Book Report: Good Company by Douglas A. Harper

Good Company is a book from what turned out to be the last days of the white migrant worker riding freight trains from job to job, season to season. Doug Harper is a Ph.D. student at Brandeis, and he hops freights with a bunch of traveling workers on the way to pick fruit in Washington state. It's a good book. It changed my perspective on freight-hopping, which I never realized was a way to actually get to a particular place, or unofficially sanctioned by companies that need to get low-wage workers to where they need work done. Lots of stories about how the cops look the other way when they're riding the trains into town during apple-picking season, but they look for any excuse to run them off when the work is done. Kind of like how meatpacking employers don't review identification paperwork too closely nowadays.

Harper is really self-conscious about being accepted by the rest of the tramps, but realizing that he's got class advantages that they don't have while also needing to hide the fact that he's there as a reporter/academic. He's also trying to take photos, and most of the other guys don't want their photo taken, so there are quite a few photos as part of the book, but they don't lend a whole lot of insight.

I got this book off the free shelf at the library, and I think it's the original printing from the '70s. It looks like there was an additional edition in 2006 or so with a different cover design. I read most of this book on the plane ride(s) back from Indonesia for a work trip. Let me know if you want to borrow it. There aren't too many books giving a first-hand account of this lifestyle, and it does so without romanticizing it too much.

Book Report: Merle Haggard: The Running Kind by David Cantwell

Wow, I'm really behind on these book reports. My idea with starting them was mainly to keep a record of what I'd been reading, and then maybe I'd be more likely to stick with it if I posted it "publicly" (as much as a blog with a couple of family members as readers can be public). So, that was the thought, and I've been fairly disciplined about keeping track of what books I've read and uploading a photo of the cover into a draft blog post, but that's about as far as I've gone in the last three months. So, starting with this one, I'm working from a few-months-old recollection of the book, so bear with me.

David Cantwell does a very disciplined job with his topic as he chooses to address it in Merle Haggard: The Running Kind. He basically looks at the career of Merle Haggard by strictly sticking to his discography, drawing from the many biographies and autobiographies that have been published about the man, but not including any interviews of his own. This doesn't lead to any fresh new information being unearthed, but for the well-trod ground that is Haggard's life and career, it's not really necessary. I think that his distance from the subject allows for some unique insights.

For instance, that Hag has been straddling a very thin line over nearly all of his post-"Okie from Muskogee" career by pandering (and sometimes dog-whistling) to the racist redneck portion of his fanbase by producing some songs that equate whiteness and ruralness with hard work and upright living (and at best implicitly shitting on the urban and "other") while still trying to retain some ironic distance from outright racism and warmongering himself. And he's done this while being a felon (pardoned by Reagan when he was California governor, yay) who has struggled with financial issues, multiple marriages, infidelity, and drug and alcohol problems throughout his life. In the instance of a more enlightened song like "Irma Jackson" that never saw the light of day as single, Cantwell takes an appropriately skeptical stance on Haggard's claims that the record company shut him down.

Hag's had a helluva career, and "Mama Tried" and "Sing Me Back Home" are fucking bangers and among my favorite country songs. But from "Okie" to "Fightin' Side of Me" to "I Take a Lot of Pride In What I Am" to "Working Man Blues," there's just too much there that's ended up on the wrong side of history. He's been an asshole, and there's not enough in his discography to put him in the black.

Note: If you haven't already, listen to the Cocaine & Rhinestones episode about Merle and "Okie", which draws a lot from this book. 

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 6

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Food

I haven’t been very good about photographing my meals thus far this trip, so this post won’t be very visual to start with, but I’ll try to add to that as I take some more photos.

Since this is a work trip, my dining options are a little bit circumscribed by my circumstances. I need to catch the bus to the factory from the hotel lobby each morning at 7:30 a.m. Breakfast is a really nice, wide-ranging buffet served in the hotel, with everything from donuts to omelettes to stir fries. I’ve settled into a pattern where I’ll have one plate of salad and some beans and stir fry veggies, and then another plate of samples of each of the four rotating dishes from the “traditional corner” of Indonesian food, as well as some fresh melon. Then if I’m still hungry, I’ll have some muesli.

Lunch is a more basic, but still very nice buffet served in the canteen in the factory (Indonesian for “canteen” = kantin, pronounced the same – see, languages are easy ;-) ).

 That’s a big crock pot-o’-white-rice to start, with usually some broiled chicken leg-thigh combos, maybe a soup, some fried fish, a pot of green beans or boiled greens, and a big ol’ plate of watermelon for dessert.

Today was the last day before the Eid al-Fitr holiday, though, and the kitchen staff must have all bailed, because there was KFC-looking fried chicken and some McDonald's cheeseburgers.

Dinner in one of the hotel restaurants is included in the room rate, and that’s a really nice option to have, but I’ve been trying to get out and explore in the evenings when I have the time and energy.

Food in Surabaya is good. It tastes good. I wouldn’t say that local food in East Java is anything totally different from food in other southeast Asian countries (if you’re familiar with Thai or Malaysian food, you won’t be disoriented), but there are some distinctions to be made, for sure.

For protein, it’s mostly chicken-, fish-, prawn- and soy-based. The chickens are longer-legged and leaner than what we’re used to in the U.S., which is different but not better or worse. I haven’t seen a lot of breast served on its own, but it seems like the white meat is used more in stir-fries or other slow-cooked preparations. Satay, or chicken served on skewers, is a common thing. Fried chicken skin is also offered on a lot of menus: I had it as part of a dish last night and it was served cold, which wasn’t the best thing I’ve eaten here. I saw some chicken feet available from some street vendors, but not so much in restaurants. Eggs are served in all forms, at all meals; a fried egg on top of fried rice seems to be a staple, and breaded, hard-boiled eggs in many different styles are a thing.

It’s unclear to me which fish are commonly eaten here. The translations on menus don’t differentiate one fish from another, so I’m not sure. Seems like they’re usually fried, often served whole head-on or in chunks, and often with plenty of bones. Prawns are also served fried for the most part, and also commonly on skewers. Seems like a Applebee’s-style coconut shrimp (you know what I mean) has been the usual, and it’s delicious.

Surabaya is just a few hours away from the town of Tempeh, so it’s not surprise that there are plenty of tofu, tempeh, and mock-duck-style veggie proteins available. They’re often prepared in a spicy stir-fry sauce, and are uniformly tasty.

Beef is around, certainly much more than pork, but not nearly as common as chicken or seafood. Seems like the most common red meat is oxtail, which I’ve only had in soup so far.

As far as fruits go, I’m assuming that this is more of a seasonal thing, but it seems like the variety available here is less than what I saw in Malaysia when I was there a couple of years ago. I’ve mostly seen melons (cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon primarily), and pears and apples. I guess that the durian and mango season has already ended for the year, which is kind of a bummer. I haven’t seen any kiwi or star fruit or anything somewhat weird like that, and citrus appears to be served much more commonly in juices than as whole fruits.

The vegetables available and grown here that I’ve seen so far are not too far outside of what’s available in the U.S.: green beans, cabbage, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, etc. Oh, and peppers, lots of peppers. I’m not a connoisseur, so I can’t tell you what kind of peppers are used specifically, but shit can get spicy in a big hurry.

Rice is the carbohydrate staple, served in steamed or fried form with pretty much every meal. Potatoes and vermicelli noodles aren’t uncommon, but rice is king, and even on the way to the factory we drive by a couple of miles of paddies right on the outskirts of the city. I haven’t seen any chopsticks around; as far as I can tell, locals eat with a fork and spoon.

U.S. chain restaurants that I’ve seen so far in Surabaya:

KFC (lots of locations)

Starbucks

McDonald’s

Carl’s Jr

Pizza Hut

Burger King

Wing Stop

A&W

Another (I’m assuming) foreign chain that exists is Pizza en Bier, which has the “Bier” portion of its signage blacked out. I’m assuming that you can get beer in their non-Indonesian locations, and I’m curious how they’re getting by here.

I’ve poked around a few grocery stores, and the most unusual thing that jumped out at me is that they purchase their cooking oil or shortening in plastic bags in the shape of a large Capri Sun. I’m going to bring back some bags of broad beans and prawn crackers, both of which are pretty decent.

Onward to Day 7

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 7

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Pedestrian and Bike Infrastructure

This post could be quite short: there is none.

However, while broadly accurate, it’s not quite fair, so I’ll try to be a little more descriptive than that. I’ve been picking my destinations for evening walks based on whether there is a decent way to walk there. I’ve gotten very spoiled in Minneapolis, and I expect to be able to walk somewhere without constantly needing to wander into traffic or run the possibility of falling into an open sewer. 

Basically, I’ve lost my sense of adventure as a pedestrian, and Surabaya has helped me rediscover it.

I have no idea how someone with even mild physical handicaps would navigate this city. There are few crosswalks, no walk/don’t walk signs, every curb is at least a foot tall with no cut-outs, and with the exception of a few broad boulevards with decent sidewalks, most sidewalks stop and start without warning and/or are intermittent and half-rotted unstable pieces of concrete laid over sewers running a couple of feet below the side of the roadway. Heaven help you if you are walking down one side of the street and see something you’d like to check out on the other side. You basically have wait for the torrent of cars and scooters to ebb slightly so you can wade through, trusting that they’ll slow down enough to let you by.

There just really aren’t any significant number of people who try to get around without a car or scooter, which on one hand I can totally see why, but on the other that creates a chicken-or-egg scenario where the infrastructure is terrible, so no one walks or bikes, or are cause and effect reversed? Do scooters and cars not respect the presence of pedestrians because all drivers are assholes, or does everyone seem like an asshole because there’s really never been a point of looking out to avoid pedestrians because they’re so rare?

Another side effect is that there’s no real way to be an effective bike commuter, so all bike shops and visible aspects of bike culture are centered around racing and triathlon. Which is a bummer, because in a city this size, there should be plenty of people to support a bike scene that doesn’t fetishize carbon components and lycra clothing, but that’s pretty much all there is. I did see this beautiful LeMond bike at a coffee shop called Wdnsdy, though:

Scooter culture seems to be much more diverse, by comparison, and seems to claim some of the territory that would be occupied by cyclists in a community with more viable transportation options. Scooters are used by everyone from the young, loud-pipes-save-lives show-offs to families of four carting around groceries to workers/vendors who need to haul huge amounts of stuff with them. That’s probably worth its own post, so I won’t go into more detail on that at this time.

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 4

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Some Conversations on Politics and Government

Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi

H-, the project manager at W-, is from Davao City, Philippines, and also lived and worked in Manila before relocating to Surabaya about five years ago. He is married with three children, but his family remained in Manila when he relocated for work, and he sees them about every three months or so. I’m not sure the reason that his family didn’t move with him to Indonesia, and I will let him bring that up if he chooses, but I don’t feel right asking about it. If I had to guess, I would assume that it’s either that his family is culturally Christian and didn’t want to move to a Muslim country, or else that Manila (not having been there myself) is a much more cosmopolitan city than Surabaya, and it would be a step down quality of life-wise.

H- is an excellent project manager, extremely detail-oriented, organized, intelligent, and proactive. He is wonderful for me to work with in this situation, where I’m arriving not knowing anything about the work culture, and also lacking confidence in this particular process equipment. However, hyper-competent project management on a site level requires a bit of an autocratic streak, which H- also possesses. Please keep that in mind regarding his political opinions.

At lunch on Saturday, H- mentioned that Indonesia should be a very wealthy country, with all of their riches in oil, natural gas, and other natural resources, but that their government is corrupt. He didn’t go into specifics on this opinion, but that provided him a segue into his praise for Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines and former mayor of Davao City. At least in the U.S. lefty media that I favor, Duterte is quite unpopular, regarded as something of a murderous despot because of the extrajudicial killings of drug addicts that he has directed and/or championed. I’ve often been curious about why Duterte’s approval ratings in his country are so high (consistently more than 70%, I’ve read) if he’s so awful.

Well, H- was very clear about his reasons for his strong support of Duterte:

•         He’s provided much-increased financial assistance to the public and military hospitals in Manila, where care is now free of charge
•         He’s streamlined the permitting process for businesses and reduced corruption by promising a decision on permits in something like 10 days
•         He’s reduced corruption drastically in government and police; supposedly you can’t bribe Manila police anymore to get out of tickets
•         He personally (and brutally) responds to business owner’s complaints; H- told a (possibly apocryphal – hey, this is all possibly apocryphal) story about a restauranteur in Manila who had an Australian patron who was smoking and wouldn’t put out his cigarette, even though public smoking in Manila is outlawed. The restauranteur called the government, and Duterte personally drove over to the restaurant and put a gun to the Australian’s head, and said he would either eat the cigarette or get his brains blown out. So, the story goes, the man ate the cigarette.
•         And finally, he’s made Manila and other cities safe by either forcing drug addicts to surrender to be placed in rehab, or else they are killed. H- said that drug users get three warnings to surrender before they are killed.
•         Generally, H- described Duterte as a man of impeccable integrity, doing what needed to be done to clean up corrupted institutions and reduce crime.

There’s definitely some stuff to like there, even if I disagree with some of the methods. I’m a softie, but maybe just arrest the addicts on the fourth try and send them to rehab forcibly rather than having them killed. Duterte has advertised himself as a man who Gets Things Done and Doesn’t Truck With Any Bullshit, and he delivers on those promises. I can see where that would be very appealing to a significant portion of the electorate.

After Trump was elected, I was hoping that maybe the silver lining would be that he could actually deliver on some useful things (less fucking around with overseas military interventions, for instance, or not kowtowing to the Israeli lobby) because of his lack of interest in decorum, but he has shown himself to be a dismal doer of things as well as an abominable person. He’s just a worthless shithead blowhard who wants to be praised for accomplishing things without actually doing them. At least Duterte is an effective doer of things, and I can see where a fellow doer of things like H- would see a kindred spirit.

My driver for part of the journey to Bromo, Leonard, is a Christian who grew up east of Bromo and has lived in Surabaya for the last twenty-plus years. He had very positive things to say about Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), who is the current president of Indonesia. Jokowi was mayor of the city of Surakarta and governor of the state of Jakarta before being elected president in 2014. Leonard praised Jokowi’s ability to get things done, as well, citing a new highway running the length of Java that was nearly complete as evidence. Also, he pointed out that Jokowi had lowered the barriers for immigrants to enter Indonesia, which Leonard considers to be positive. Leonard expected Jokowi to be re-elected easily in 2019.

I asked whether Leonard’s church was near those that were bombed last month in Surabaya, and he said yes, that he was close enough that he heard the explosions when they happened. He was clearly saddened by the bombings, but he pointed out that Surabaya is a misguided place for ISIS to try to sow discord (the bombings were carried out by five members of a single family from Syria, is how it was explained to me). Surabaya as he described it, is a place where different religions respect each other and generally get along well. He said that it’s a place where anyone, even children, can walk the streets safely, and said that Jakarta was not like that. I can testify to the fact that I’ve felt very safe walking in Surabaya.

Leonard said that Surabaya mourned for two days after the bombings, and that the police presence has been more noticeable since then, but that after those two days everything got back to normal and people still treat each other the same way that they did before. I was glad to hear that because almost 17 years after 9/11, the U.S. is nowhere near that point. So, it’s not like terrorism has to lead to permanent mistrust and suspicion among different ethnic and religious groups. It’s almost as if the U.S. is worse at this than other places.

Go To Day 5

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 5

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Bromo

At the end of the day on Saturday, H- told me that I didn’t need to come back to work until Monday. Day off, woo-hoo! I wasn’t expecting one of those while I was here, so I was a bit unprepared. My first idea was that I would go see the local professional soccer team, Persebaya, play on Saturday night. However, they were playing an away game, although they will be at home on this coming Saturday night.

Plan B: see what tour options are available through the hotel concierge desk. As luck would have it, they offered a tour to Bromo Ijen (which I thought were the same thing, more on that in a bit), some volcanoes a few hours away. I requested a day tour, and was informed that the sunrise tour would leave at midnight that (Saturday) night and return around noon. If I would confirm that I was in, they would try to find an English-speaking driver. It was nearly 8 p.m. by this time, but hey, YOLO, let’s do this. The concierge (a really sweet young lady with braces on both her top and bottom teeth) called back to confirm shortly thereafter, and Leonard would meet me in the lobby at midnight. The trip didn’t include food or horse rental (?), but the front desk could put together a breakfast for me since my room rate includes food.

I went to bed at 8:30, not difficult for my still-jet-lagged ass, and set the alarm for 11:46. I groggily walked down to the lobby, and Leonard was there, and wondered where my jacket was. Hardy Minnesotan that I am, I couldn’t foresee an occasion where I’d need to wear a jacket anywhere in Indonesia. “I’ll be fine,” I said, thinking very self-sufficient thoughts, and grabbed my box lunch from the front desk. Leonard drove me south out of Surabaya for a couple of hours while I unsuccessfully tried to get a little more sleep. The roads got bumpier and curvier the further we drove, and Leonard stopped in a parking lot in a small village, which had many canvas sheets covered in Arabica coffee beans, which had been harvested nearby and were now drying. There was also a badass ‘70s-era Toyota Land Cruiser, like you see in an old safari movie or something.

Leonard handed me off to my guide, Julian, and his apparently mute driver, and we piled into the Land Cruiser and headed up out of the village and into the mountains beyond. I was doing the mental calculations for the hourly rate for three people and the fuel being expended to cart me out of the city and into the mountains, and I could understand why the tour cost was as steep as it was. It was already significantly cooler than in the city. Leonard insisted that I would need a jacket, and he generously pulled his from a backpack in the hatch of the minivan and handed it to me.

The Land Cruiser came from a land long ago and far away before the existence of seat belts, although there was a handy strap above the passenger-side window to hang onto. The jeep was a four-speed manual with little in the way of exhaust muffling. Did it stall frequently while trying to turn around on the narrow roads? Dear reader, I assure you that it did. Was it quite loud and was there a strong fuel odor inside the vehicle at all times, requiring us to keep the windows halfway down? You know this to be true. The path of our jeep coincided with that of many others merging from several other parking lots along the road as we wound up the mountain, and I realized that perhaps there would be many others who chose this very night to also ascend to this specific spot.

As we curved through many villages with many homestays, hotels, and restaurants serving the tourist clientele, I realized that I was seeing signs for Bromo, but nothing that mentioned Ijen. I guess I’d assumed that “bromo” or “ijen” meant volcano, and that the other word in the phrase was a descriptor. Google translate was no help on this matter, and I realized I was in error when consulting a map: Ijen was a different volcano more than a three-hour drive away, and that I was headed to Bromo, which is the Indonesian word for Brahmin, the Hindu god. This is why it’s important to plan your travels for more than 15 minutes before leaving, to avoid these sort of embarrassing misunderstandings.

It was nearly 3 a.m. as we parked the jeep along a narrow road alongside many other jeeps and scooters in the pitch black and Julian and I shuffled the last ¼ mile past vendors offering souvenirs (most of which were stocking caps and scarves – Leonard’s jacket would come in very handy), cup-o-noodles, and hot beverages. We reached the viewing area, which was an amphitheater-like space atop Mount Pajaksthan (sp?) with concrete stairs for seating, and already more than a hundred fellow-travelers had gathered.

Sunrise wasn’t until 5 a.m., and I was seriously concerned about being bored to death shivering in the dark while occasionally being blinded by the flashlights of vendors walking by hawking jackets and blankets – Julian is an exceptionally nice person, but his English was broken enough that it made conversation pretty labor-intensive – but fortunately the couple standing next to me at the railing were recently-graduated medical students from England (she German by Sri Lankan extraction) who were on a three-month jaunt through Southeast Asia and happy to expound on their travels. I believe their names were Gulya and Thomas, and they had been on a minibus that entire previous day from Djojakarta through Borobudur and on to Bromo. They were leaving soon after sunrise as part of a tour group that was headed to Ijen and on to Bali. They were super nice folks, and I realized that I like most tourists that I meet who are traveling to out-of-the-way places. They generally are happy to put some effort into making their own fun and are more concerned with the richness of their experiences than the fanciness of their accommodations. I hope that I come off the same way to others.

The time passed pleasantly enough and before we knew it, there was enough light available for even our phone cameras to take stunning photos of Bromo and the surrounding peaks.

I realized that I had a time-lapse feature on my camera that I’d never played with, and I started goofing around with that trying to incorporate the now-massive crowd into the photos of the mountains.

At a little before 6 a.m., Julian (above) led me back to the jeep and we wound our way back down from Pajaksthan to the “Sand Sea”, the tabletop-flat desert area that surrounds the base of Bromo.

Julian asked if I wanted to rent a horse to carry me part of the way up to the Bromo crater, and then I understood why it was pointed out that that wasn’t included in the tour price. We walked along through the sand and past many locals renting horses and selling trinkets (Bromo’s a Hindu holy site, and there were several people selling flowers which were to be thrown into the crater as offering). I bought a fabric muff to put over my face to block the dust and also to cast a cool bandido vibe.

There were some Hindu figures carved into the rock on the walk toward the crater.

We reached the stairway which led to the top of the crater, and climbed up.

It appeared that it would have been possible to walk around the entire perimeter of the crater, but there was a lot of loose dirt on the rock, and the handrails ended pretty close to the top of the steps, so I decided that I would risk offering myself to Brahmin on this day.

We retraced our steps back to the jeep and headed back to the rendezvous point with Leonard. Along the way, we saw many different crops being grown, including cabbages, corn, green beans, garlic, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and several others that I didn’t recognize. They were being grown in some cases on incredibly steep slopes.

We met back up with Leonard and bid goodbye to Julian and his quiet colleague. Leonard and I had a good conversation on the way back, some of which I recounted in the Day 4 post. Leonard took me to a great t-shirt shop on the way back to the hotel, where I picked up some gifts to bring home. I got back to the hotel at a little after 11 a.m. It was a great trip, and if you’re ever in East Java, I encourage you to check out Bromo.

Onward to Day 6

Book Report: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Periodic Table is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi, generally arranged in chronological order (with a few diversions) so that they trace the arc of his career as a chemist, from his childhood in northern Italy, his time in Auschwitz concentration camp at the tail end of World War II, and his return to Turin.

The book's ingenious structure is that each story corresponds (and is titled) with an element of the periodic table: for example, "Zinc" tells a tale of university lab work, while "Lead" and  "Mercury" tell something akin to folk tales in distant lands.

Levi wrote other books concerning his experiences in Auschwitz, so this book doesn't spend a lot of time on those details, but Auschwitz, as well as Fascism in his native Italy, are supporting characters throughout the book. In fact, a "colleague" at a factory that was using Levi as slave labor while he was in Auschwitz re-enters his life years later in "Vanadium," and Levi forces the man to reckon with his actions during that earlier time.

I don't feel like I'm in an adequate state of mind to effectively communicate why I related to this book so much, but I just feel like Levi spent many years trying as a chemist to be a competent professional, and this book conveys that spirit in a way that I haven't experienced before. That in attempting to do a thing well that thing, though not transcendent in any way in and of itself, can become a way to convey transcendence upon our actions. Levi seeks answers in a very temporal, immediate vein in his work, and in that way his words lift up his work, perhaps. He is a modest man, but he has shown me so much in how he has gone about his daily life.

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 3

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Media

A quick aside to let you know the structure of my workdays while in Indonesia: I wake up at about 4 a.m. because jet lag, then I try to stay busy in the hotel room with phone calls or emails until the breakfast buffet opens at 6. The factory sends a car or minibus to pick me and any other hotel guests who are visiting workers at W-, and the vehicle departs the hotel at 7:30. It’s about a half-hour drive to the factory, and I work from 8 to 5. A different driver takes us back to the hotel; the first couple of nights the drive back has taken 90 minutes, so arriving at the hotel about 6:30 p.m. I motivate myself to go out and find something different to eat, or else I order one of the five entrees that’s available through room service, and I pass out at about 9 p.m.

OK, on to media. Surabaya doesn’t appear to have any readily-available English-language print media. There are little newsstands at random points on the sidewalks or between other business shanties that feature a few newspapers, a wide variety of bottled water and cigarettes (Dunhill is the only brand I’ve recognized, but there are also Apache and others, at about $1 a pack), as well as some little publications featuring smiling women on the cover that I’m assuming are porn of some type. All the newspapers and magazines are in Indonesian, even in the Barnes-and-Noble-type establishment that I found in the mall. I’m guessing that in Jakarta (or maybe Bali or other tourist destinations for Westerners or even foreigners) you can probably find the Financial Times or Economist or International Business Tribune, but I haven’t seen any of those here.

The TV in the hotel gets about six or eight news channels, of which most are in English (CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc.) or Chinese. I’m assuming that some of the Indonesian broadcast channels also feature news programming, but I’m probably not watching at the time that that would be featured. There are also several sports channels: Fox Sports 1 & 2 which broadcast in English, Soccer Channel which broadcasts in Indonesian, and a random sports channel that’s had anything from table tennis to judo which broadcasts in Indonesian. The hosts on the Indonesian-language channels are refreshingly less polished-looking than I’m used to seeing from TV hosts, and they appear to have been selected less for their conventional attractiveness.

Before visiting the mall last evening, I would have said that there is very little sex used to sell anything in advertising in Indonesia, at least on anything visible from the street. There are no barely-clothed, smiling women featured in any billboards or store signs, which is quite nice to experience. The influence of political Islam on culture: it doesn’t have to be all bad! However, the mall had all the same stores that you’d see in a mall in a suburban American city, and all the same vacant-looking pretty white people in their signage. It was very depressing, to be honest, but the use of sex to sell really stood out after a few days of not being exposed to it elsewhere. While at home, I think that I definitely get desensitized to it after a while.

As far as the internet is concerned, things are a little bit restricted. For example, Blogger isn’t linked to from Google’s Indonesian site, so I had to enter the URL for my blog manually and then bookmark it. There are several other Google apps that appear to not be linked to here – the matrix is considerably less populated when I click on the little tic-tac-toe board from my Gmail account. Also, my preferred site for – ahem – lonely business traveler purposes (which is entirely text-based and not at all exploitative by the – admittedly extremely low – standard of websites for the lonely business traveler) is blocked. I’m guessing that similar sites for lonely people with more visually-minded tastes are also unavailable, although I’m not certain whether that’s something that’s regulated by the hotel wifi or a larger organization. Indonesia: encouraging business travelers to be more imaginative.

Go to Day 4

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 2

Go back to Day 1

Rather than give you a full blow-by-blow of every day of this trip, in each post I’ll try to handle a different aspect of the culture here as I am observing it. A disclaimer: I don’t speak any Indonesian, I’m pretty shy in general, and especially shy when I’m in a situation where I don’t speak the language and am clearly not from there. So, a lot of this is going to be pieced together based on my first-hand observations as well as some internet sleuthing and whatever information I can clean from some very awkward conversations with the folks I encounter while I’m here. I’m afraid I don’t have the social skills to be an effective journalist in a foreign country, so I apologize in advance for what I’m going to get wrong. I’m going to try to give you the newcomer’s perspective on Indonesia, for better or worse.

Today: Alcohol

At the risk of telling you something you already know, Indonesia has the largest population (~270 million) of any majority-Muslim country in the world. According to Wikipedia, about 88% of the population identifies as Muslim. Sometime in the early middle ages, Islam replaced Buddhism and Hinduism as the major religion in this part of the world, and it’s been that way since (once again paraphrasing Wikipedia).

As I would assume as a fairly direct result, booze is not a big part of daily life here. I have not seen any advertising for alcohol anywhere, it’s not available in any of the convenience stores or grocery stores that I’ve visited, and as far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a liquor store in Surabaya. I know there was a duty-free store in the Surabaya airport, and I’ll need to check and see if there was any alcohol for sale there. There were a few street vendors selling glass liter-sized bottles of some sort of undetermined liquid the first day I was walking around in the city, but I’m assuming that’s fuel – I will try to get to the bottom of that one. Wherever there’s prohibition, formal or informal, there’s certainly some sort of black or grey market that exists, right?

At any rate, it’s not completely unavailable. The hotel that I’m staying in has a few beers available for purchase in the Café, the restaurant that I’ve eaten at so far, and the Thai restaurant that I ate at in the mall also had beer available for purchase. Alcohol is highly taxed, so the beer is quite expensive compared to food or other drinks - 68,100 Rupiah (about $5) for a Bintang, San Miguel or Heineken.

Bintang is basically Heineken – the brewery was built by Heineken in the ‘50s, it was nationalized by the Indonesian government in the ‘60s, and now it’s owned by Heineken again. The label design even looks like Heineken. 

I took this at a grocery store last night. It's a metaphor, maaaannn.

As far as I can tell in my internet research, it’s the only brewery in Indonesia that actually sells beer in Indonesia (Bali Hai appears to brew only for export, and Djakarta - maker of Anker - seems to not actually brew in the country?). You can get a Guinness or Corona as well, but those are even more expensive. I haven’t seen any mention of wine or cocktails anywhere, but I’ll let you know if that changes.

Since I’m staying on the “Executive Floor” of the hotel, I have access to a free happy hour in the lounge on the floor above my room. I went up there after work tonight, and they have some appetizers and a refrigerator with soda water and soft drinks, but no alcohol. The attendant asked if I wanted a beer, and seemed extremely relieved when I said no. I haven’t had anything to drink since the night before I left home, which is the longest dry stretch in quite some time. It’s probably good to abstain once in a while, just to mix it up.

There are karaoke clubs, which I’d assume serve alcohol. Maybe I’ll check one of those out later in the trip. If they’re like the ones in Malaysia, you’ll have a scantily-clad young lady who will rub your shoulders while you drink, which sounds ok in theory but is at least as awkward as a strip club in practice. I’m thinking that I’m just not very good at interpersonal interaction, especially when there’s an implied financial component.

Go To Day 3

Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 1

I’m currently in Surabaya, Indonesia for a plant startup. The flight was Minneapolis -> Seattle -> Tokyo -> Singapore -> Surabaya, which was about as direct as I could figure out to do it. I left at 9 a.m. Monday and arrived at 10 a.m. Wednesday (with an overnight at the Singapore airport). Things are pretty slow at the outset here at the plant as I wait for the last of the construction to be completed, so in order to make it look like I’m staying busy and doing computer work rather than showing my hand and openly reading a book all day, you’re going to get a very detailed account of my trip so far.

Indonesia, Day 1

I flew from Singapore in the early morning. I’ve been to Singapore three different times now, and have always flown in late at night and left early in the morning, so I’ve never seen anything other than the airport and the Crowne Plaza attached to the airport, and it’s been dark most of the time that I’ve been there. I flew Scoot Air, which is a small airline based in Singapore. Their strategy appears to be offering cheap flights to less-touristy locations (such as Surabaya) and having any amenities be at an additional charge. There were no free beverages or anything else on the flight, and the seat was extremely uncomfortable, although I checked a bag for free and the plane and service and everything were fine. Not bad for $78 one way.

A note about the Singapore airport experience: you go through security when you go to your gate; the gate opened a little more than an hour before departure, and there were two gates served by the single security checkpoint: my flight and a Silk Air flight to Darwin, Australia. As you might expect, the clientele for those two flights were considerably different; I was (I think) the only westerner on the flight to Surabaya (and I was nearly a head taller than the next-tallest passenger), and the flight to Darwin was evenly split between groups of (white) students and elderly (white) couples. A woman with (white) hair shorter than mine came through security as the line was forming to get on the plane to Surabaya, and she looked a little confused, but just fell into the line because what are you going to do? I was pretty sure that she was headed to Darwin, so I told her that this wasn’t the line for her flight, and she didn’t follow at first, but eventually she got it. Don’t follow me lady, I’m with these dark-complected folks over here.

I landed in Surabaya at about 10:30 a.m. If you didn’t have anything to declare, you were supposed to be able to go through the “green channel” for customs, but there were only three lines, and they were all the “red channel” for people with things to declare. I am still not sure if there was any way to bypass that or not, but if there was, I missed it. The whole baggage claim/customs area was a congested mess of families with carts piled high with luggage, but I made it through in 30 minutes or so. There was supposed to be a driver from W- there to meet me, but I couldn’t spot them in the mass of people at the entrance, so I settled down to wait, secure in my knowledge that I would be pretty easy to pick out of that crowd. After another half hour or so, I was proven correct. In the meantime, I’d received an email that I didn’t need to come to the plant until the next day, so I wasn’t in any big hurry.

The parking lot was on the south side of the airport, and we needed to go north to get to the hotel, and it took about 30 minutes to get from the parking lot to the north entrance to the airport, because the road was about 1 ½ lanes wide and overrun with heavy vehicle traffic while scooters weaved in between the vehicles. Surabaya is the second-largest city in Indonesia, with a population of 3 million in the city itself and 10 million in the metro area. It appears that any road that is an expressway (limited access, where scooters aren’t allowed) is a toll road, and traffic lights are few and far between. I also haven’t seen any evidence of public transportation, so it’s about like you might expect given those constraints.

I’ve decided to keep a running D&D-style attributes matrix based on my work travel experiences. Your mileage may vary, of course. Here we are so far:

Lawful Good: TBD                 Neutral Good: Brazil                       Chaotic Good: Indonesia

Lawful Neutral: China            True Neutral: Singapore                  Chaotic Neutral: Malaysia

Lawful Evil: Japan                  Neutral Evil: Eddyville, Iowa        Chaotic Evil: Mexico

I checked into my very nice, 4-star hotel, where I have a room on the Executive Floor and the rate is somewhere around $35 a night including meals, but alcohol is additional. I had lunch in one of the several hotel restaurants; I’ll go back and look up what it was called, but it was a chicken drumstick and a couple of beef skewers with a fried egg on top of a cake of seafood fried rice, with a few vegetables on the side. Pretty good!

By this point, it was 2:30 p.m. or so, and I went for a walk. Surabaya is aggressively pedestrian-unfriendly, at least in the several miles of neighborhoods between my hotel and the central downtown area. If there’s room for a sidewalk, then there will be scooters or vendor carts or a car parked directly in your path. Several “streets” are so narrow that I could stretch my arms and nearly touch the buildings on each side, but that doesn’t mean that scooters won’t buzz through there while families hang out on the stoop in front of their apartment. 

It’s tough to navigate on foot, is what I’m saying. I saw a few brave souls on bicycles, but motorized transport is pretty much the only way to go.

I’m going to include a couple of photos of the cemetery that I walked through here, because I don’t think any description that I could make would do it justice.

I walked past the edge on my way out, and then thought I could cut back through on my way back to the hotel as dusk descended at about 5:30 p.m. (this near-the-equator year-round-equinox stuff is difficult to adjust to). This is where I have to assume that Indonesia’s general lack of motivation to fuck up a lost dorky looking white boy really shone through, because nobody messed with me or even said anything that threatening, as I doubled back a couple of times, obviously lost, and they just hung out and made their trash fires on the ground and did not assault me. Thanks very much for that, random decent folk who are unconscionably poor but not predatory.

Indonesian children hanging out on the street apparently like to call me “Mister” and want to shake my hand. There are a few white people about, but I could see where my presence in their neighborhood would be a novelty, and I admire their ability to not run away in horror, unlike their rural Chinese counterparts. This “mister” stuff happened on a number of occasions in the afternoon, with the largest group being 8-10 kids who shook my hand in turn. I didn’t really have a good feel for the vibe going in, so I didn’t know if they were going to ask for money or what, but it seemed very genuine and cute after having it happen a few times. I try to make a not-uncomfortable amount of eye contact, smile and keep walking fairly briskly when in doubt of my situation, and that seemed to work well.

My destination was a monument commemorating the Indonesian victory over the Dutch in 1945, securing their independence, and the Surabaya museum nearby, which had a similar theme. I didn’t find the monument, which either wasn’t located where google said it was, or I just didn’t recognize it, and the museum had just closed when I arrived, so that was an overall bust. Oh well. The river running through the central city is pretty nasty-looking. I stopped at a Giant hyper-mart on the way back to the hotel and checked out their grocery wares. The plant I’m working at while here makes palm and palm kernel oil, and it’s the local custom for that to be packaged in plastic bags, kind of like a quart-size Capri Sun, except clear. So that’s weird. It seems like Indonesia has a little different outlook on packaging recycling – lots of disposable containers. I’m sure their amount of trash generated and overall carbon footprint is much smaller than the US, but we definitely do a lot more virtue signaling with our packaging choices and preference for four-cycle engines.

I was pretty much beat by the time I got back to the hotel, it was dark, and since the day’s Ramadan fast had just ended at sundown, the hotel restaurants were packed, so I just downed my welcome-gift plate of fruit that had been left in my room and called it a night after watching some French Open tennis and AFF U19 soccer action.

Go To Day 2

Book Report: Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Lab Girl is more exhilarating, inspiring, entertaining, and brave than any memoir by a botany researcher has any right to be. It educates about plants, points out the inherent problems with funding for curiosity-based science, and gives a glimpse inside the mind of a brilliant but troubled scientist.

We follow Jahren, a native of the never-named but thinly-disguised Austin, Minnesota, from childhood to doctorhood to parenthood, with stops in between in Minneapolis, Berkeley, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Hawaii. It’s interspersed with frequently-fascinating asides about plant science, where you will learn many things you didn’t know you didn’t know about why plants do the things they do. For example, why the leaves on a tree are larger and darker on the top of the tree than on the bottom, and the thousands of years-old lotus seed that was found in a Chinese peat bog.

Jahren grows up in a family that, as many of us who grew up in the small-town Midwest can relate, does a much better job of showing their love than talking about it. Her father taught science at the local community college, and Jahren got free run of the place in the off hours. That interest in science brought her to the University of Minnesota on a scholarship, where she considered medical school but couldn’t afford it.

She worked a series of part-time jobs to put herself through school, including a jaunt as an IV-bag mixer at the U of M hospital. It’s during this time that Jahren’s manic tendencies are first hinted at, as she goes several days at a time without sleeping while studying and pulling double shifts at the hospital.

UC-Berkeley is her next stop, as Jahren puts herself through grad school on a research assistantship which includes a lot of incredibly boring-sounding soils research. It’s through that work that she meets Bill, a kindred spirit who platonically accompanies her through the entire rest of the book, building labs, crashing in (and once, just straight-up crashing) vans, and eating as horribly as their meager earnings allow.

Jahren and Bill sojourn onward to Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins, building labs, running mass spectrometers, and carbon-dating the shit out of things. They push themselves too hard for too long with too little money, and eventually the cracks begin to show. After some significant individual breakdowns, things get better and they move to Hawaii, with Jahren tenured and Bill on solid financial footing thanks to a savvy real-estate move. Jahren gets married to an intellectual equal and has a child, and things end as happily-ever-after as anything can for people who are well aware that they live on a dying planet giving too much for what will never be a reasonable return.

As someone who works a job much more for a check than for anything that can be considered passion, I greatly admire the sincere enjoyment and full-on commitment that Jahren brings to her work. I’m also curious how much of that brain chemistry that drives her to unparalleled excellence in her field is the flip side of the manic-depressive coin. And also, is that mental instability part of the price that she has to pay for the work necessary to rise to the level of her more-privileged male counterparts, whose ability was never questioned because of their sex? These are all compelling questions, and while Lab Girl doesn’t offer easy answers, it provides plenty of food for thought.

Book Report: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I guess the worst thing I can say about The Underground Railroad is that it wasn’t transcendent; I’d rather commend it with faint criticism than damn it with faint praise. What it is is really good and really depressing. The central conceit of the book, which recently received the Pulitzer Prize, is that the Underground Railroad existed as, you know, a literal railroad that operates literally underground. That’s genius, and Whitehead probably deserved the Pulitzer for that innovation alone. He otherwise plays it straight without too many other elements of magical realism, as the waning days of the slavery-era south need no embellishment.

The book begins in Georgia, where the central character, Cora, runs away from the Randall plantation, which is depicted as suitably hellish. She and her fellow-traveler, Caesar, are transported to South Carolina via the titular means. South Carolina is depicted as a reform-minded place, where blacks are given some measure of freedom and opportunity for self-improvement. However, there’s a dark side to that “progress”, as whites conduct Tuskegee-style syphilis experiments and coerced sterilizations on slave and free alike.

Cora and Caesar decide that maybe further north would be their speed, and they end up in North Carolina. The Tarheel State has taken a different tack on the slavery issue, as they’ve chosen to eliminate their black population through a targeted lynching program, stringing up bodies for miles through the trees in a so-called Trail of Freedom. North Carolina’s slaveholding farmers have decided that importing poor white immigrants is less trouble and not much more expensive than managing a growing black population, so they intend to either kill or drive off those blacks who are currently about. Cora goes into hiding in the attic of a former conductor of the defunct local spur of the Railroad, but is found out when she’s sold out by the house’s Irish servant. The cowardly couple who had hid her are lynched, and Cora is taken away by the Anton Chigurh-like Ridgeway, a runaway slave catcher who intends to return her to Randall.

Ridgeway conveniently has to make a long detour through Tennessee and Missouri to pick up some other “strays”, which gives Cora an opportunity to be rescued by a couple of gun-toting free blacks and taken to a Utopian black-owned communal farm in free Indiana. No one can have nice things in this world, though, so Ridgeway and a posse massacre the farm, killing Cora’s rescuer in the process. The book ends with Cora revealing the opening to an abandoned Railroad station to Ridgeway, but then killing him by grabbing him and pulling them both in a heap down the platform steps, bashing in his head in the process. A severely injured Cora takes up the hand-powered car and seesaws her way through the darkness into an unknown future.

Whitehead does a tremendous job of taking what seems like a well-worn period in American history and creating an even bleaker, more gruesome tale than I would have imagined possible. Pretty much every white person that Cora encounters is either fully evil, entirely deluded in their motivations, or completely incompetent (frequently two of those or more), which I can’t say is at all unrealistic. The only hope that exists in that world – and perhaps in the current one – is in the striving for something better a little further down the road.