Time Traveling Laundry

And Other Tales of Bahasa Indonesia

"She is useless" - "He keeps beating me"

“So will the laundry be ready by tomorrow morning?” I asked. 

“Yes,” the woman answered, “or maybe yesterday.”

‘Yesterday?’ I thought. I wondered at her comment in my head, although my surprise must have also shown on my face. At our previous accommodations, laundry had come back the next day or even the same day. But this was something new – the phenomenal return time she proposed was a bit unbelievable.

Of course, it was just a language mix-up, one of many which we have grown accustomed to. Like all the other times, it was cleared up quickly. She had obviously meant ‘today’, which made more sense, although it was not as much fun as imagining our t-shirts and underwear traversing the fourth dimension.

Plenty of people in the small towns we’ve stayed in speak a little English, mainly thanks to the presence of other surfers and travelers like ourselves. But that wasn’t always enough to get by, so Paul has been working diligently to learn Bahasa Indonesia, the Indonesian language. I’ve picked up a few things too, since it’s not a terribly difficult language. But along the way we’ve discovered a number of similar sounding words that have very different meanings. For example:

Tiga (TEE-gah) – Three
vs
Tidak (TEE-dah) – No

and

Bawah (BAH-wah) – Below
vs
Bawang (BAH-wang) – Onion

Don't forget your bucket

Kelapa Luckily, we haven’t had many problems with those sets, and mixing them up wouldn’t be a big deal. But I discovered another pair that could result in some major confusion. Most small towns have a village head, the kepala desa, whom you would ask for if you needed to stay a night in town and there were no regular accommodations available. However, it would be bad to mix that up with kelapa, the word for coconut – you might find yourself asking for The Village Coconut. And before I looked up the exact meanings of each word, I worried that a mix-up could have you calling the chief The Head Coconut.

With problems like that, it is important to be able to say what you mean. Our guidebook was a good start – it helped us learn useful phrases like, “Where is the bathroom?” and, “I’d like to order the grilled goat, please.” But it is fairly limited, and when we are away from the vast resources of the internet, and we most often are, it frequently comes up short. It provided little aid in communicating truly important things, such as: “My room has bees,” or, “There are goats in your rice,” or, “Come quickly! The third monkey is back!”

The Third Monkey

Soft Values In our quest for a larger Indonesian vocabulary, multilingual product packaging has been fairly helpful, and often amusing as well. As with many languages, translating Indonesian into English is less of a science than an imprecise art, especially when attempted by those with a limited and fuzzy understanding of the real meanings and best uses of words. The intentions are sincere, but you end up with things like toilet paper that will bring your family ‘soft’ values, or sauce that provides ‘a delicious taste of food’.

Delicious Taste of Food While most labels are useful aids to communication, they can also be deceiving. The front of a package of margarine featured the word ‘serbaguna’, which we assumed to mean ‘margarine’. However, when Paul tried  to purchase more, repeating “Serbaguna, serbaguna!” only produced blank stares and a few chuckles from various food store staff. It was only after returning home without success that he had the time to research the word and find out that he had been insisting, “Multipurpose, multipurpose!” to the baffled locals.

Sometimes, no translation is necessary – the Indonesian words are entertaining by themselves. For example, the word for water is ‘air’, the word for hour is ‘jam’, and the word for for paint is ‘cat’. We’ve gotten used to some things like that, but it’s still a bit odd to consume beverages whose main ingredients include air. Despite that sort of confusing translation, there are plenty of cognates – words that sound similar in both languages. Es=ice, botol=bottle, and so forth. And most importantly, as this image of our feline friend demonstrates, the word for tea is teh.

Overall, learning Indonesian has been an entertaining process. From bees in our room (it was really a gigantic wasp-type thing) to time-traveling laundry, we’ve experienced the joys and the challenges of the age-old problem that is multi-lingual communication. I encourage you to try it some time, with a language of your choice. For now, this is The Village Coconut, signing out.

Teh Botol Lol

Expectations (2010-04-28)

When I envisioned being in Indonesia, I saw scenes of line after line of surf wrapping around a beautiful point break. I saw clear blue water, sandy beaches, and palm trees swaying on the horizon. I saw myself surfing every morning, and some afternoons, I saw quiet, rustic villages populated by a mix of surfers and local rice farmers or fishermen. Things haven’t exactly turned out the way I expected.Cimaja Point on a Small Day For starters, the waves have been far less consistent than I thought they would be. Even on the good days the swells are often mixed up or confused, and break inconsistently. We’ve gone, at times, for days without any waves at all. The prime spot in Cimaja is a point break that is truly epic on larger swells, but the ride is short, and when it’s big, it’s scary big. On small days, on the other hand, it tends to be unsurfable, especially at low tide when there are boulders sticking out of the break. Other spots in the area are mostly beach breaks, and are usually either closed out or too weak to surf. And that’s not to mention the dirty river water washing out to sea near the break, The Creek That Drains Near Cimaja Pointor all the trash littering the beach. Indonesia doesn’t exactly have the kind of garbage collection or sewage treatment infrastructure that the United States has, in fact they seem to have none outside of large cities. Our best surf so far was in Sawarna, which actually is a quiet rustic village, where the left hand coral reef break seemed to fire perfectly every morning. Staying there has been the highlight of the trip, and it was an excellent opportunity to practice surfing a super consistent leftward breaking wave. But now we’re staying at Ocean Queen, a very pleasant resort west of Cimaja, and after a week in Cimaja not paddling out because the waves were too big and the break too crowded, we’ve been greeted every morning to total calm. Unfulfilled expectations can be frustrating, and it would be easy to hang my head and say “why did I ever come half way around the world for this?” But if I did that I would be totally missing the point of all the experiences that this trip has been about. A trip like this isn’t really about the things you expect to happen, but the unexpected things that do. Sure the surf hasn’t been perfect, and the town wasn’t what I thought it would be, but we’ve met interesting people, eaten in a food stall with goat meat hanging from Some Typical Walled Up Shore Poundthe ceiling, we’ve learned a bit of the local language, we’ve helped students practice their English, we’ve seen every imaginable stage of rice production, we’ve seen wild monkeys and discovered bat caves, we’ve watched beautiful sunsets, and taken long walks on empty beaches. Even our dealings with customs will be an experience I won’t soon forget, and I value it as a learning experience. Who knows, maybe there will be good surf tomorrow.

•••

About 4 hours after I wrote this post a new swell filled in. I had my best session since Sawarna surfing Karang Haji, the right hand point/reef break that is 50 feet from my front door. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I’ll leave it at that.

2010-04-28 Karang Haji (1 of 7) 2010-04-28 Karang Haji (4 of 7)
2010-04-28 Karang Haji (2 of 7) 2010-04-28 Karang Haji (5 of 7)
2010-04-28 Karang Haji (3 of 7) 2010-04-28 Karang Haji (6 of 7)
2010-04-28 Karang Haji (7 of 7)

A Year of Living Dangerously (2010-04-21)

As we sat in the Rumah Makan in the small village of Cimaja, brushing away the occasional mosquito or local cat, I put a bite of vegetables in my mouth.
“You know those are raw,” Jen said questioningly, looking up at me.
I stabbed another cucumber, and replied in as suave and James Bond-like a voice as I could muster, “I like to live… dangerously,” taking another bite.
Jen grinned. “You eat those dangerous vegetables,” she said, laughing.

Nasi Goreng
Some Rights Reserved1

When I tell people that I quit my job, or that I’m spending 2 months in a rural part of a third world country, or that that country is predominately Muslim, or that I plan to take up open ocean sailing, they usually look at me like I’m crazy, foolish, or both. The guide books go on for pages about all the diseases, poisonous animals, or other hazards that are likely to befall us. But while many of the fears people express are misguided or exaggerated, the fact of the matter is that these things are risky. However, a life with no risk is no life at all. For some of us the acceptable or, I should say, desirable amount of risk is different than others. For me, the activities I engage in strike just the right balance. So even if some tragedy should strike, I can at least go content that, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says of the rope dancer, “[I] have made danger [my] vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that.”

The feet of a tightrope walker.
Some Rights Reserved2

I should say, however, that I did leave behind a very well paying job that probably had some potential to advance my “career.” This was a move that everyone from my friends, to my boss, to my new acquaintances overseas have all gawked at. But I didn’t just give it up on a whim. I gave it up because I felt it was the only path available to me. There are two basic goals that drive me: get happy, stay happy. I’m not a fan of hedonism, which I’ve heard it pointed out is a philosophy that only ends in a heroin overdose, but I do think that happiness in this life is the most we can hope for. I also think that it’s probably a good idea to take a long term view regarding our happiness. Hence the stay happy bit, which I think the popular understanding of hedonism lacks. It’s also important to remember that happiness is a complicated human emotion, despite what the scientists have told us about dopamine. A good parent is still happy to have children even when changing diapers, for example.

Getting back to my point, the reason I left my job; I was in a situation that I couldn’t possibly be happy with. The culture was all wrong, the staff ranged from had-potential-but-burnt-out to nice-guy-but-incompetent; the work, while not uninteresting, was so tangled up in red tape, bad decisions and worse planning that it was an endless frustration; and lastly I lost faith in the leadership’s ability to actually leverage the talent they did have working for them. So, at some point, even with all the benefits and bonuses and salary and stock, the question becomes: What is the price of my happiness? And unfortunately you can’t buy your happiness – you can only sell it. In the long run who knows, maybe I’ll pick up my career where I left off, or maybe I’ll use my head, show some adaptability, and do something else. Either way, I’m much happier now than I was before, and I’m confident that I can find work in which I can remain happy.

“But,” you might ask, “how can you just decide one day to embark on such an unknown journey, or an unknown way of life? What if it’s not what you expect? What if you fail?” Well, some times you just have to take a leap, like The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock, refusing to let other people tell you how your life will be, grabbing the girl by the hand and jumping on a bus. In the words of Lloyd Dobler:

Diane: Nobody believes this is going to work, do they?
Lloyd: You just described every great success story.

Say Anything

  1. Nasi Goreng Ikan Asin: This file is licensed by Rizka Budiati under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/47196317@N00/862446765/ for more information.
  2. funambulist 02: This file is licensed by Wiros under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/91515119@N00/1795141144/ for more information.
  3. Hopefully use of this sceen shot from Say Anything is fair use.

What Next? (2010-04-15)

When I decided I wanted to visit Indonesia one of my reasons was to force myself to cut all the ties that keep me bound to one place, not just geographically but mentally as well. It’s not that those things: a job, a lease, a bedroom set and pull out couch, stereo system and closet full of junk, monthly stylist appointment and magazine subscriptions; are bad things. They’re not. It’s just that they make it easy to forget why you’re doing what you’re doing. The path of least apparent resistance tends to be the most attractive. But then you end up some years down the line asking yourself "what am I doing here" and feeling completely trapped by all those things, and more, instead of saying "I can’t believe I’m in a tiny village in western Java where I have a perfect surf spot nearly to myself every morning and help locals with their English in the afternoon," and feeling absolutely great about the adventure that brought you there.

But you can’t just live your life going from one tropical island adventure to the next, can you? Which is why my next reason was to spend time thinking about what I should do next with my life. The thing that I keep coming back to is: How do I make every day until the day I die part of one great adventure? And I don’t mean for every day to be happy and care free. Adventures have their ups and downs, their excitements and boredoms, triumphs and tragedy; working for a startup, for example, was an adventure.

This is as far as my contemplation has brought me. A question, but a question to which the remainder of my life will be the answer. An answer lived a day at a time, seizing every moment, always taking the path less travelled instead of least resistance, and never forgetting what a wonderful journey it has been.