Wednesday, December 2, 2015

I have to concentrate really hard to think back to what happened yesterday. I’m not sure why. It could be because I’m very tired again. I’ve come down with some kind of cold or throat infection, and I had trouble sleeping. I’m pretty sure that I caught the cold from the woman that cut my hair. When I went into that salon and she eventually came to my chair, I noticed right away that she was coughing badly. My very first thought was “Uh-oh,” and I considered just getting up and leaving. Life is challenging enough in Tanjungbalai without catching a bad cold. And I knew that if I let this woman hover around me for twenty minutes cutting my hair, the chances were good that I’d catch her cold. And I think that’s what happened. My throat actually started to hurt shortly after my haircut, and now I’m coming down with the full cold. Perhaps I caught it from her. Perhaps not. It’s impossible to say.

My experiences of the morning will be of interest only to those of a technical bent. That’s because I spent much of the morning wrestling with problems on my smartphone. The basic problem has to do with the address book on my phone – the Contacts. My Contacts are a mess, and I have no idea why they’re a mess or how to fix it. I don’t know exactly where the Contacts come from. They just appeared on my phone when I first bought it and logged into my various accounts. And more and more Contacts keep appearing, and I don’t even know where any of them are coming from. Plus, I have multiple listings for everyone. Some people I know have 10 different listings in my Contacts. And I’ve tried everything I can think of to fix the problem, but I’ve made no progress. I don’t know what settings control the Contacts. So I downloaded an app that was supposed to help me fix all of this. Setting up the app was a complicated process and it took a long time. And in the end, it made no difference. It was supposed to be this super-duper all-powerful program that can do everything. But, in fact, it didn’t fix the problems and it seems to be less useful than the basic Contacts app that came with my phone. The app came with all these promises about what it can do, and yet I can’t make it do any of those things. I’ll end up just deleting it, I suppose.

The big adventures of the day all revolved around going out for another photo walkabout. I made the wise decision to go on foot. When I walk around, I tend to have a good experience. When I take the bike, it’s generally a disaster. So I set off with two feet and my camera in my hand. I had the 90mm lens on the camera. This lens is fast becoming my favorite lens. The 150mm is sharper and brighter, but it isn’t always as useful on these small streets. The focal length is a bit too long at times. I’d love to have two camera bodies. Then I could have both lenses at the same time.

Right out of the gate, a mentally unbalanced man approached me. This happens everywhere in the world. The crazy people are attracted to foreigners for some reason. We’re like bright flowers filled with nectar and they’re hungry bees. They fly right toward us the second we step outside. These crazy people are always well-known. Everyone in the neighborhood knows them. And everyone has a good laugh when they see the poor foreigner having to deal with the crazy guy. It’s always very funny for everyone. It generally doesn’t bother me that much. This guy was friendly. And he just wanted to babble at me in Indonesian and then have his picture taken. There was no pressure on me to try to communicate, because he wasn’t trying to have a conversation anyway. He was living in his own world. He struck some dramatic kung fu poses, and I took his picture a few times.

At the bridge, I stopped and took some photographs of some greenish/bluish clams and the boys selling them. Those photographs didn’t turn out very good. I realized later on that this was because I had been fiddling around with my camera’s settings, and I had left one setting on and forgotten about it. So the light wasn’t good. But I realized what I had done, and I changed the setting afterward. This Olympus camera can be confusing that way. The menu system is very complicated, and you can easily change something and then forget that you did it. After my pictures of the clams, I took some pictures of some boats on the river, and those pictures turned out much nicer.

On the other side of the bridge, I turned left and found myself outside of a very large second-hand clothing market. It was a covered market, and it consisted of hundreds of small clothing stalls in a dense maze of narrow walkways. There were so many of these stalls that I have to wonder how any of them make enough money to survive. I don’t know how they could make enough to even pay the rent on their stall. The rent must be very low. The clothing was clearly of the type that gets donated around the world and then shipped overseas in huge bales. When you visit Africa, you are always aware of this business because you see people wearing outdated and sometimes very funny clothing from North America and Europe. So you will see people in Africa wearing a T-shirt from the Kansas City Kiwanis club or something. And the slogans on the T-shirts can be very risque and every inappropriate in other ways, but the local people may not even know it. I don’t think the clothing in this market in Tanjungbalai was like that, however. For one thing, I didn’t see the usual goofy T-shirts. The style of the clothing was also not so outdated. Plus, the sizes were fairly small. Clothing from Canada and the US tends to be large, extra-large, and extra-extra-extra large. This clothing was in good condition and all sized to fit the standard Indonesian bodies.

On an earlier walk, I had met a man named Natan who worked in this industry. I met him again yesterday, and he showed me the bales inside his small warehouse. He said that the bales came from Singapore and Malaysia. He mentioned bales from Canada, but I didn’t understand what he said about them. He sold the bales for between 2 and 3 million rupiah. That’s US$145 to US$218. That seems expensive to me, but there is a lot of clothing in each bale. The numbers probably work out. The bales were sorted based on type of clothing. One bale might contain children’s clothing. Another bale might consist of only bedspreads and sheets. Another might be men’s shirts. It’s a fascinating thing to explore because there are so many steps in the process. Natan’s small warehouse would be in the middle of the chain. The clothing had to start somewhere in the world where it was donated to a charity. This clothing would then be sent to a center where it would be sorted and prepared and then bundled into bales. It would have to be shipped to Indonesia in cargo ships. I assume it would then be sold in big lots to distributors who would then sell it to small local wholesalers like Natan. Then Natan would sell it to small retailers. Perhaps there is even one more step in there because one of those stalls I saw in the market seemed to be too small to handle even one bale. Perhaps there are other people who buy the bales and then break down their contents and sell them at wholesale prices to the people in the market. There is a wonderful podcast by Planet Money in which they explore this in depth. They start at a second-hand clothing market like this in Africa and then trace the clothing all the way from its origins in the United States to the customers who buy it and finally wear it in Africa.

I met a few people inside the market including a man from Jakarta visiting friends in Tanjungbalai. He was trying on leather jackets. I was amused to see that the arms on the jackets were too short. This told me that the jackets did NOT come from Canada. Any clothing from Canada would probably have been far too large rather than too small. I also met some students and I posed for pictures with them.

Later on, in a small residential neighborhood I met a friendly older woman, and she invited me into her home. I sat on a plastic chair in her living room and had a nice, long visit with her, her son, her sister, and her son’s friend. She served me tea and bananas and sandwiches made with chocolate sprinkles. She spoke a little English, as did everyone else. Unfortunately, it was just enough to allow them to ask me the usual questions about my age and where I was from and what I was doing in Tanjungbalai. But they didn’t speak enough for me to learn much about them.

The woman wasn’t much older than me, in fact. She told me that she was 57 years old. To me, she looked about 100. It was hard to believe that we were of the same generation. There was no mention of a husband or father, so I don’t know what the deal was there. I also didn’t see much of the house other than the front living room. It was roughly furnished with a table and some plastic chairs and some other chairs. They had set up a small store in the livingroom, and they sold snacks and instant coffee and that sort of thing. There was also a hotplate there. I assume that was for the store and that they had a larger kitchen in the back somewhere. I got the impression that they all lived there, but I don’t know what the sleeping arrangements were like. The woman did talk about being poor quite a bit. It was a topic of conversation with her and she wanted to know if the Philippines was poorer or richer than Indonesia.

The son was pretty technical, and when it came time to take pictures together, he made sure to hook up my phone to his tablet via Bluetooth and transfer the pictures that way. He was quite comfortable just taking over my phone. I was okay with that, but I kept an eye on what he was doing. He was amazed that I didn’t have something called Blackberry Messenger on my phone, and he went straight to the Google Play store to download it and install it. I stopped him before he did that. I can barely comprehend the messaging systems I have on my phone now. I hardly need another one.

Things got a bit crazier on the streets after I said goodbye to this friendly family. There were a lot more children out and about, and quite a large crowd gathered around me from time to time. The sun was going down anyway, and it was time to turn around and slowly make my way back to my hotel. I took a few more pictures along the way, and then I spent a somewhat relaxed evening sorting through them and uploading the best of them to Facebook and to my blog. At one time, Aswin from the hotel knocked on my door. He said that a friend of his was at the hotel and would I mind coming down and talking to her. She was an English student and wanted to chat and practice her English.

I didn’t mind, and I took a quick shower and changed into some more suitable clothing and went down. It was a fairly typical encounter, and one that confused me terribly. This woman wanted me to come to her school and attend an English class. That’s fine. However, she was completely incapable of or unwilling to give any information. It’s remarkably confusing. I think of the opposite situation. Imagine I attended a Spanish class, and I met a man from Spain. I would say, “Would you have time to come speak to my class? Our class is at 7:30 every night and it lasts for one hour. Are you free Wednesday night? Here is the location.” etc.

But this woman could produce no information at all. I had to press her really hard for information, but no matter how many times I asked a question, she would not answer it. It seems so straightforward to me. I agreed to come to her class. Now I just needed to know when, where, and for how long. It’s not complicated. But after more than half an hour, I still had no clue what was expected of me. This would just be an example of a disorganized person except that I have had this experience hundreds of times in my life in Asia. It’s a pattern of behavior, and an extreme one. And it isn’t a language problem. She understood my English perfectly, and I understood her. The problem was one of logic or a lack of a thinking process. It’s so puzzling. I can’t help but think, again, of how difficult it must be for countries to communicate in any official way. If I can’t even make arrangements to visit an English class, how is it possible for countries to do anything related to one another. The cultural and language barriers must be immense.

Tags: Sumatra Part 01