1/1/11!
Happy New Year, everyone!
I got a hotel room here in Yogya for New Year’s Eve with two American friends who lived at the homestay with me. I was hoping for a pool, a bar and someplace with character - all of which this place promised at a cool $33 each for the deluxe room and extra bed, including breakfast and New Year’s Gala Dinner. I really enjoyed our small veranda and the green lawns and bushes that separated the bungalows, not to mention the garden in our bathroom (no joke); I hadn’t realized quite how much I’ve been craving green space. Unfortunately, while the pool was pretty nice, the bar was empty both of staff and of drink of any kind. As for the character.… well, possibly the buildings had some in 1970.
New Year’s Gala Dinner was held in a harshly bright pavilion with table after table of teenagers who had come in a large tour bus earlier that evening. We arrived to the pavilion as most of them were digging into their meals, promptly convinced ourselves the real dinner was somewhere else, went looking but found nothing but the want-to-be bar, and returned, resigned, to the pavilion. At this point multiple very officious and magenta-clad staff members ushered us through a buffet station of greasy fried rice, fried noodles, tough beef and poorly seasoned chicken sate. They made sure to seat us at the table right up front, where the MC could more easily poke fun at us and whereby the entire room had a polite excuse to stare. The singer-dancers stood right next to our table as they rounded up teenagers and attempted to force them to dance in front of all of their friends.
At risk of pointing out the obvious, let me make clear that we were the only people in the space who weren’t Indonesian. Admittedly, the few adults besides us not chaperoning the teen group appeared just as discomfited by the whole scenario, but they had us to distract them, and surely they had arrived with a clearer idea of what a “New Year’s Gala Dinner” implied. (Namely, bright lights, terrible food, a gratingly obnoxious MC and off-key singing by women in too-small high heels and tacky hair extensions, with some public humiliation and door prizes thrown in to really kick off the New Year right.) Let me also make clear that singers aside, we were pretty close to being the only women there not wearing jilbabs; and that there was absolutely no hope for alcohol of any kind at the dinner.
After a polite sojourn we escaped back to our bungalow, and passed the rest of the evening on our veranda finding humor in topics ranging from “Stuff White People Like” to avian predation of early hominids to Indonesian usage of the third person in references to self, and watching the fireworks our bungalow neighbors were shooting off with much smoke and potential for amputated fingers. We rang 2011 in with beer smuggled from the gas station; beer is bubbly, right? Close enough.
***
Funnily enough the shattered expectations for New Year’s Eve fit in well with my current state of cultural adjustment. I’m in a secure and pampered bubble right now, back and forth between language classes and a homestay providing two meals a day, hot water and AC if I want it, and with English-speaking bule (read: gringo, or toubab) friends readily available for advice and escapism and partnering-in-crime. But those moments when the real world intercedes and I must slow down, change my approach, let go of any expectations or assumptions, and/or accept that I have no idea what is going on are coming more frequently as I both become more antsy to get out of the bubble and am forced out of it by real world responsibilities.
2010 was a big year – I finished my Masters, I left the city where I’d lived for three years, I helped my sister with an even bigger transition, I found a job, I came here. Right now I’m dreaming of much, much smaller things out of 2011: understanding my total at the supermarket without needing a visual; finding someplace to enjoy a glass of wine; remembering to ask permission to sit down in at the station of a travel agent who has never seen me before; walking down the main road without losing my nerve with the motorbikes; giving directions to the taxi driver that make any sort of sense.
xo
M
PS – I figured out a mailing address and that some friends have actually received letters and non-valuable packages. Send me an email if you’re tempted.
