Tuesday, November 17, 2015

I seem to be stuck in a time loop. Every morning is exactly like the previous one. I wake up after a long sleep but still feel fatigued. Then I hear the rain drumming on the roof. This morning was a bit different in that I also heard loud peals of thunder. My understanding was that during the monsoon season, it would rain in the afternoons, and that it would rain for a brief period of time. That is how the rainy season was in most places I’ve been. In Guatemala, for example, you could set your clock to the afternoon downpour. It would start at 3:15 and the rain would thunder down for twenty minutes to half an hour, and then it would stop and the sun would come out. As such, a rainy season was no deterrent to cycling. I read that the rainy season was like that here in Sumatra. So far, however, that has not been the case. It has been raining throughout the night and the day almost non-stop ever since I arrived. I did see on my smartphone that the weather forecast was calling for sunny skies in other places around Sumatra. So perhaps it is only coastal towns like Tanjungbalai that experience such an onslaught of rain. Perhaps my goal should be to get out of Tanjungbalai and head inland. The weather might improve.

My evening yesterday continued in much the same vein as the rest of the day. I walked back from the Hypermart with my treasure trove of coffee and Coffeemate amidst the constant greetings and somewhat confusing conversations. No one can fault the Indonesians on their friendliness and openness. They have all the social inhibitions of rambunctious puppies. The problem continued to be the language barrier. I could have only the most basic conversations, and I rarely understood what we were talking about.

Physically, the walking was quite difficult as well. There really are no sidewalks as such, and there is no concern whatsoever for keeping a walking path clear. There is no concern for keeping the road clear for that matter. This total lack of rules and concern for safety and systems is an interesting aspect to this part of the world. In Canada, pretty much everything I see here would be a cause for a massive uproar of anger and people calling the police and the city. For example, there is an extensive system of underground waterways for sewage and rain and all that kind of thing. Every thirty or forty feet, you encounter a big square opening in the cement that leads down to these water tunnels. These squares are supposed to be filled with heavy concrete lids. But nearly all of the lids are gone. Perhaps they were never even there? In any event, the entire city is a deathtrap of large holes in the ground that you could fall into at any time if you’re not careful. They’re everywhere, and they’re large enough for your whole body to fit into easily. The drop isn’t that far. You can see the garbage- and sewage-filled water just two or three feet below you, but if you happened to step into one of these holes with the sharp, jagged concrete edges, you could be on your way to the hospital with broken legs, broken ribs, or at the very least large gashes and cuts in your legs and arms (not to mention the risk of infection from that horrific water). The equivalent in Canada would be for literally all the manhole covers in the street and all the sewer gratings to be gone. Just gone. (And that’s assuming the manhole covers were two or three times as big.) I was chatting with Rea about this later on, and she said that she fell into one of these holes when she first moved to Tanjungbalai. Many, many years ago, I fell into one in the Philippines. They’re no joke.

These missing sewage covers are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of safety hazards and problems. Everything here is a safety hazard, and with little regulation or control, people just do whatever they want. For example, I had to walk past lots of places where there was some kind of construction going on in the building. The people doing the work just dumped all their material right out on the street. One place needed some sand and gravel. They had clearly just backed the dump truck to the street outside their house and dumped it there and left it there – probably for weeks. This pile of sand and gravel blocked half the street. And no one cared. They just drove around it. There were no safety cones, no yellow ribbons, no men in hardhats directing trafffic, no irate neighbors calling the police. Imagine if you had some work done on your house and you had a dump truck come and dump an entire load of gravel onto a Canadian street and just left it there. How long would it take for the neighbors and the police to come knocking? Probably about two minutes. In any event, you couldn’t talk the truck driver into doing it in the first place. His company would get in trouble.

You can look at this sort of thing from two points of view. You can see it as bad. It’s clearly dangerous and inconvenient, and it makes the city look like a disaster zone. But it’s also good. People can do what they want and live their lives without the government or the police or the neighbors constantly telling them what they can or cannot do. They don’t drown in regulations and laws the way people in North America and Europe do. The same idea can be applied across the board. Tanjungbalai’s streets are filled with streetside stalls and carts selling every kind of drink or snack you can think of. They are everywhere. And you can bet that none of them have a retailer’s license or a health inspection certificate or even pay taxes. I’d be willing to bet that not a single one in this entire city would pass even the most basic inspection by any official from Canada. They’d all be shut down by the government as being unsafe, unhealthy, and otherwise illegal. But on the positive side, this lack of regulation leads to a wonderful variety and creativity and choice. It also keeps the prices down. If you applied all the laws of Canada to these food stalls and forced them to meet all of our various codes, the price for their snacks would go up a hundredfold. This lack of regulation also means that everyone has a chance to make some kind of living. There are tiny nooks and crannies that people can fit into and still survive. A single old woman can set up a little stove and a pan and make some snacks and then sell them at the side of the road in order to make enough money for each day. This woman would be sent packing in Canada by the police. You just couldn’t do it. The same goes for the hundreds or even thousands of motorcycle taxis. I doubt that they are regulated in any serious way. Nearly all of them would be removed from the streets if they had to pass a Canadian safety inspection. And no one wears helmets. But all the men driving those motorcycles are making a living. The relaxed atmosphere gives them the option to make a living. In a more restricted society, they’d be in trouble.

I hung out in my room for a brief while after my long walk around the city. Then it came time for dinner. I was hoping to find a restaurant with rice and a variety of veggie dishes, but that was not to be. I ended up, once more, back at my pangsit place. But I branched out and pointed at another phrase on the food cart outside the restaurant. This was “mie tiaw”. I tried to ask the men there what this dish consisted of. But with the language barrier, we didn’t make any progress. I assume the culture barrier was part of the problem as well, because I didn’t really need language for them to answer my question. These carts are essentially the entire kitchen. All the ingredients are there. I just needed the men to point at the various ingredients to show me what “mie tiaw” was. If you went into a grocery store and had no idea what an apple was, the clerk could just point at an apple. But I think for the men at this restaurant, it’s second nature to know what “mie tiaw” was. Every time I tried to ask what mie tiaw was, they just told me that it was mie tiaw. Doesn’t everyone know? I tried to get them to point out which ingredients they used. Was it rice? Was it noodles? These vegetables? Eggs? What is mie tiaw? Again, they just said it was mie tiaw. I eventually gave in and ordered it. When the dish arrived at my table, I was still a little puzzled. I recognized some of the ingredients. There were bean sprouts. There were bits of scrambled or fried eggs. There appeared to be some kind of noodles. And there were some green leafy things. And there were lots of other things, but I had no idea what any of it was. It was no problem, though. It was my kind of food – simple and easy to eat. My only problem was that it wasn’t enough for a meal. I would have to order at least one more to feel even partially full. As it was, I only had the one dish, and I find I’m quite hungry this morning. My body has not been getting enough food since I arrived in Indonesia.

There was one other customer in the restaurant at that time, and he invited me to sit with him at his table. He was an Indonesian man in his late forties, and he spoke a few words of English. While we ate, we struggled through some simple conversation. I learned that he worked for an insurance company, his wife was a teacher, that he also had a small business involving online gaming, and he was born somewhere else. Through him, I learned that the owners of this restaurant were Buddhist and that it was a family business. The grandfather of the two men running it had opened the restaurant about sixty years ago.

After the meal, I went with this man to a quite interesting outdoor courtyard right beside my hotel. I could see this courtyard from my hotel and had been quite curious about it. We sat at one of the tables and I ordered a cup of coffee. It was typical Sumatran coffee – black, very hot, and loaded with sugar. It was good coffee, but I could do without the sugar. There were perhaps fifteen large tables in this courtyard all being serviced by five or six food stalls and a regular kitchen. You could order food or coffee or beer from these places. Based on the noise level, I know it remains open quite late for the beer drinkers. The courtyard is surrounded by buildings on all sides, and each building has a variety of activities going on. One side had an extremely loud karaoke bar. When the door opened to this place, the entire courtyard was blasted with sound and you couldn’t even speak until the door closed again. I can hear the music (and even feel it) all night long up in my hotel room. Another side had a large badminton club. This badminton center seemed to be the main draw of this courtyard as evidenced by the 150 or so scooters parked outside. The other side was my hotel plus some puclic bathrooms. I noted from the large signs on the bathroom that the Indonesian word for women is “Juanita” and that for men is “Pria.” I commented on how funny it is that the word Juanita is also the name of a girl in Spanish. I expected the men’s bathroom to be called “Juan”. But, not surprisingly, it took about twenty minutes to explain the joke to my new Indonesian friend, and he never really understood what I was talking about.

Conversation with my new friend never really got easy, but we chatted about a few things. He lives in Tanjungbalai, but his insurance office is in the nearby town of Kisaran. He doesn’t go to Kisaran every day. He has a secretary there who staffs the office from Monday to Saturday. I asked him what a typical salary for a secretary or similar employee might be. He said that most salaries are about two million rupiah a month. That’s about $150 US. That’s obviously not very much, especially when you consider they work six days a week with only Sundays off. I told him that I was often puzzled by the contrast between the low income and the number of consumer goods. If, for example, you are making only $150 a month, how can you afford to buy a scooter – something that costs $1,500 US and nearly everyone has? He said the trick was that no one actually buys a scooter outright. They buy it on credit and it takes them many years to pay it off. I guess I never really thought of that because I doubted that anyone could get a loan or qualify for credit when their salary is so low. But the majority of people make that small amount of money, so the local businesses either have to take the risk and give them credit or not have any customers at all. I assume the same goes for smartphones and the other consumer goods that people have. I do see very nice houses even here in Tanjungbalai and I see expensive cars, as well. I would be curious to know what the people living in those houses and driving those cars do for a living. (I’m curious about this in every country I visit.)

I wasn’t exactly sure why, but after I had my coffee in this courtyard, my new friend wanted to take me for a drive around Tanjungbalai. My spidey sense went off a little bit because it was dark and there really wasn’t much point to driving around. What could you see but dirty streets and closed businesses? However, I can never resist a ride in a car. It’s something of a novelty. So we drove around a bit and he pointed out the sights, such as the big, bright sign for the Hypermart. Conversation was even more difficult than before because he insisted on playing quite loud music on his car’s stereo. His playlist of choice skipped from John Lennon’s “Imagine” to the theme from Titanic (My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dione). Once we saw the Hypermart, we turned around and drove back into town and he dropped me off in front of my hotel.

It wasn’t a bad day overall, assuming you’re interested in the minutiae of daily life in places like this. I’d seen a lot and met a ton of people. Nearly every conversation was borderline incomprehensible, but a few facts got through. I’d had some new food and tracked down the Hypermart – the place to go when the zombie apocalypse hits. The rain let up long enough for me to walk around in the afternoon. Now I just need the rain to relent in the morning a bit and allow me to cycle on. I guess that when the time comes, I will cycle just the short distance to Kisaran and stay there overnight before moving on. I will have to see if there is a losmen in Kisaran.

 

 

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01