indonesian habit but one that should be found throughout the world. If we can ban smoking in public places surely we can ban this too. What seemed like a mildly interesting programme on lost Indonesian railway lines went on silently while the music droned on. Outside it is getting dark, we pass tiny houses with mildewed walls and red tiled, or corrugated iron roofs, signs advertising goods or warungs everywhere, painted on walls or on banners hung off buildings or strung across the road. Now fully grown rice, some already harvested while a second crop is still growing. The dark base of a volcano can now be seen rising up into the cloud. Maddison and I are in Malang staying with one of the University tutors in two tiny, noisy and cell like rooms while we hunt for houses. Pak Habib, the tutor, has been
helpful but the appartments he showed us were very expensive, the homestay was too much like a post guest house. The owner proudly told us about the music and parties they held but when I saw the speakers directly outside the rooms on offer I felt it could be worse than living next to a mosque. Kos are cheap lodging houses mostly used by students and low paid workers, though there are some very good ones the majority have tiny depressing rooms and shared mandi. Renting a house seemed the best alternative and we stumbled upon a rather rundown but wonderful estate, with fountains and statues and brightly coloured old fahioned houses. Rather like the set for some strange film. We found an empty house and like it, the price was good and we thought it was in the bag but then we had a message to say the ownwers did not want unmarried people sharing a house. Leaving the estate we passed an off ice where a young man was sitting behind a desk. I am not sure what he was doing, a sign outside talked about a project with goats, but inside all was wonderfully vague. We told hime our problem and he said he would try to help. Sure enough that evening we got a message offering his own house, next to the office. There was some story about the family moving and we could have the place fully furnished for six months. We went and looked around, the house was nice but still very lived in and family members in most rooms. It would have suited though and we were prepared to bargain over the rent. However it turnrf out the asking price was far too high and disappointed we returned to a house Maddy had found before we left Joga. We had rejected it because the neighbourhood seemed rather boring and a long way out of town, but on going to look around we found it was the best house we had see so far, well furnished and not as far outside town as we first thought. We agreed to take it and am now waiting for confirmation and hoping nothing goes wrong. Malang is cooler, less dirty and more green than Jogja but transport has not been easy, there is a network of small buses that cover the city but if you are unfamiliar with the roads it can be diffuclt and unlike Jogja there are dew taxis. Taxis are also much more expensive, a Rp 20000 minimum. Maddison was outraged whhen she she was asked to pay 500 more than it showed on the meter and the owner of our prospective house had to be asked to adjudicate, though she didn't really know herself. I could tell from the expression on the taxi driver's face, fear, confusion and imploring sympathy, that there was indeed a minimum fare. We hope to be able to take some of our luggage over todayand then have to wait for the house to be cleaned - though it looked perfectly clean - before we move in It feels as though are stuck in limbo, waiting for some news of houses in Malang. We have been promised some addresses and do not want to go house hunting until we have them. There are no estate agents on every corner as there are in the UK. House hunting involves – as do most things in Indonesia – using a network of contacts or simply wandering around looking for signs and asking people if they know of somewhere to let. Meanwhile Maddison has become addicted to Janet Evanovitch crime novels and sits in the corner of the room chain-reading. She is now on Shakey Eighty, the eightieth novel in the series. The heroine Stephanie Plum is now aged 87, is in a nursing home hooked up to a life support machine but still trying to chase bad debtors, even though most of them died years ago. I have one of the worst attacks of sakit perut I have had so far and sit clasping my knees and shivering outside the bathroom door. We have become one of those dismal plays from the 1950s or 60s. Last night we watched a Thai comedy on the computer and had McDonalds deliver us burgers. I could not face Indonesian food, despite having had a most delicious lunch that may have been the cause of later trouble. Thai humour and McDonalds have things in common, both are the lowest of their kind, this is a little unfair to the, it was probably just this particular film and as we know McDonalds pride themselves on their consistency. No one has sent the long chatty emails full of gossip and trivial detail that I so look forward to to; it is as though they are all sulking because I had a holiday in Thailand and they did not. Only the humming of the air conditioning breaks the dreadful silence. Since writing the above I have made a suprising and rapid recovery and am sitting in Cheers eating pancake and ice-cream. To the left is a picture of the Thai Pun prize. It is slightly blurred as the little creature moves so fast it is difficult to capture it on camera. Well tried all of you. I hope you all understood the references to Flann O'Brien's Keats and Chapman stories. If not you must try and read them. Older readers may also remember Muir and Norden on the radio quiz show My Word. It is odd to feel that I will soon be leaving Gang Rengalli. It takes a few months to find your way around a place but I feel I have now seen most of what Jogja has to offer. Some of you may be able to help me. I am looking for a copy of Durga/ Umayai by Mangunwijaya but in Indonesian, I have the English, and am having no luck even in the public and university libraries. If by any chance you see or hear of a copy let me know. Now I will do another internet search and may write more about leaving Jog This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.
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June 2011
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