Monday, November 16, 2015

Well, according to my smartphone (which has access to the Internet), it is 8:30 in the morning. According to my watch, alarm clock, and computer, it is 9:30. It seems that the Internet is much smarter than me because it knew that the time in Sumatra was one hour different from the time in Malaysia. I honestly had no idea. The trip from Malaysia to Sumatra was so short that it never occurred to me that I’d be crossing a time zone. I never thought to even check. In fact, this not checking is a theme of my little trip to Sumatra. I have become so accustomed to the relative ease of living in places like the Philippines and Malaysia that I was not mentally prepared for Indonesia at all. Normally, when coming to a country like this, I’d be on edge and doing research and planning. But this time, I just went la-la-la la-dee-da and hopped on a ferry. So almost everything I encounter is a bit of a shock – particularly the language barrier. I’ve gotten so used to people speaking English (even in Taiwan), that I’m constantly taken aback when I walk into a shop here and find that the person does not speak a work of English. Well, OF COURSE they don’t. This is Sumatra. But my brain hasn’t caught up to this fact yet. And I’ve forgotten just how hard that makes life. You just can’t do anything if you can’t speak. Even the simplest of tasks is a challenge.

Well, yesterday was a fairly relaxed day compared to the previous one. Even so, it was interesting. I happened to have a little bit of alcohol fuel with me, so I fired up my Trangia stove in my room and had coffee while I wrote about the ferry ride and my arrival. I spent a lot longer doing that than I expected, and by the time I went outside, it was already mid-afternoon. My first stop was at the Samsung store to say hello to Rea and report back about the cell phone and SIM card.

The Samsung shop seems a bit out of place in this city. It’s a brand new store with all the same perfect lighting and perfect and clean displays that you see in any Samsung store in an expensive mall in Malaysia. Everything around it is old and jumbled and disorganized and somewhat dirty and grey. The Samsung store just sits there glowing white like a spaceship from an alien world. It’s also fully air conditioned inside, which is a relief.

Rea happened to be in the back taking a nap when I showed up. She is the supervisor at the store, and two of her staff were outside working. Neither of them spoke a word of English, but when I asked about Rea, the woman went to the back to get her. When Rea came out, she was yawning and rubbing her eyes, so I knew she had been sleeping. I felt bad about waking her up, but she seemed happy enough to see me. It’s odd, though. It’s hard to find your footing when dealing with people from countries like Indonesia. When you have social interactions with anyone – friends, family, co-workers, strangers – you are constantly monitoring things to see how the other person feels and how you should behave. Do they want to talk or do they want you to go away? Are you bothering them? You look for a hundred social cues. But even with Rea, a woman I’d had quite an adventure with racing through the streets on the back of her scooter, I wasn’t sure of what was going on. I was reading her face and body language, and I got the impression that she was unhappy that I was there and that I was annoying her. But then she would say something that indicated she was very pleased I had come to visit. It’s difficult to tell.

In any event, she pulled up a chair for me and invited me to sit down at their brilliantly white display table, and we spent some time chatting. We started with the phone, of course, and I told her that much of the time, I wasn’t getting good access to the Internet. I guess you want to have a setting of H+ at the top. That means you have a strong connection. Then you can watch videos on YouTube and do anything you want. But I was always getting E, which was a much weaker connection. I was just curious if that was normal or if that meant something was wrong. Perhaps one just got different signal strengths all the time depending on whether you are indoors or outside or near a cell tower. The funny thing is that I had great difficulty getting answers to any of my questions. I realized that Rea (and all the other people I’d been talking to the last couple of days) had difficulty picking up on the tone or sentence structure of a question. I’d ask a question, but she wouldn’t realize it was a question. She missed the rising tone at the end or she just didn’t notice the question format of the sentence. They can safely ignore a statement. I can babble on endlessly about something, and if they don’t understand, it’s fine. They just nod their heads and pretend they know what I’m saying. I think they’re listening and understanding, when really they’re not. It doesn’t matter that much. But then I ask a question and they ignore me completely. There is no reaction. I would repeat the question several times and really empasize the “who” or the “when” or the “what” or the “why” and make it sound like a question, but it didn’t help at all. Rea would just stare at me, and I’d wonder what was going on. Then it eventually dawned on me that she had no idea I was asking a question at all.

I could go on and on about this general topic. There are so many complicating factors surrounding communicating with people from another country who speak another language. I think that in terms of lessons learned from traveling, that is the main one. This lesson goes all the way back to my first experience – the CWY exchange program with India. The program even had exercises they made us do that demonstrated clearly all the problems that can occur when you are trying to communicate across a language and culture barrier, all the misunderstandings that can occur. The lesson is important because it relates to business and war and everything. I guess it is one of the many things that has made me a cynic. I often hear people bemoaning the state of the world and being amazed that there so many wars all the time. After my experiences traveling, I feel the opposite. I’m amazed that there aren’t MORE wars. There are thousands of ways that people from different cultures can misunderstand each other. If I can’t even arrive at a ferry port without nearly losing my mind and wanting to scream at everyone, how can I expect politicians to do any better? I can’t even pop into a local shop and order a bowl of noodles without triggering a huge cross-cultural misunderstanding. So when two countries end up at each other’s throats and at war, it seems perfectly understandable to me. I can’t stand it when people come out with platitudes like how traveling has helped them see that people all around the world are all the same. Nonsense. People are not the same. People are different. Extremely different. So if you don’t want anger and misunderstandings and war, you have to work hard at it. It takes hard work, knowledge, skill, and practice.

During our chat, I learned a few things about Rea. Her home town is Bukittinggi, a very popular tourist town in west Sumatra. It’s located in a beautiful mountainous area. I had hoped to go there, but Rea made it sound like there were far too many tourists there. She said she saw tourists all the time. She has been working for Samsung for a few years. I don’t know how she got her first job or how she rose to the level of supervisor, but as a supervisor, she is sent to new cities to manage new stores when they are first opened. So Samsung has moved her to different cities all over Sumatra, the latest one being Tanjungbalai. She has never been outside Indonesia, but she has been all over Sumatra and to various places on the central island of Java. She dreams of visiting other countries around the world someday. She has a sister living in Malaysia. This sister is married to a boat captain on the island of Langkawi, which is a big tourist spot in Malaysia.

Since Rea is a cell phone expert, we chatted about Android vs Windows Phone vs iPhone. She was wondering why I didn’t have an iPhone. In her experience, westerners prefer iPhones. I even managed to show her a few things, including the camera function of Google Translate. You just point the video camera on your phone at any writing in any language, and the phone automatically translates it right in the video. You don’t have to enter any text. It’s hard to describe, but you can just look at whatever video is on your phone’s screen and all the signs and text in it will be translated to English right there on the screen in real time. It’s total science fiction.

We also talked about languages. I was wondering how Rea spoke such good English. Did she take special courses? Was it her hobby? Was she just good at languages? I had a lot of trouble getting her to understand my question. I was wondering if everyone in Indonesia studies English in school. And if so, how is it that she speaks English well and so many don’t? There had to be some special reason for her to come out of the Indonesian school system speaking English well and other people don’t. I never did get an answer. I still don’t know if English is a standard part of the school curriculum here. In this conversation, my poor language ability became apparent. My ears just don’t hear sounds very well. Rea was trying to teach me how to say a couple of simple things in Indonesian, and I was hopeless. I have to see things written down in order to understand it. For dinner, I was going to just hop across the street to this little shop that sold bowls of noodles. Rea told me the name for that type of dish. She said it several times, and then I entered it into Google Translate on my phone as “pancit”. That’s what I heard. Rea laughed when she saw that. I had it wrong. It’s actually “pangsit”. My ears couldn’t heard the difference between “pan” and “pang”. But when I see it written down, it all makes sense. I guess that’s just how my brain works. I have to start with the written word.

I don’t know anything about Indonesian, but I’m already getting the impression that it has a fairly simple and logical alphabet. For example, I thought this woman’s name was Ria. When I hear that sound, that is how I would write it. But we are now friends on Facebook, and I see that she spells her name as Rea. And that makes more logical sense. The sound “e” is represented by the letter “e”. It’s logical. The same for “pangsit”. I wrote the “s” sound as a “c” – pancit – because that’s how it is in English in a word like that. But it’s not logical. It’s more logical to write all “s” sounds as the letter “s”. Why not?

With information from Rea, I walked confidently across the street to have dinner. The man running this little noodle stand came up to me, and I said “pangsit” and that was all. He indicated that I should sit down, and then he got to work. The bowl of noodles he presented me with was FAR better than I expected. It wasn’t just some noodles and a bit of broth. It was a complete meal with big green leaves of some kind, various shredded meats, and some really tasty dumplings along with lots of flavor. I took a picture of it and put it on Facebook. He served all the noodles and the fixings in one bowl and the steaming hot broth in a separate bowl. I assumed you were expected to dump the broth over the noodles yourself. I don’t know why that is so, but it was a nice presentation of the meal. The only problem was that the plastic bowl holding the broth was so hot that I could barely touch it. I nearly spilled the whole thing as I tried.

The dish was delicious, and midway through I decided to have a second bowl. This is an interesting point where language and culture barriers come into play. There’s a flow to every social interaction and we often get by by anticipating what comes next. I had ordered my noodles, received my noodles, eaten my noodles, and now the man at the restaurant was expecting me to pay for my noodles. That’s what he was listening for. But I threw him a curve ball. I wanted to order ANOTHER bowl of pangsit. And this is probably unheard of. Who would do such a thing? So no matter how many times I tried to explain what I wanted (using body language and hand gestures, etc), he simply couldn’t understand. He assumed – quite naturally – that I was asking about the price. It was time to pay, after all. Because his expectations were different from mine, we couldn’t communicate. In the end, he called over a friend of his that spoke a bit of English, and this man helped clear everything up, and I got my second bowl of noodles. It was as good as the first, but partway through the meal, my glasses slipped off my nose and fell down right into the big chunk of noodles I was in the middle of scooping up with my chopsticks. This is the kind of thing that only seems to happen to me. The noodles got all wrapped around my glasses and I was struggling to get it all untangled with glasses dipping into my bowl. I couldn’t move much because the glasses were dripping wet with broth and dragging long noodles around all over the place. The Indonesians could only stare and wonder what was wrong with these foreigners. They are so helpless they can’t even eat noodles.

Rea had told me that pangsit cost 10,000 rupiah, which is $1 Canadian. But this man charged me 13, 000 rupiah per bowl. I don’t know if Rea was wrong or if it is standard practice to overcharge foreigners. Everyone always thinks we are super rich and can afford anything. I was hoping (based on stories I’ve heard) that Indonesia would be really cheap. Everyone said it was the cheapest place in Asia and much cheaper than Malaysia or the Philippines. But so far that hasn’t been my experience. My hostel room in Malaysia was about the same as my room here, and it was much nicer. My meals in Malaysia at the Indian restaurant came to 6 ringgit every day, which is $1.82 Canadian. And that is for a huge meal of rice and three other dishes. My two bowls of pangsit were great, but they didn’t fill me up completely, and they cost $2.50 Canadian. So far, I’m finding Indonesia to be more expensive than Malaysia.

After my two bowls of pangsit, I went for a walk around this part of town. To be honest, there is no way to describe the experience. Photographs wouldn’t help either. The only way to get across the experience would be with video. The streets were filled with scooters and tricycles racing past at high speeds. They come from all different directions and honk their horn all the time. There are few traffic lights. Most intersections have no lights at all, and people just drive through while honking their horn. They’re good at it, and the hundreds of scooters just weave in and out in a complex ballet.

The sides of the streets are lined with food stalls serving every type of mysterious snack or food you can imagine. One thing I’ve noticed is that most of these food stalls have the name of the food written on the outside. That’s handy. My noodle shop had the word “pangsit” written on the cart outside in big black letters. So that is a handy way to learn the names of different foods. Being a tall white guy, I was a big attraction as I walked along. They don’t see many foreigners here. Everyone said hello and other things. Most of the time, I didn’t know what they were saying even when they were speaking English. I just returned the greetings as best I could. Then out of nowhere, I saw a long colorful train coming down the street. It was a children’s ride made up of a series of toy train cars decked out in hundreds of bright lights. Further up the street, there were about a dozen miniature merry-go-rounds equally bright with hundreds of lights. Each merry-go-round had perhaps eight small cars or airplanes or boats that the children could sit in and go around. Each ride was powered by a teenage boy sitting in a chair and operating bicycle pedals with his feet. It was a wonderful scene.

Across the street from the merry-go-rounds, I spotted a ticketing office for the ferry that runs between Tanjungbalai and Klang. I plan on taking that ferry back to Malaysia, so I popped inside to ask about the schedule and such things. Unfortunately, I ran smack into that language and culture barrier again. The man inside did not speak any English. And my magic smartphone wasn’t any help. I used it to translate “schedule” into Indonesian, but he had no idea what I was asking. Finally, this man called in another man and this second man cleared up the confusion. It turns out my question about the schedule made little sense because the ferry left every day (except Sunday). My smartphone has become a key part of my life in a very short time. My GPS mapping programs allows me to drop a pin anywhere I like. So while I was at the ticketing office, I put a pin on my map and labelled it. Now when I return in two months (assuming I leave), I’ll know exactly where the ticketing office is. Not only does this mean I don’t have to write anything down, it means that I don’t even have to know my relative location. I can be anywhere in Tajungbalai. I can be completely lost. And I just have to hit one buttton and it will give me a route from my current location to the ticketing office. I just have to follow the arrows on the map on my phone. It’s very cool.

It was still relatively early in the evening by that point, but I was exhausted. This has been a constant thing with me for a long time. I’m tired all the time. Even now as I’m typing, I can barely function. I had a good nights sleep, but I could fall over right now and go to sleep. I don’t know when this started, but it seems to have been around for a long time. I’m tired all the time. I wish I had more energy. Maybe I’m not sleeping as well as I think I am.

And that brings my story up to date. I woke up this morning to the discouraging sound of heavy rain. It stopped for a while, but it’s raining again now. I was blase about coming to Sumatra during the monsoon season, but that may have been a mistake. Perhaps this weather exists only along the east coast and it is better inland and on the west coast. I don’t know. I’ve asked lots of people here about the weather and the rainy season and the road conditions, but I don’t get any useful information. It’s the culture thing again. Yesterday, there was a funny moment. I was talking to Rea about Lake Toba and how I was going to go there next. Rea and I have been talking endlessly about my bicycle and traveling by bicycle. She has seen lots of pictures of my bike and my trailer and she’s seen pictures of my bike trips in Ethiopia and Guinea and the Philippines. We’ve talked about how I’m going to ride my bike around Sumatra. Yet, when I mentioned Lake Toba, she had a long conversation with her co-worker and then turned to me and told me all about which bus I had to take to get there and how long it would take. I gave her a puzzled look and said that I was going to ride my bike. She was astonished. And I was astonished that she was astonished. We’d been talking about my bike trip around Sumatra for a long time. How did she not understand? The answer is that from an Indonesia point of view, riding a bicycle is pure insanity. No one in their right mind would ride a bike if they had enough money to ride in a bus. So even though we’d talked about my bike trip a long time, it never really dawned her that I was riding a bike. It just made no sense.

5:24 p.m.

This is how I keep my journal. I will write in the morning and mark the date. But later in the day, if I write anything, I just note the time. As you can see, it is nearly 5:30. Today has been another recovery day. I need a lot of those apparently. One really difficult day on a ferry and bike to get to Tanjungbalai, and then I need three days to recover from the trauma.

That’s not really true. I just enjoy towns like Tanjungbalai. I often end up hanging out in local towns like this. There is nothing special about them and other foreigners generally hate them. They head to the places where you can trek to the top of a volcano or go into the jungle to see orangutans. I’m such a boring person, I am entertained by a little train that goes down the street or a ordinary noodle shop in an ordinary town.

My plan was to move out of this hotel – this “losmen” – and move into a much nicer one that I found. However, it rained so hard all morning that I couldn’t leave. Checkout time is noon, and it was still raining hard at noon. I could have made the switch, but it was too much trouble. Instead, I forked over another 80,000 rupiah for one more night, hoisted my umbrella, and went out looking for food. I intended to go right next door to a little shop that sells a type of local rice pancake called roti cane, or something like that. Unfortunately, it was closed. I was told it opens late in the afternoon. I walked a bit further intending to find a special place to eat, but it was raining so much that I just went straight back to the pangsit shop. My bowl of noodles didn’t strike me as quite as tasty as yesterday, but at least I avoided getting my glasses mixed up with my noodles. That isn’t to say I didn’t have trouble with my glasses, because I did. I carry them on a cord around my neck, and this cord constantly gets caught in things. Today, I caught the cord with my hand, and it pulled down on the arms of the glasses and snapped one of them right off. It was only a matter of time before that happened. I’m going to try to fix them with Krazy Glue, but that never works. I remember seeing the commercials for Krazy Glue for years and years, and this glue could do anything. But it’s really just a lie. I don’t think I’ve ever had Krazy Glue actually work for me the way it does in the commercials.

I seem to have a neverending list of errands to run. I’m always shopping for bits and bobs to fix this or fix that. And I’m always looking for unusual things. It’s my lot in life. Today, after my pangsit breakfast, I went looking for fuel for my Trangia cookstove. I travel with two stoves. One is a big monster stove that can use any fuel in the world. The other is a tiny alcohol stove called a Trangia. I love my Trangia. It’s so quiet and simple that I can use it inside hotel rooms. It’s a bit dangerous, but I’m careful. And I usually set it up in the bathroom where I can’t set anything on fire. This allows me to make hot coffee or noodles or spaghetti in my room and then I can write in my journal and relax instead of always going out to a restaurant.

However, I have to find special fuel for this stove. It burns a type of alcohol fuel, and this fuel has many different names and it changes in every country. In Canada, it’s easy to find, of course. But in Asia, it’s more difficult. And I can’t ask local people because they don’t understand what I’m talking about. So all I can do is go to many different stores and look around on my own. While I was in the Philippines, I learned that you can buy this alcohol at paint stores. It is used as a paint thinner. So I decided to look for a paint store or a hardware store here. But no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find one. Rea just sent me a message with a possible location for a paint store. I’ll go there tomorrow. I did find a type of alcohol at a pharmacy. But it is isopropyl alcohol. It will burn if it is 91% pure, but it leaves black soot on your pot. I hate that. I want to find better fuel.

I also wanted to find instant coffee and creamer. This is the other great pleasure of my mornings. And I can be quite specific about what I want. For example, it’s easy to buy 3-in-1 coffee packets here (coffee+cream+sugar premixed). That is what everyone in Asia drinks. But it is mostly sugar, and I don’t want any sugar at all. I just want to find big bags of instant coffee and then a separate bag of coffee creamer/whitener. Then I can just mix it up myself. I ended up having to walk a couple of kilometers to a place called Hypermart. It’s a giant luxury grocery store combined with a hardware section, electronics section, appliance section, etc. It felt otherwordly inside that store. It was exactly like the Samsung store – clean, white, bright, luxurious – and completely empty. I was almost the only customer in this giant place. I guess most Indonesians can’t afford to shop there. I found some instant coffee and even some Coffeemate. So I was happy.

I had a lot of adventures as I walked to and from the Hypermart. People reacted to me as if they had just seen a movie star or Bigfoot. Lots of people shouted greetings or other things at me. Most people get around on three-wheeled motorcycles. They’re basically a motorcycle with a big passenger section attached. They call them “becak” (pronounced “bay-check”). The drivers of these becak saw me walking and saw a potential customer. They all shouted at me and stopped to offer me a lift. I prefer to walk or ride my bike pretty much all the time, and these men couldn’t understand that at all. They were very insistent, and it became a bit tiresome to constantly have to deal with these guys as I walked.

One becak stopped beside me, and a young girl – obviously a student – popped her head out and gave me a glorious smile from underneath her hijab and started chattering away in English. She told me that she was studying English, and she wanted me to help her. Basically, she just wanted to have a chat with a foreigner. So I stood there for a few minutes and let her ask me the usual questions like “How old are you?” and “Where are you from?” and “What is your name?” Her English was actually quite good, and I was able to ask her questions in turn and she was able to answer them. It turned out that the driver of the becak was her father, and he looked on with pride as his daughter demonstrated her language skills. Rea must have been like that when she was young – bright and animated and with a natural ability for English.

While walking around, you realize just how young the population of Indonesia is. You see students everywhere. They all wear white school uniforms, so they are very recognizable, and they seem to make up the majority of the population. They go to and from school in these motorcycle taxis and they often fill them to the brim with five or six or more students piling in. They often also drive their own scooters. They look far too young to be driving them. No one wears a helmet, and I’m sure none of them have a driver’s license. I often wonder where they get the money to buy them. One has an image of these countries as relatively poor, but then everyone has a motorcycle or a scooter and the latest smartphone. So they can’t be that poor.

Another time, a man inside a building shouted a greeting at me. I turned and went inside to see what the place was all about. Unfortunately, he couldn’t speak a word of English. Neither could anyone else. They asked me to sit down and they offered me drinks and everyone shook my hand and they all talked and explained, but I had no idea what was going on or why they were so excited to see me. I think it was some kind of political campaign office, but I don’t really know. Stuff like that happened all day long with people introducing themselves and asking random questions. And afterwards, I’d be left wondering what that was all about. It’s all a big mystery.

 

 

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01