Surabaya, Indonesia: Day 3

Go back to Day 2
Go back to Day 1

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