Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Another relatively quiet day yesterday. However, a couple of things happened. The biggest excitement occurred in the morning. I was sitting out on the balcony drinking a cup of coffee when I noticed a security guard at the bank across the street bending over something. I couldn’t see what it was he was doing, but suddenly there was a fairly loud noise and a cloud of orange smoke burst upwards and hit this guy right in the face. It was a pretty big explosion and the orange dusty smoke spread out over the entire area. Then a short time later, some thick black smoke started to appear. It was difficult to figure out what was going on because there was a cement wall blocking much of the lower view. I naturally associated the initial explosion with the fire, but the fire seemed to be at a slightly different spot. And there appeared to be a car involved. It was very confusing.

In a few minutes, the fire itself became stronger and more localized. It appeared to be inside a big electrical junction box on the wall of the building next to the bank’s parking lot. By this point, there was a lot of activity as many security guards and other men attacked the fire with fire extinguishers and eventually tracked down the keys to the car and pushed it out of danger. So the vehicle wasn’t the source of the fire. It was just at risk from the fire, and they wanted to move it. And I think the initial explosion did not cause the fire. In fact, I think the security guard noticed a small fire starting in the electrical box, and he tried to use a fire extinguisher, and it was that fire extinguisher that exploded in his face. All the other fire extinguishers aimed at the electrical fire had little to no effect, and the fire got worse. I started to worry for the building next door. And I also wondered when the fire department was going to show up. A fair amount of time had passed and no police or fire fighters had arrived. I didn’t hear any sirens either.

The fire seemed to go out suddenly by itself. I think someone turned off the electrical power. Assuming that an electrical short or overheating was the cause of the fire, turning off the power removed its source and the fire just went out. Quite a bit later, two fire trucks finally appeared. No one even bothered to get down from the fire trucks as far as I could tell. They parked outside the bank’s parking lot on the street for a minute, saw that there was no fire, and then they drove away. All the drama was over. I shot some video of the fire and a couple of pictures and I put it all on Facebook.

My other small adventure occurred later in the day when I stopped at a neighborhood coffee shop. I’d seen this shop a number of times and kept thinking that I should check it out. It was a typical local business in that it wasn’t just a coffee shop. In fact, the tea and coffee part seemed somewhat tacked on. They clearly did other things, but I wasn’t sure what. So yesterday, on a whim, I popped in to look around. It turns out that their main business was framing paintings and photographs. The interior of the shop was jammed with wood for picture frames, and a friendly young man was behind a wide counter hammering on the current frame he was building. There was also a small display of very large gemstones and rings. I’d seen these big rings on the fingers of men all over Tanjungbalai. They occasionally have three or four of these rings on one hand – so many rings that you’d think that hand wouldn’t be useful for any normal tasks. In the back, there was a big room, like a family’s living room, and lots of people were sitting around in chairs and talking.

To my surprise, everyone was very friendly and welcoming and smiling. I say I was surprised because these people were Chinese and it was a Chinese business. Typical Indonesians would be smiling like crazy and very overtly friendly, of course. But the Chinese I’ve encountered anywhere in the world are more reserved in general. I often enter a business run by the Chinese and end up feeling like they don’t like me and want me to go away. They don’t have the knack of creating a welcoming atmosphere. But this family was very happy to see me, and they sat me down with a cup of coffee and smiled a lot and even asked me questions about myself and what I thought of the flavor of the coffee.

While I was sitting there, a man at another table engaged me in conversation. I eventually switched tables and joined him. I couldn’t hear him above the traffic noise otherwise. His English wasn’t great, so we stuck mainly to the usual questions and answers about my name and age and nationality and hotel and how I really should go to Lake Toba. The interesting part came later when I asked him about his work. He came right out with it and said that he was, essentially, a smuggler. He smuggled illegal workers into Malaysia. He had a car and a large boat, and he drove people from Medan down to Tanjungbalai and then used a boat to ferry them across to Malaysia and put them ashore. He said that he charged them 200,000 rupiah for the trip from Medan by car ($20 Canadian) and 1.5 million rupiah for the boat trip to Malaysia ($150 Canadian). Those seemed like reasonable fees. One hears about huge sums that people pay smugglers to get them into the United States or Australia or into Europe. I often wonder how those poor refugees can come up with the $20,000 or the other large sums that get mentioned. $170 seems more reasonable and affordable.

I mentioned the other day that I was bored with the pictures I was taking. To remedy that, I put my 24mm wide angle lens on the camera and went out to get some more interesting angles. The idea is to take pictures of the same subjects – people and market produce – but to place the camera in unusual positions (such as low to the ground) to be shooting upwards or downwards or to put objects very close in the foreground and have the people in the background. Just do something different.

In terms of getting that perspective, I was somewhat happy with the result. One of the first sets of pictures I took was at a roadside mechanic shop. A man there specialized in repairing motorcycle wheels, and he had a visually interesting display of motorcycle wheel rims and spokes. I hung out there for a few minutes and snapped pictures of all these objects with him either in the foreground or background working. I like the result. I got some other nice pictures, too. However, I had a lot of trouble with lighting. This is a new problem, as well. I don’t remember having so much trouble getting proper exposure when I first bought the camera. I think sometimes I expect too much. I expect to be blown away by every single picture I take. I see professional photographs online, and I expect every one of my pictures to have the same whiz-bang impact as one of theirs. Of course, that’s silly. Those professional pictures are taken with much better cameras, and they spend a lot of time composing them and getting them right. Plus, they alter them and edit them heavily in Photoshop afterwards. I just walk around snapping away and I don’t edit the pictures at all.

Tags: Sumatra Part 01