Ahh, holidays…
A time to leave behind all the trials and tribulations of the workplace and strike out for greener pastures and horizons new. A time to bid farewell to office politics and say hello to shipboard romances and moonlit beach liaisons. A time to forget the quiet hell of wage slavery and live in paradise for a moment, no matter how fleeting.
All of which begs the question [and to all you English teachers out there: I know damn well this is an incorrect use of 'begging the question', but it's how 99% of the English speaking world uses it these days, and it's late, and I'm tired, and all-in-all it's just easier to fill the gaps in an established lexical framework (you can thank me later, Mr Michael Lewis), however fallacious its etymology, than to come up with an original way of expressing something] of just why Tash's sister Vanessa (AKA Iola's Aunty Vanushka) has chosen to while away her desperately short escape from juggling studying psych at Melbourne Uni with three jobs in sunny Surabaya, the city described by most travel guides as:
Um.. Okay, so if you absolutely have to pass through Surabaya on your
way to Bali, Bromo or Yogya, and you find yourself forced to spend the
night, then we suppose you could check out Dollys—Surabaya's
world-famous red light district—or go for a beer at Colours (kind of
like Dollys, except you don't have to pay and you stand a far better
chance of catching a nasty disease). If you're truly desperate, you
could walk through the old submarine near the end of Jalan Kayun or
wander through TP, the biggest mall in South-East Asia...
And so on.
All of which is complete tosh, of course. Most of these guides then go on to say that if you're looking for non-Indonesian food, there are a couple of places you could try,and then list four or five 5 star restaurants. This is the equivalent of saying that if you find yourself in Melbourne and don't feel like eating traditional Australian steak and eggs, then perhaps you should try the one French restaurant on Collins St, and the cheeky little Italian place on Lygon St.
Surabaya is a big, cosmopolitan city. It's littered with an incredible variety of cuisines. Leaving aside the fact that 'Indonesian' food as an umbrella heading covers hundreds of cultures, all with their traditional foods, within a loud shout of our house (which is out in the burbs) you can get everything from Australian sirloin to Kobe beef to Korean Kimchee to Japanese to Italian to Turkish—you can even get American! (ie McDonalds', KFC, Wendy's, Breadtalk, Starbucks, A&W: all the usual crap that's been spreading virus-style across the global palate since it first escaped Bumf**ck, Idaho stashed in the carry-on of a retired insurance salesman).
And there are plenty of touristy-type spots (what Indonesians usually refer to, somewhat charmingly, as 'tourism objects'), it's just that they're not usually aimed at tourists like us (ie white westerners), which I, for one, find absolutely fantastic, given that most of the 'tourism objects' in Indonesia that are aimed at people like us tend to be either littered with loud, loutish, shouting, red-faced wankers, or, if it's the off-season, full of sad Indonesians desperately trying to offload their stock of immaculately carved wooden penises and bright pink 'batik' sarongs.
Take yesterday, for example (hmmm—this has been an awfully long lead-in to what was going to be a brief précis of our activities over the last couple of days, but hey; when you gotta rant, you gotta rant). We took Aunty Vanushka to Masjid Sunan Ampel in the heart of the Arab Quarter. This is a large, and very old, mosque that is visited by Islamic travellers from all over the world.
As we wandered the laneways surrounding the mosque, we were in total tourist land, but to us it was strange and exotic. Instead of t-shirts saying 'My friend went to Bali/Surfers/Fiji/Kho Samui/Goa and all he got me was this lousy t-shirt' there are commemorative editions of the
Koran, prayer beads, gorgeously embroidered clothing, spices and oils, and a fantastic selection of food (like yummy falafels, the first I've found here). Great stuff. Check out a brief vid of Tash and Ness buying some bracelets for Iola here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUmcLeTrA4A
Best of all (for me), you can buy dozens of varieties of dates (I'm a sucker for a good date) for about a dollar a kilo.
Just before we left, we bumped into a guy we'd met the last time we were there. He, along with approximately 15346 other people we've met over the last six months, had politely asked whether he could take a photo of Iola. This time, as soon as he saw us, he dragged us over to
his shopfront. There, sharing pride of place with a photo of our man arm-in-arm with the head of cultural studies at ANU, was a blown-up print of the photo he'd taken of our baby girl! God knows what this place is doing to her sense of perspective.
From there we went to Pasar Atom, an old-school market/mall in China Town. After Tash and Ness had spent a while exploring the incredible variety of textiles on offer, we went upstairs and splurged on a new set of plates, cutlery, mugs, implements of mass mashing and grating
etc. I don't get quite as excited by this sort of stuff as they do, but I have to admit that it's all very nice kit indeed. Total outlay on the splurge? About thirty dollars!
And today was a real treat.
Madura is an island just off the coast of Java. If you tell the average Javanese that you're going to Madura, they'll look at you like you're mad and try to explain to you that the Madurese are,
essentially, mad, bad and dangerous to know.
From what I've been able to gather, the explanation for this attitude is that over the last few decades, the vast majority of Madurese have emigrated to places like Java in search of the almighty dollar. In a poor country, Madura is a poor island, and the temptation to seek one's fortunes elsewhere must be overwhelming. The reality tends to be that they wind up doing really shitty jobs for less than shitty money, all the while being pissed on from a great height by the people they interact with (if there's one truism I've noted over the years, it's that people need other people to feel superior to!). Thus, they've developed a reputation for being rude, angry and fast with a knife.
But when you talk to people who've actually been there, you hear a very different tale indeed. And that's exactly what we found. Friendly people, quiet streets (a welcome change from the anarchy on Surabayan roads!), and some very interesting things to look at.
Getting there was as cruisy as cruisy could be. A taxi to the ferry terminal, tickets purchased for the princely sum of about fifty cents each, and a rather pleasant half-hour ride to Kamal (Madura's main port). I was particularly taken by the fact that the ferry came complete with a karaoke stage with a keyboard player and pro singer with whom the more outgoing passengers could sing duets.
At the other end we wandered around for a bit, finding various things to look at, including some cute wooden rocking horses (one of which we bought for Iola on the way home for $5) and a crazy lady in clown-like make-up who kept saluting me and miming corporal's stripes on her
sleeves. I gotta say: pretty much everyone we encountered over there was friendly and helpful, but for somewhere that has sea salt production as one of its primary industries, there seemed to be a really high occurrence of cretinism. Someone should tell these people about iodine, and fast.
After that we leapt aboard a passing colt (mini-vans that travel from place to place when the driver considers that he has crammed as many people as humanly possible in the back) bound for Bangkalan, a town about 20 km to the north that has become increasingly industrialised
(in marked contrast to the Eastern part of the island) in recent years as a result of its proximity to Surabaya.
It was a sleepy little place, although from what I gather this will change dramatically come bull-racing season. I'm looking forward to heading back for that. It's hugely popular, and the tradition of bull-racing (basically small boys balanced precariously on a plank being dragged along at great speed by a pair of enormous bulls) informs Madurese culture enormously—to the extent that houses are built in the shape of giant bull's horns!
We didn't hang out for more than a couple of hours, because Iola's been a little off-colour the last few days and was feeling the heat a bit, but Tash and Ness managed to find themselves some lovely traditional batik in the market, and I got to check out the street of false teeth specialists, which I was very keen to do. We also found one of those things that have been oddly difficult to find in Surabaya: safety pins.
We've been trying to find them at random moments over the last six months. We've tried the sewing sections in supermarkets and department stores, specialist sewing shops; you name it, we've looked for safety pins there.
So where did we eventually find them? At a tiny little gew-gaw stall in the middle of the food section at the pasar! God knows what they were doing there, smack in the centre of the meat section (ie surrounded by everything from dried fish to chicken feet, all crawling with flies and enough to turn the most dedicated carnivore into a vegan), but I carpe diemed to the max and bought about a four year supply!
Anyway, I've probably rambled on for long enough for what was supposed to be a quick round-up of the weekend, so I guess I'll get this sucker posted and pretend to do some work…
