Wednesday, November 25, 2015

It’s another rainy morning. I don’t understand exactly why, but when it rains, my room can be overhwelmed with the smell of fish. Apparently, the rain water mixes with fish somewhere and the smell appears here. That tells me I’m in Indonesia. I also know I’m in Indonesia because of the traffic noise. I don’t know if I’ve made this point clear before, but the traffic noise is such an issue mainly because the traffic consists almost entirely of poorly maintained scooters and motorcycles. This is not the steady hum of cars on a road. This is the room-shaking rumble and roar of countless small motorcycle engines. During the day, the noise is non-stop. At night, it diminishes, but it never stops. Right across the road from my hotel, there is a large bank with a big set of ATM machines. Getting cash from an ATM is a big part of daily life here, and there is a constant stream of people getting money. In the dead of night, one extremely loud motorcycle is much more noticeable than during the day when there are a dozen at once. But I sleep through it just fine. I always use earplugs, and my mental state is good. I don’t resent the noise or fight it. I just accept it as part of the scenery. I do wonder, though, what it must be like to grow up here. On my walk yesterday, I started to lose it a little bit towards the end. I got stuck on a busy road for a while and the swirling, roaring, non-stop flow of traffic started to stress me out. I deal with it partially because I know it is a temporary situation. Imagine if this was your life and it would never end.

This isn’t a new game or a new thought by any means, but I’ve amused myself (very briefly) by trying to come up with a reason for every single person I see to be on the road and going somewhere. I can never do it. It’s strange to look out over my balcony and see hundreds and hundreds of people racing everywhere all day long. Where could they all possibly be going? Going to the shop to buy bread. Okay. Going to the bank to get money. Sure. Going to the market to buy some food for dinner. Taking something somewhere to have it repaired. And then I’ve run out of ideas. There is no way I can possibly imagine a reason for all of them to be roaring past my balcony on their motorcycle.

Well, anyone looking at me yesterday could have guessed what I was doing by the camera in my hand. I had my Olympus with me, and I had the 150mm lens on it. Like a hunter with a certain rifle, you can guess what I am after based on the lens I have on my camera. The 24mm means I am after landscapes. The 150mm means I am after portraits. I’ve been thinking (not for the first time), that my camera setup is all wrong. I’ve long been prejudiced against zoom lenses, so I have only prime lenses. That’s never been a big problem before, but here in Indonesia, my photograpy is being dictated by other people. I might want to take portraits, but people will call me over and ask that I take a picture of them and their five friends (or twenty friends). To do that properly, I’d have to change lenses on my camera. Obviously, I can’t do that every time, so a zoom lens would be much better. When I bought my Olympus camera, there were no good zoom lenses available. But recently, the released a set of 3 very good zooms. If I could do it easily, I’d like to sell my current lenses and buy one of these zooms. Maybe. Or else I’d like to have a second camera body. That would make a lot of sense. I currently have five lenses: 24mm, 50mm, 60mm macro, 90mm, and a 150mm. (Rick will know what that means.) And that is kind of wasteful when you think about it. I can only have one lens on the camera at a time, so four of them are just sitting in a bag doing nothing. I own them and paid for them, but I’m not using them. A second camera body would mean I could have two focal lengths available at any one time. So I could shoot my portraits with my 150mm and then shoot small groups with the 50mm. Alternatively, I could buy one of the zoom lenses. One of their new zooms is a 24mm-80mm constant F2.8. (Again, Rick will know what that means.) Hmm. I was thinking that would be a perfect lens for me, but again based on my experience here, the range might not be right. It’s too short on the zoom end. And it would end up replacing only my smallest and lightest lenses – the 24 and the 90. That wouldn’t save me any weight. Still, it would be a nice lens to have. But a second body would actually be a better tool to have than that lens now that I think about it.

Anyway, enough about that. My walk yesterday took me to a brand new part of the city. I crossed the bridge on the way to the ferry dock as before, but this time I turned left instead of right. This brought me along the banks of the main river to a big bridge. I crossed that bridge and then turned back and walked through the small streets back to my hotel. I had the usual encounters with all kinds of people that wanted their pictures taken by themselves or with me. People then wanted my Facebook information. A solution to my camera troubles was to take my portraits with my Olympus and the 150mm lens. Then I’d whip out my smartphone and take a group shot. That worked out fairly well. Once or twice, I even handed over my smartphone to someone else to take a picture, but that never led to any success. The pictures were almost always terrible. But it was better than nothing. I’m just worried they will break the phone somehow. I should probably use the Canon instead. I think I don’t because it bothers me every time they jab the shutter button like it is bug they are trying to crush. The idea with cameras in general is to press the shutter down gently halfway. Then the camera locks focus on the subject. Once it is focused, you press the shutter button the rest of the way. But, of course, no one here knows that about my camera. They’re used to smartphones and you just jab the screen with your finger to take a picture. So they do that with the Canon and it shakes the camera and makes the picture blurry. They don’t hold the camera steady.

A couple of the areas I went through were quite poor. Anyone living alongside rivers and oceans is almost always among the poorest people. It’s interesting that they model the very first of human civilizations. People historically have always lived beside rivers first. We need the water source for everything – for drinking, for washing, for irrigating crops, to carry away sewage, etc. But then technology advanced to a state where we can live far from the water source. We use pipes to bring the water to us and pipes to take the waste away. It means we can live in cleaner and better and more healthy environments. But poor people today can’t afford that technology, so they live right beside the water. The catch is that it isn’t as healthy as it used to be. The rivers can be very dirty and a source of every disease imagineable. In fact, this land beside the rivers is the least desirable, which is why they can afford to live there in the first place. They often are squatting there and have no legal title to the land.

Even so, everyone in these poor areas seemed to have electricity and a TV. Nice clothes weren’t in short supply either. So the economic lives of people remains mysterious. I did happen across one big social event. I saw some large colorful banners on the streets. These large banners are custom ordered by people and then put on display to congratulate people for births, graduations, marriages, etc. I think they are also used for funerals. I guess they’re similar to flowers or wreaths in Canadian culture. But these are much, much more ostentatious. I never did get the full story, but I think this party was for the baptism of a couple of babies or something to do with a special stage in their lives. They must have been special babies, because there were seven or eight really large banners on display. (Indonesia is Muslim, but there is a Christian minority.)

A woman saw me walk past, and she invited me inside to join the party. I ended up staying only for a few minutes. To be honest, I didn’t really want to stay at all. Had I shown any interest, I could have stuck around and had a big meal with them and drinks and much more. When I showed up, they were just beginning to bring out large trays of food and put them on the tables. I knew that if I wanted to escape, I’d have to do it soon. Once all the food was out, I’d probably have to stay and eat. Not that it would be such a terrible thing, but I had just begun my walk, and I didn’t want to sit down and be trapped there. Plus, there is only so much that can be said in the five or six sentences of English that most people know. I sat down at a table with a group of men, and we quickly ran through the standard topics: my name; where I’m from; where I’m staying; why I’m here; and then general astonishment at my being alone and being single. Cue the laughter as elegible single women are presented and teased. A couple of pictures. And that’s the whole encounter. Staying longer than that just means going through the same set of questions with a new group of people. Then another group. And another. By then, my grinning muscles would be aching. So I went through the routine with one group and then left.

There isn’t much else to say. I took some pictures of some children and some groups of mothers and their children during my walk. I passed a lot of schools, but luckily I was at the back side and I was never spotted. I got some good views of some new areas from the new bridge I discovered. The river has been rising steadily because of all the rain, and it was wide and moving fast. A lot of debris was coming down with the water and piling up against the bridge’s pylons and against the posts holding up houses. People were busy clearing away the log jams. If they allow it to build up too much, it will catch more and more debris until the water pressure could become strong enough to damage their homes.

The most pleasant encounter of the day came towards the end of my walk. I spotted a very clean and nice-looking fruit juice stand, and I stopped there to get a mango shake. The juice stand turned out to be sitting right outside the family’s house, and they had some chairs and a table sitting in the shade under some trees. I sat there and ran through the usual questions with the father and the mother and then with the daughter. The daughter spoke English a bit better than most, and she was pleasant to talk to. I posed for pictures with the whole family, and those pictures turned out very nice.

When I went out for a late lunch/early dinner, I was unpleasantly surprised to see that all of my usual restaurants were closed. In fact, many businesses were closed. I hadn’t heard anything about a holiday, but it must have been a special day. (I learned later that it was Teacher’s Day, which is a pretty big deal.) It worked out well, though, because it gave me the urge to see if spaghetti sauce was available. I still had some spaghetti in my bags from Malaysia. I was happy to see some jars of spaghetti sauce in a local shop, and I bought a jar to try it out. I cooked up some spaghetti in my room (I really should have put my stove out on the balcony, but I didn’t want an audience), added the sauce, and had a wonderful dinner. I love spaghetti. It gives me a warm and full feeling that a local meal never does. I find that with local meals, I never get enough food. I’d have to order two or three full meals in order to feel full. A big bowl of spaghetti is more satisfying. I used half the jar of sauce, and I will have the other half tonight.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01