Only another two weeks before the presentation and completed study followed by the performance. So I will not be putting up much on the blog. The picture is of Mumu rehearsing, I will put up some others soon as I get the chance and the i This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.
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I've added a few new photos to the Photos Page. but it is an almost impossible task most of the time. It was a lot easier in Jogja where there were nearby internet cafes with good access. It is also quite difficult to send long emails and posting a letter means a trip into town and long queues at the Post Office for stamps. It is easier for me to write the blog than email.
Please keep sending cards and letters to the address on the Home Page. It is areal treat to find one in the post box. Yes, this picture is of Madison kissing a rabbit. This is the kind of degeneracy I live with. Once the plates are not washed immediately after use, the bins start being overfilled, then you start to take your clothes to the laundry once an month instead of once a week.... and finally you end up kissing rabbits. It's the long hot nights that do it. That and the dubious quality of the local 'licker' (as Madison calls it).Brooke appears to have gone mad while off on Rote island, she began to send texts from 'The Heart of Darkness' and her room was raided by the police. Presumably her reputation had spread throughout the island. How much she had to pay not to be deported I don't know. Back to the rabbit. The Malang Festival is on and we went to see it. The three girls, me and three of Maddy's entourage of young men. All in one car. Luckily my age commands the front seat. That and, I suspect, a little prurient enjoyment of being squashed up like a tinful of hamsters bythose on the back seat. The festival theme is Malang in Times Past - a theme beloved by festivals from Scott Base Antarctica to Wadi Jebel Kamelbone in the Sahara, by way of Clun.- 'Times Past' I mean, miss out the Malang.- It was interesting to seen that the Javanese idea of a festival is to seal off a few streets, line them with stalls, add a wayang stage and then cram in as many -or more- people as is physically possible. The crowd then ignores the wayang and shuffles slowly to one end of the street, (pausing only briefly to cheer and shout ribald comments at transvestites.) then turns and shuffles back,then turns and shuffles back (pausing etc.) then turns and ..... I don't know how long this goes on for as I only stayed a few hours. Apart from transvestite taunting, the next most popular activity was taking a break in one of the many food stalls that lined the street, or buying a silly hat, from a silly-hat seller, or a potato peeler, or an Arema (our football team) tee shirt..... I saw something I had been looking for all over Jogja, a device for changing the lamp bulbs on high ceilings. I didn't have the Indonesian and it is not the thing you can look up in the dictionary. I tried saying in bahasa Indonesia 'thing-for-changing-lightbulbs-on-high-ceilings' and I was shown a bizarre range of light fittings, patriotic flags and baroque plaster mouldings until I finally gave up. Now in Malang, where I don't need one, I see them with a large label telling me they are called stick lampu. Why didn't I think of that. .... or a rabbit. It was on my bed when I arrived back aafter the others. They though it would give me a surprise. In fact the sight of a small brown furry bunny gave me an overwhelming feeling of relief that there were no crocodiles on sale at the festival. In Indonesia it does..... follow this link:
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/05/19/divine-cigarettes-used-treat-cancer.html There is a census going on and Lisa reports that the TV news the oter day had an interview with someone who remembers the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. And he was not the oldest man interviewed. Clearly this is the healthiest place in the world to live. It's the pollution. It kills off the weak and halt. By the way, when writing about our trip to the airport and hitting a motorcyclist I did not mean to suggest that Viv was in anyway overreacting. Only that almost everyone feels the same when they first get here. Not only is there the stress of the meandering bus ride. Bus rides can be frustrating anywhere. I remember trying to go to a meeting in Staffordshire by bus; a journey of four miles extended to fifteen through a maze of suburbs and estates. There were also the usual sick children, drunks and loutish youths that always seem to take the same bus as me. In Indonesia the 'bus problem' is compounded by the addition of a foreign language and alien culture and extends in to most corners of everyday life. But not to worry, I believe they are working on a cigarette that will make every bus trip seem divine. Here just outside The Haunted Hotel I saw piles of stuffed cloth crocodiles looking very similar to the gecko in the picture above. - I have posted it here for those who who were too lazy to follow the earlier link-
Stuffed toy or Photoshop? Perhaps both. There is a very convenient horizontal line running across the picture and the texture of the floor looks as though it has been pained on. When enlarged the kitten does not seem to be in a natural pose. There is also something suspicious about the blurred feet. These are just guesses and I cannot do more than blow the picture up and look at it closely but it is certainly no gecko. The confusion of the previous day continued when shortly after 5am I got a call to say our second bus was full and one would be arriving at 6am to take us to the airport at Surabaya. Luckily we had packed the night before and I had simply to put the laptop into my small daysack to be ready to leave. There was barely time for a hastily gulped coffee before the minibus arrived and we set off. Viv has an ordered and rational mind. This is not a good thing to bring East of Suez – along with straighteners and hair drier – as an ordered and rational mind belongs to a cooler climate where it will not sprout fungal growths or be covered in mould overnight. Viv found it difficult when after such an early start we stopped after a mile or two and waited for over half an hour until another passenger turned up. I had trouble understanding the driver, who muttered, and the new passenger who spoke mostly Javanese, but it seemed she was late because of some chap 'up there'. God perhaps. We set off again, crawling along in the early morning traffic out along the sprawling and seemingly endless ribbon development; a litter of shacks and sheds and factories and always 'filthy warungs' frying chicken and rice on the roadside. Behind the houses and shacks volcanoes rose on either side; to the east the Bromo massif and to the West Gunung Arjuna. The road was narrow and the traffic was heavy so we made slow progress. Despite our early start I could see that Viv had lost all confidence in our driver and was already convinced she was going to miss her fight. She wanted me to interrogate the driver and the two other passengers about our destination and time of arrival. I'm afraid I rather churlishly refused, mainly because I had spoken to the driver over the phone about the airport and if I asked again in the bus I wouldn't have been able to hear his answer. And time of arrival? ... Insha'Allah. At last we reached more open country and joined the toll road where we were finally able to race along towards Surabaya. Viv was ale to relax briefly lulled by a false belief in the primacy of order and rationality as it exists in Indonesia. We turned off the toll road and into a maze of tiny streets. Viv froze with horror convinced the driver had no intention of going to the airport. We entered an extraordinary luxury housing estate full of faux Greek and baroque statuary and in a gated street, guarded by a small army of security guards, we dropped off our passenger. After that we turned and headed back into the maze much to Viv's despair, as she felt, with some justification, that we ought to be on a 'real' road heading towards the airport. Her worst fears were confirmed when we hit a motorcyclist. Luckily it was when we were moving slowly out at a junction; a girl on a motorbike tried to cut across in front of us but was not fast enough, wavered and was hit by our minibus. She, and her bike, seemed not to be damaged, but the front of our bus made of weaker stuff,was quite badly broken. Naturally, we had to stop and argue about who's fault it all was, and various people had to chip in with their version of events. It was all done in a civilised Indonesian way, with smiles and no raised voices, though the veneer seemed very brittle at times. Finally the bus set off again but turned around and headed back the way we had come for a while and then stopped. This was too much for Viv who was now convinced she would never reach Australia, and probably never manage to leave Java. We got out, looked at the damage. Viv showed her plane ticket. I asked how long it would be until we got to the airport. The driver was in no mood for reassuring bolshie passengers. He snapped something about, '5 minutes'. The girl on the bike turned up, she must have had to go back home, and an unknown amount of money changed hands. The we set off again and half an hour later were sitting in the airport drinking coffee and eating a bun, with time to spare. I have been here so long now that I can calmly let these things take their course and hope that they will turn out well in the end, and they usually do, and have forgotten the feelings of panic and frustration that, just like Viv, I used to feel on journeys like these. Perhaps too, all those races to get on to cross-Channel and Mediterranean ferries, sometimes shooting on just as the car port was rising, have had an effect. Insha'Allah. We nearly always made it. After seeing Viv off I took an airport bus to the main bus terminal and then another bus back towards Malang. My original plans to stay in Surabaya for a day and to visit the site of old Majapahit capital, Trowulan or see some of the bird colonies out on the Solo estuary had been shelved as I realised travel is very slow and I had only one day. I have another Durga/Umayi rehearsal tomorrow. In fact it was rather lucky that our original buses were full and we set off at 6 am giving us plenty of time to get stuck in traffic, wait for passengers and run over people. Rather than return all the way to Malang I decided to get out a few miles before at Lawan. More a messy bus terminal than a town and famous only for the huge and haunted, crumbling art-deco hotel Niagara. And that's where I am now, in a strange room with a wooden door fully fourteen feet high. Rotting shutters leading out on to a balcony I hope will not collapse beneath me, no fan or air-conditioning, an electric insect zapper on the wall whose cable is not quite long enough to allow it to be plugged into the socked and a good number of tiny and very energetic mosquitoes. I did have a moth the size of a small bat, but I ejected it. And perhaps..... a ghost Yesterday Viv and I took-tea-at-the-Tugu. We drank tea and nibbled Indonesian snacks at Malang's poshest hotel. Afterwards we met Maddy and Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) at the very noisy Java Dancer coffee house. We had booked the bus-that -comes-to-your-door, better known as The Travel, to take Viv and I to Surbaya to catch her plane for Australia. Where she will be visiting friends and crocodile hunting for a month or two. Confusion set in when I began to get calls on my mobile phone that were so broken up and inaudible that they they were totally incomprehensible. I asked the caller to text instead but the calls just kept coming. In Java Dancer I got a call and could not hear a single word. I passed the phone to Maddy but even with her bat like ears she could no make sense of it. Then she got the brilliant idea of ringing back on her phone. She did so and got an understandable connection but at the same time my phone rang again with another incomprehensible call from someone else in the same company. Eventually we discovered that our bus was fully booked and we had to take an earlier one. Everything was now sorted out we though and all that remained was to head home and have a simple, straightforward and enjoyable pizza delivered from Pizza hut to round off the day. But it was not to be. Viv and I took an angkot back to the house while Maddy and Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) went to Pizza Hut to order the Pizza's. It was a little more complicated than that as Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) does not like Pizza Hut and went elsewhere to get her pizza. Viv and I arrived back at the house and waited. I juiced some sour oranges. We waited and waited some more. Finally Maddy and Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) turned up. Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) with pizza and Maddy asking where the delivery was. Maddy tried to call Pizza Hut but there was no answer. Had the order simply been abandoned? After some heated discussion it was decided that Maddy and Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) would race back to Pizza Hut and demand an explanation. So they did. Viv and I and Maddy's friend Reza, who had turned up waited at the house. No sooner had Maddy and Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) left than the pizza delivery man arrived telling us he had come earlier but couldn't make anyone hear and open the gate. The idea of leaving a note did not occur to him. He tried Maddy's phone but it was not working. We paid for the pizza and the delivery man set off back to Pizza Hut. I called Maddy's phone and it was not working. So we put the pizza in the oven and waited, and waited and waited, until Maddy and Benita (not to be confused with Bonita) finally turned up with a duplicate order of pizza. Here things get a little complicated. It seems that while Maddy was at Pizza Hut demanding to know what had happened to our order the delivery man arrived and told her that he had been unable to make anyone hear when he had tried earlier. Then the pizzas (duplicate set) arrived and the delivery man offered to deliver them. Maddy gave him a firm No Thanks, paid for the pizzas and set off back to No 1 Japan Mandalwangi with the duplicate set of pizzas. So we paid twice and had an absolute plethora of pizza, half of which will be eaten another day. It turned out that Maddy's phone was indeed not working and so although her name was on the bill she gave Benita (not to be confused with Bonita)'s number but unfortunately it was written down wrongly. Why the delivery man did not point out that he had already delivered and been paid for the pizza, especially when he saw Maddy with the duplicate set – that he also offered to deliver – remains one of the mysteries of Indonesia. Last Saturday Viv and I hired a car and went to Panataran, the largest temple complex in Easter Java. Panataran was begun around the 1200 and continued to be enlarged for 250 years until the Hindu Majapahit empire finally fell to Muslim Demak. Compared with the 8th century temples of Central Java Panataran is bound to disappoint; the site is on a much smaller scale than Prambanan or Borobudur and the carving less fine. Nevertheless it is the carvings that make the trip to Panataran worthwhile. The Naga temple surrounded by massive carved serpents and what remains of the upper part of a temple that seems to rise into the air on huge winged beings. The relief panels are filled with narrative and domestic detail and the carving marks a late transition from the flat to a more three dimensional style. For one small child that day the massive temple and the grotesque carved demons were eclipsed by a meeting with a real demon. As we stood on the highest level of the main temple and gazed out across the whole complex Maddison -yes Maddy came too – took out her two of her front teeth and grimaced a a distraught little boy. He was still crying and shaking when we left 40 minutes later. Panataran is close to the town of Blitar where President Sukarno grew up and is buried. His family wanted him to be buried at his home nearer Jakarta but to discourage any possible cult growing around the first president Suharto had him buried alongside his mother in far away Blitar. Sukarno was reinstated after the reformation in the 1980s and there is now a huge monumental grave and museum as well as the nearby house where he grew up, also a museum. But... before we went to see Sukarno's home we stopped for something to eat and the café owner asked if he could take our pictures while we ate .We graciously agreed and he took a picture, and another, and another and another and so on for almost the entire meal. It is sometimes tiresome being a celebrity and I fully expect, if I ever return to Blitar, to see a huge picture of myself outside the café grinning inanely and holding a piece of chicken beneath the caption, 'X's Café: The Place Where the Cool Bule's Hang Out!' Sukarno's tomb was a simple affair on a marble floor under a large wooden canopy. Despite the efforts he still has a cult following and is seen by some as having supernatural powers, so there were plenty of Indonesians saying prayers and making small offerings of flowers. The 'modest family home' turned out to be a vast rambling one storied house filled with memorabilia and Sukarno clutter. The house of someone from the wealthy middle class with their extended family and servants. Retraction.
Monster Gecko There is no tiny giraffe the size of a teacup, with tea spoon representing neck. I made it up as a comment on the gullibility of the Jakarta Post. But now we have incontrovertible evidence of monster geckos. Click the link above sent to us by A Smart. Powercut in Jogja He switches on the light but there's no light any more powers gone down he fumbles for a torch pulls open a drawer the handle breaks it crashes to the floor he thinks he has candles, somewhere he stumbles to the kitchen ransacks a cupboard shoves aside the packets and the tins but they're not there Finally he stops to think standing there in darkness he feels suddenly helpless vulnerable then he remembers the candles are on the shelf beneath the sink he drops to his knees upon the tiles roughly pulls open the plywood door and, yes candles... and matches on the table the matches are damp and will not strike he curses but the third or fourth catches light success! Back in his room he sweeps a stack of books to the ground that had been piled on his chair sits down and waits outside in the street someone shouts or was it a scream? The sudden sound startles him he knocks the candle. It goes out. He sits and waits in darkness In the darkness and the heat the power's down it's been own since morning now he sees no single light in the whole town there's been so many blackouts recently but none like this so perhaps they were some kind of warning because now it seems as though it's going down for ever it's been said before and better but only the young and the stupid think they can choose the time and place for things even the time and place for going down the rest of us just sit and wait grateful for some fragments of the past sit and wait for all that stuff the disinterested future brings and yet though I know all this and now I know it well I still wish I had not stopped smoking and had time for one long cigarette before this slow going down going down for ever Washing Up/Washed Up Ankle deep in water Lost and tossed on a wild sea my mind sloshes back and forth with each violent wave carrying the muddled jumble of everything not fixed not fast, not nailed down a mug, a book, a piece of string a dead rat, a cap.... a diamond ring -where did that come from?- but from all this swirl and splash nothing can be saved I can only grip tightly to the rail hold fast to the wheel and hope to keep the boat this thing, this self this me afloat 64-kg gecko sold for $20m:
JAKARTA: A giant gecko, weighing 64 kilograms, was recently found in Kalakbakan, Malaysia - an area that shares a border with Indonesia - and was sold for RM64 million (US$19.5 million), Tribun Kaltim newspaper reported Friday. "The gecko has been sold for RM1 million per kilogram," said Arbin, who took a picture of the animal. "The buyer was an Indonesian who later took it overseas, maybe to China." Tribun reported that despite the gecko having been sold, its editorial office and journalists received calls all Friday from "businesspeople" who wanted to bid higher prices. Arbin said the gecko was found by a local teenager in a forest in Kalakbakan. - JP I have recently captured a tiny giraffe the size of a tea cup in our garden. I offer it for sale at £ |
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June 2011
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