American gangsters and Mister

I find that while blogging on a daily basis seems tedious and maybe not too eventful, letting more than four or five days go by is like forgetting about my blog for a year. I don’t even know where to start.

In Indonesia it’s totally acceptable, even maybe encouraged for teachers (especially young foreign English teachers!) to hang out with their students outside school. That said, yesterday I found myself at TimeZone (an arcade in one of the malls), playing horribly at a sort of erm…DanceDanceRevolution type game, except I think this one was more difficult…with one of my students, Fia. At some point, when we were sitting on big plastic hamburgers that functioned for the moment as chairs, waiting for our turn at this crazy game, I got massively involved in a conversation with two twelve year old girls. By the end, they’d asked me everything from my religious preference to my marital status to my phone number and email address. Can you imagine this happening in the states? All the same, it was completely sweet, innocent, and entertaining. Then I got on the back of 16 year old Fia’s motorbike, and she drove me home. During this ride, we both talked about not having boyfriends and both agreed that this was more or less a choice of ours, because for the time being we enjoy the freedom and lack of stress that comes with being single.

Well, suffice to say Ramadan is drawing to a close, there are only six days left of the twenty-eight. What’s happened, strangely, is that because I spend so much of my time with Muslim fasters, I myself have inadvertently fasted to some extent; lately I’ve been having 1.5 meals a day instead of my usual 3.5. It isn’t because I’m trying to fast, necessarily, but more because now that food isn’t everyone’s motivating factor in life (they can’t eat between 4 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. every day), I’ve just sort of lost my appetite, and even when with appetite I have found it much easier to put up with until I feel like cooking or buying food. I guess this is a good thing, because a couple women at my school recently commented that my stomach is getting so fat I have started looking a little pregnant. Thanks, orang-orang (people), for your honesty…

Today I got called “sir” and “mister” at least four times.

People in Indonesia don’t walk places. They just don’t. They either ride a motorbike, drive, take an angkot (public transportation, sort of a cross between a van and a bus)… a bike, a pedi-cab, or do the unthinkable and drive (cars are definitely a luxury here…reserved for the rich). Today I walked about 30 minutes in the hopes of getting a pedicure before I leave for my 9 day beach vacation. I have never been talked to by so many people in my life. I think in the 30 minutes at least 100 people either said hello or waved or honked at me, and with that kind of positive attention, it’s really hard not to smile the entire time. Which attracts even more attention. It’s so weird being a symbol. People aren’t interested in me because I’m me, far from it. They’re interested in the fact that I come from the West and have white skin. It’s like the aftermath of being a colonized people or something. Rather than hate Americans, like Europeans do, they think we are all movie actors or pop singers, or just beautiful. If they only knew...

Speaking of which, I saw the new Kevin Bacon movie with my ibu the other day, and it was HORRIBLE! I was shocked that American film companies export so many bloody, cruel and violent movies to Asian countries. One of the women I was with actually had to explain one of the movie’s premises (it’s about a gang in some run-down American city) regarding the mobster hierarchy; she had seen so many gangster movies at the cinema that she was a veritable expert on the topic. Do wonders never cease?