From late December...I didn't have internet for awhile

This is unrelated to the rest of my post, but I have recently discovered how sexy I find men who wear sarongs. In Indonesia and especially in Java and in madrassah (small religious villages), men basically wear skirts. They tie a decently large garment (often batik print) around their waist and wear this rather than pants. On Fridays, which are the special Muslim prayer day (shollah jum'at, I think), most men around Malang are in sarung. And you'd really have to be here to understand what is so sexy about this look. I'd date a man in a skirt any day.

So I've only recently come home from the Christmas trip to the island of Sumatra. I spent 8 nights in Sumatera Utara (the north) with three other Fulbrighter girls. We hung out in the capital city, spent two days trekking and rafting through a jungle filled with monkeys and even a few orangutans, another day climbing an inactive volcano, and a few days chilling out at the largest volcanic lake in the world. Suffice to say it was probably the best of my trips thus far. This might be in part due to the fact that I was courted by a Batak guy. Batak is the tribal group of North Sumatra (the same way Javanese is the tribal affiliation of most who live in East and Central Java). Basically, Bataks are known for their square, "nostrilly" noses, brutal honesty (as opposed to the Javanese excessive politeness/indirectness), and the men are known for being somewhat lascivious. Rather than shout "hey mister!" to me from afar, they walk right up to me and say "you're beautiful, want to come home with me?" Verrrry different cultures. I should also mention that most Bataks are Christian. Thus traveling there for Christmas.

So, what began as a lesbian vacation turned quickly into a party of two.
(I guess I should explain. Rachel, Caitlin, Claire and I coined the term after taking a serious of vacations that were always female-only affairs, usually involved several candle-light dinners, and lots of sharing beds [ie saving money on hotel rooms]. Hence, lesbian vacations were born. And I imagine there will be more before the year is finished.)

We had heard that Batak men on the island of Samosir (the island in the center of the lake) tend to lust intensely after bule women who come there for vacation. If they happen to hit it off with a particular lady, they fall pretty madly in love, keep a photo of their beloved with them always, and are under the impression that they are in a serious, committed relationship even if they never see their girlfriend again. My relationship (I use the word somewhat facetiously) with Nicolas followed this pattern. It started as middle-school style flirting: for some reason, we began a serious of play-boxing matches, (ie: let's hit each other playfully). Within a matter of hours we were holding hands, and less than 24 hours later, people on the island were referring to us as girlfriend and boyfriend. Will I see him again? It's hard to say, but I now have a bracelet with his name on it strapped to my wrist, and frankly i don't know how to remove it without cutting it off. That's saying something.

And then there was Mister Roy. Roy is an ageless (somewhere between 29 and 42 I think) single guy with long (below his shoulders) almost kinky-curly hair, half of which seems to have been dyed blonde, and an array of euro-trash/metro-sexual/muscle-man ensembles. Roy first comes across as a Rastafarian; he offers to hook you up with marijuana or magic mushrooms (illegality aside), he brings out some great food and wine (he runs a restaurant on the island), offers to take you on a motorbike tour of the island the following day. But things change quickly enough. You soon discover that Roy wants women. Whether he wants an actual sexual encounter or just to creepily touch your feet is unclear, but it's obvious enough that Roy eats, sleeps, walks, and dreams only in pursuit of women. He calls you "darling," he puts his hands in inappropriate places (ie your shoulders, your feet, your head); he stares at you from beneath his fake Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses. As you walk out of the lake in your bathing suit, he nonchalantly mentions how sexy you are. When you're in the process of deciding who will ride with whom on the motorbikes, he immediately points to you and says "I want that one" as if he is choosing from so many cuts of meat. Yes, Roy is an unforgettable man. When you meet up with him the next morning, he quite graphically informs you that he had no woman to take home last night, and thus there was "only wanking" (his words, not mine).

Sadly, I was rarely, if ever, the object of Roy's desire, but I couldn't be happier that I got to witness the scenes above. As for my friends, well, I 'm not sure they feel the same way. Roy was pretty sure he'd end up with one of them, and by the end, the most action he got was a few slaps on the wrist from the girls when they found his inappropriateness to be downright annoying. When I asked Nicolas if Roy would ever get married, he sighed and said wistfully, "Ugh, well, I don’t know." That sounded more like "no" to me.