An English friend of mine recently remarked “You know you've been in Indonesia too long when McDonald’s runs out of burgers, and you’re not
even surprised”. Psychologist and author Professor Richard Wiseman concluded
after a series of quirky experiments that Indonesia has the third slowest pace
of life in the world. It’s pretty
evident. I must stress, I have been
overwhelmed by the friendliness, kindness and flexibility (not in the yoga
sense, but in the sense of not having rules for the sake of rules) of the
people, which has been a breath of fresh air having grown tired of the UK’s
anal officialdom and bakery’s that won’t change a ten pound note for you unless
you buy something you don’t want. So, I
have mostly good things to say about the people, but those of you who know me
well know that I’m better at having a rant about stuff that riles me than
pleasantly identifying things, places and people that are functioning properly.
 |
| Sorry, got no burgers left. |
As someone who doesn't eat beef, McDonald’s running out of
burgers doesn't really affect me, but many other aspects of this fascinating
country, if they don’t affect me, certainly make me briefly furious for about
three or four seconds before I swiftly and happily remind myself of the fact that
I am one man from probably the luckiest demographic and generation in
humanity’s history and that I have an excellent, fun, relaxing and well paid
job that affords me a very enviable lifestyle in a beautiful archipelago (well… a sprawling, polluted dirty mess of a city in an otherwise beautiful archipelago).
Far and away the most infuriating thing I see on a daily
basis is parents on a motorcycle wearing helmets, with a child sandwiched
between them without one. When I incredulously
protest about this to anyone in earshot, I am often met with a giggle by an
Indonesian who explains that the law insists on adults wearing helmets, but
children don’t have to. Rather than
appeasing me, this serves to highlight an even more disturbing fact – that some
lawmakers in this country are evidently too stupid to realise that children’s
heads are actually made from the same materials as an adult’s, and are just as
vulnerable to serious injury or death should they rocket head first into a
billboard after a failed attempt by their careless father to squeeze between
two trucks at speed just to gain a few meters. Furthermore, it is at best worrying and at
worst pathetic that some people feel that if the law doesn't force them to
consider the safety of their children in dangerous situations, parental concern doesn't seem to fill the void, leaving children’s heads dangerously exposed on
roads full of impatient and reckless drivers.
Always wanting to see the best in people, if I notice adults and their
children both without helmets, I may give the parents the benefit of the doubt
and assume them to be too poor (there are some seriously poor people round
here), but for those who have found the money to protect their own heads but
not their kids’? Please.
 |
| Stupid, negligent adults with vulnerable children |
Here are some other, less danger-related things that make me
sing “I (We) gotta get outta this place, If it’s the last thing I (we) ever do”
- Hearing the chorus from “My heart will go on” by Celine Dion in my head over and over, occasionally accompanied by a vision of the French-Canadian heavenly crow squawking from the tip of an asteroid, arms outstretched as if drenching the whole universe in her endless glory. In the attempt by some quarters of this society to become as Western as possible regardless of the actual merits of doing so, Celine Dion is the staple soundtrack of all cinema foyers. To make matters worse, my apartment’s management has included this ditty on the instrumental muzak casio-keyboard-built-in-demo style play list of about ten songs which are infuriatingly piped toward the ears of anyone unfortunate enough to have to wait a few minutes for an elevator. I don’t take kindly to this. Bemused locals no doubt wonder why they occasionally see a really tall foreigner grimacing with his palms pressed against his ears while ordering the lift to hurry up. It seems this awful song appeals to those social climbers who cringingly denounce anything from their home country as being unworthy (be that music, movies or even interior design styles) while embracing anything advertised to them as being cool in Europe or America without question. Some of these types think a warung (a super cheap food stall at the side of the road) is beneath them. They deserve better. They deserve McDonald’s, Celine Dion and freaky blue contact lenses that make them look more like aliens than Caucasians. I think they need to have a look at themselves.
- Seeing said folk hanging out in McDonald’s. It seems to be a cool place to hang out if you’ve got a bit more money and want to be seen in a happening place, as is KFC. Thor is going to put the obesity hammer down on this society soon. I wonder if such customers realise that while some of them feel they are showing their social status by eating Western foods, such ‘restaurants’ in the UK are (not discounting the sizable occasional customer base of educated middle class folk enjoying a guilty pleasure) mostly frequented by less educated poor people, the kind that many McDonald’s customers here try to avoid by not visiting warungs.
- Hearing “Someone like you” by Adele. I have an attitude problem when it comes to music. I don’t actually consider it a problem, but it seems many others do. I feel that, despite the endless amount of musical styles and genres available to our ears, music can broadly be lumped into two huge categories. The first is music written purely for the purpose of expressing emotion, be it fun, happiness, sadness, nostalgia, or anything else. Within this huge category there many songs that do nothing for me, but I hold no principled objection to them as I feel that as long as they fall into this first category they have merit. Who am I to judge someone’s artistic output if they created a piece of work to honestly satisfy their creative needs? The second category is music written for the sole purpose of making money. Songs in this category cannot be performed by an individual or group not deemed marketable by a big business, or they simply wouldn’t make as much money. I’m not saying it’s impossible to like these songs; fair play to you if you do, but I don’t even consider them to be music. I know that, by definition of course they are, but most are forgotten after a short period of time because they are basically the product of one big mass marketing exercise and not of human emotion, meaning they likely have no longevity and are exposed as being devoid of any soul once whatever trend they were part of is consigned to history. I’m not going to pretend that I know exactly where the line is to be drawn between these two categories, and that there isn’t a degree of overlap, but as a general rule, we can hear from the beautiful emotive nature of songs such as ‘Life on Mars’ by David Bowie, and the passionate anger of ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage Against the Machine that their music videos do not require the presence of sexy women writhing naked on the bonnet of a Mercedes to sell; likewise it is hard to imagine a Justin Bieber song’s sales not suffering were it to be sung by Thom Yorke of Radiohead instead. I’ve gone off on a tangent here, but the point is I do feel Adele’s “Someone Like You” does have merit. It sounds like a song from the heart. She is not in my eye, a physically attractive woman. She would not be able to crawl around in a thong singing a commercial dance song in the way other successful singers do. The problem I have is that it’s so overplayed. I never liked it in the first place, partly due to the association I have of it with heartbreak, as it was all over the airwaves in the UK after I suffered a particularly intense break up. I then departed to Indonesia where, almost 18 months on, I still hear it almost every day. In taxis, in the mall, in warungs, cafes, bars and nightclubs. It is particularly irritating on a Friday or Saturday night out. Let’s have some fun! Let’s have some James Brown! No, let’s put on a tragic song about heartbreak. And let’s make sure we put it on again an hour later, and again an hour after that.
- Unexpectedly crunching an unidentifiable gritty substance while eating an otherwise normal meal. Or sometimes biting into a small stone. This seems a uniquely Indonesian problem. It happens in around eight out of ten meals. Everything is just too relaxed here. Bit of grit in your dinner? Ah, stop whining, get it down you. It even happens when I cook! I suspect this is because Indonesia’s relaxed attitude to life extends to the rice paddies, meaning that when the rice is packed, it isn’t done with a great degree of diligence, allowing grit and stones to be hidden within. That’s my hypothesis. Further down the chain I cook my dinner and find a stone in my teeth.
- Hearing impatient drivers beeping at you to get a move on before the lights have even turned to green. This even happens a hundred metres or so from the lights. People here seem to think that the guys at the front are blind and need to be made aware that the light will soon change from red to green. Even when they can see that the traffic at the front of the queue has started moving, they will hold down their horns for five seconds at a time. The horn on a car or motorbike has many potential meanings in Surabaya, most of which can be simplified to “I’m a dick”. The only other uses of the horn are when people are understandably reacting to someone being a total dick by pressing their horn. You are driving at a good speed in busy traffic. A dick is desperately trying to squeeze in front of you, even though there is barely any space. “Beep beep!” I reply with “Beep!” which means, “Sorry dick, I’m not letting you in.” You’re trying to pull out into a very busy road at the first sign of a gap in traffic. Seeing said gap, a motorcyclist puts his foot down, in such a hurry to join the traffic jam a few hundred metres further ahead that he is unwilling to slow down to let me onto the road. As I edge out, he accelerates and holds his horn down. This means “I’m a maaaasssive dick and you better realise it or I’ll take us both out in a display of kamikaze bravado”. I saw a horrible crash a few weeks ago. Some dicks in football colours decided to ignore the red light and inch across the city’s busiest crossroads, because after all they are really cool and it is only fair that everyone stop for them. An unfortunate young woman with misplaced confidence in the green light before her eyes smashed straight into the side of a massive dick and unfortunately came out the worse of the two. The dick got up and was promptly apprehended by an onlooking policeman, who hadn’t seen fit to bother intervening until there was an accident. I don’t know if the woman survived. Even with a serious crash scene in front of them in the middle of the junction, dicks announce their presence all around. “Beep! Get out of my way, I’m a dick, I have to get past!” “Beep! Beep! Don’t die on the floor in front of me, I’m a dick!”
- An imbecile trying to overtake you on the side that you have been indicating on for the last five seconds, just as you make the turn. I angrily swear in my almost lost Bishop Auckland accent, calling them all sorts that they don’t understand.
- Being told your order is unavailable, 45 minutes after placing it, just as all your friends' meals arrive. And no, this is not when the restaurant is busy, this is standard practise. “Would you like to choose something different sir?” “I would like to have chosen something different 45 minutes ago, but I guess that would have needed common sense and basic interaction between kitchen and waiting staff”. Way too much to expect of course.
- Being served cow skin amongst your vegetables or even cow snout after explaining that you don’t eat meat. “But it isn’t meat!” A nose isn’t meat! Hey, I don’t eat meat, but that skin, and that nose, gimme it!
- You order a simple bowl of instant noodles at an outdoor street cafe and the woman who serves it to you (I hesitate to use the word waitress – she probably owns the place, she serves customers, takes naps behind the window display of food and practically lives there), without having been asked, cracks a raw egg into your bowl to garnish. Cheers.
- You order toasted chocolate spread bread. Despite no mention of such a conflicting ingredient, grated cheese is served between the two slices of bread with the chocolate spread.
- You pick up a menu in a fancy restaurant. The prices, the font and the overall layout of the menu imply that the food will be good. You read a description of what sounds like an interesting and probably delicious pizza (if you like fish) – ‘stonebaked pizza topped with salmon and tuna, garnished with rocket and olive oil and topped with a….’ until you get to the end of the description… ‘Kraft single(!)’. Wow, you guys really know what you’re doing. Stick to making Indonesian food. You’re good at that, and it’s nice.
- A taxi driver sees you coming, scrambles around in his glove box to find a CD, and puts on what I imagine is ‘The Best (or worst) of Bryan Adams’, seemingly for the foreigner’s benefit. Can’t fault the man’s willingness to please, but he’d do me less harm if he drove off with my luggage while I was using the ATM than forcing me to listen to such corny heart-pop. “Take me as I am, Take my life, I would give it all, I would sacrifice”. Bryan! You need to find a new woman for two reasons. Firstly, if she’s the kind of woman that needs you to sacrifice yourself to keep her interested, well mate, that’s s&m gone too far in my book. Secondly, based on my own life experiences, no woman out there can possibly be attracted to such a self pitying stance of desperation. You should have written her a funk tune man. But you can’t do that now. You’ve done the damage with this tune already. Move onto to the next target, a clean slate. Good luck.
- Your internet or utilities are cut off without warning because of a late payment. No, it doesn’t cross their mind to simply call you or put a note through your door (these services are all provided in house at my apartment complex) requesting payment in which case I would pay immediately as I always have enough in the bank to do so.
I’ll probably add more to this list as ever more incredibly
illogical events catch my eye.
Hopefully they won’t and I can spend my remaining time here in a state
of calm.
No comments:
Post a Comment