Thursday, November 19, 2015

This should be a short journal entry today. I don’t feel the urge to write much, and I didn’t do very much yesterday that I could write about. It was sunny in the morning, which was an encouraging sign, but then the rain clouds moved in and I had to run for cover for much of the day. I had plans to break out my “real” camera, but the weather put an end to that idea.

In terms of activity (if not time), much of the day was spent on my smartphone and on Facebook. As I mentioned, the Indonesians are crazy about taking selfies and putting them on Facebook. Therefore, everyone I meet ends up sending me a Facebook friends request. These requests are odd things. For one, I rarely know who these people are. I meet a lot of people throughout the day, and when I see a friend request, I don’t know who it is from. Is it from the guy I met in a restaurant? Is it from a guy that works in the paint shop? Is it from the guy I met on the ferry from Malaysia? Or is it the guy who fixes rice cookers? I got myself in trouble yesterday because I did indeed get a friend request from the young fellow who loves to speak English and who fixes rice cookers. I spoke to him for two hours or more, but I couldn’t remember his name, and I didn’t recognize his pictures on Facebook. So when I accepted his friend request, I had to ask him who he was. I imagine this hurt his feelings, but I had no choice. When he wrote back and identified himself, I felt bad. Out of all the people I met, he was the one guy that I made a real connection with. Meeting me and talking to me was special for him, and then I respond like I don’t even remember him. But it is a failure of Facebook etiquette on their part not to identify themselves. I don’t blame them, because most people fail in this way. If I send someone a friend request, it’s always to someone that is important to me. I don’t want to populate my Facebook world with hundreds (or even thousands as some people do) of random strangers. Plus, I send a message along with my Facebook friends request – a greeting and a short paragraph about who I am and how we met. It’s just good manners.

I’ve been accepting nearly all of these Facebook friends requests even though I don’t want to. I accept them because the people here really expect me to, and it means a lot to them. So far, I’ve ignored only one request, and that was from a man who seemed a little unbalanced and who was a bit annoying and intrusive. I didn’t want to have to deal with him.

These requests are interesting, too, because I get a tiny glimpse into their personal lives. Though, I have to say, it is a VERY tiny glimpse. Most people in Asia treat their Facebook pages as personal profiles, and they populate them largely with photographs of themselves looking cool and fashionable and striking cool poses. The closer they can get their appearance to a local pop star or movie star, the better. So even through their photographs, I don’t learn much about them. Still, something always manages to get through, and I will see a photograph of family members or a school graduation.

I also spent time uploading short videos to Facebook. I had shot some bits of video here and there, but hadn’t done anything with them. Video files are very large, and it takes a good Internet connection to upload them. I uploaded a few of them yesterday. It’s a complicated business, though. When I upload them from my phone to Facebook, the files are compressed badly and the video looks terrible. But when I upload them to my online Google account and then “share” them to Facebook, it doesn’t embed the video. It embeds a link which then takes you to my Google Photos page. I don’t like that. Most people don’t want to click on links that open up new web pages. They want to stay on the Facebook page and watch the video there. Worse, the link to my video says “Google Photo”. So people don’t even know it is a video. They never end up seeing it because they think it is a photo. And why would you click on a photo link? The photo is right there. So I haven’t figured out a good way to post and embed videos to Facebook.

To be honest, I feel stupid posting so many photos and videos to Facebook. It’s the best way to share an experience with friends. It’s reallly the only way, since everyone I know is on Facebook. But it ends up making money for other people when you think about it. Facebook has a website, and we dummies make content for them for free. It is like having a newspaper and tricking everyone in the world into writing all the articles and taking all the pictures for free. It’s a great racket. I would rather post all these photos and videos to my own website. But, unfortunately, that is very complicated. I can’t just click on one button to upload a photo. It is along and difficult process. And in the end, no one will see it there anyway.

My only adventures yesterday centered on my lunch and dinner. For lunch, I popped into a small restaurant that is located nearby. I would have walked right past it, but a friendly young man sitting out front called out a greeting. I liked the look of the guy, and the restaurant looked passably comfortable, so I crossed the street and went to check the place out. We had the usual confusing conversation, but the end result was satisfying. I got two big pieces of chicken, some rice, and a serving of what I believe was durian. It was a good lunch for me, as I was missing rice. Most of my meals have been based on noodles since I got here, and my system has been rebelling a bit. I’m not sick, but my digestive system isn’t exactly overjoyed at the change in its diet either. My system had gotten accustomed to a steady diet of rice, tofu, and vegetables in Malaysia. Then all of that disappeared and was replaced with very spicy noodle dishes. My stomach has not been terribly pleased.

I liked the meal, though the Indonesians were puzzled that I didn’t pile on endless amounts of fiery hot spicy sauces. The meal came to 18,000 rupiah, which is about $1.30 US. That’s about the same as my regular vegetarian meal was in Malaysia. But my meal in Malaysia was much larger and had more dishes. I will probably go back to this restaurant again. It was an okay experience.

For dinner, I returned to the popular place where I had martabak mesir the other night. In other words, I had “folded Egyptian rice pancake with a spicy beef filling”. After I ate there the other night, I got a few Facebook friends requests from people who work there. One of them was from an attractive young woman named Nanda Sweet. My guess was that she was a daughter in the family that owned and operated the restaurant. It just seemed odd to see someone that pretty and so well-dressed in the middle of this place slapping the dough and preparing food alongside everyone else. I figured she had to be family. It turns out that I was right because she sent me a short message on Facebook, and she mentioned that it was her father’s restaurant. When I went there last night, I shot some video of the two men that were preparing the martabak mesir for the grill. Nanda Sweet commented that it was amazing to see her father on my Facebook page.

This is another aspect to this strange Facebook experience. I’m taking pictures and shooting video that capture my perspective of Indonesia. So, for example, I might take a picture of a very dirty room or a nasty toilet. That will say something about my experience here. But what will an Indonesian think of me taking such a picture and putting it on Facebook? I end up with quite a few not-so-complimentary opinions of local habits. That’s only natural. But now do I have to censor myself on Facebook for fear of insulting my new Indonesian friends? In this case, I wondered if it was proper to take a video of these two men while they were working. I did ask for permission using sign language. But still, it’s a personal thing. There could be any number of reasons to do with the Indonesian culture or with them being Muslim that could mean taking that video is rude and putting it on Facebook is a bad thing. But Nanda Sweet seemed very happy about it. She even seemed pleased and honored. And that, in turn, makes me feel weird. I often get treated as some kind of honored guest, when I know that I am nothing of the kind. I was actually interested in changing hotels partially because I was embarrassed to be staying in such a dirty place as the Hayani Hotel. When I first met Rea at the Samsung store, I avoided the topic of where exactly I was staying. I felt she would naturally assume that I was staying in the nicest and most expensive hotel in the city (if, in fact, there is such a place). After all, I was from the rich country of Canada. But I don’t travel that way. I stay in the cheapest places I can find. It’s part of the lifestyle of this type of travel. But for Indonesians, it’s probably very strange. Once I was in the Asahan, I was much more open about where I was staying. It is the lowest form of accommodation here, but at least it is clean and respectable.

 

 

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01