7/30/2006/AD - Nuptial Industrial Complex

The following has been brewing for a while, but I never know how to quite present it without seeming like I'm bragging, or deliberately sounding special, or clamoring for adulation, but it's sort of necessary for the content of this letter. So let it henceforth be known, I am now married, and in just 17 short days it will be our one-month anniversary!

It's also important to state that I consider marriage to be quite a personal thing. I feel no urge to declare my new status to others save for tax forms and immigration documents, as it has little bearing on who *I* am. So I apologize to anybody who feels like they've been wrongfully excluded from the buildup of events to my marriage, but the lack of news of this seemingly covert marriage really is neither through neglect nor spite, but is smothered by a general disinterest to draw the wrong kind of attention (such as blind praise, hollow congratulations, and "oh, she looks so nice!") In fact, on the day of my marriage, a friend of mine sent me a sober letter about her divorce and experiences, and I found that to be perhaps the most welcome sort of marriage congratulations I had received, in that it was both intimate and useful, albeit in a cautionary sort of way.

Patty Feng is my sweetheart, though I often still stumble and refer to her as my girlfriend. I met her through ballroom dancing about 3 years ago. She is Taiwanese, though she lived in Hawaii for 6 years and puts my humble Chinese skills to shame, to the extent that we speak English 97% of the time in the household. (It's better to use English when out and about, because there are a lot of artlessly nosy people on trains, sidewalks and the like who crane their necks and eavesdrop on our conversations, which are of course much more interesting than any other conversation due to my celebrity/freak foreigner status.) In deference to Patty's wishes, I will write little of her, save for the fact that she's quite possibly the nicest person I've ever met, and is amazingly patient, harmonious, and good-natured.

I'll try not to rail on about marriage and its meaning to me too much, but I must say that my previous concept of marriage has taken a lot of battle-damage as of late. In my selfish, idealistic western perceptions, a marriage was a union of two people, primarily for tax purposes and to mark your sweetie as off-limits to others. Though I did consider our marriage's ramification regarding her parents, it was all sort of a hazy, intermittent subconscious hum rather than a startling truth. But the day I went to meet her parents, it became starkly obvious that I was marrying her family as well.

It all started with the "meeting," wherein Patty brought me to her parents for the formal introduction as a Suitor with Amorous Intent Eventuating in Marriage. Patty had given them several days warning of my arrival, which was plenty of time for her father to create a mental docket of questions with which he would interrogate me. This interrogation, all in Chinese, included but was not limited to questions such as "Do you love my daughter? Do you really love my daughter? What are your plans for children? What if Patty can't have children? Do you have a girlfriend in the U.S.? Do you have another wife in the U.S.?" The last couple of questions took me by surprise, and laughing a bit at them was probably not good form. Not only is it an odd question to ask, but really, if I were enough of a cad to want to marry Patty while I was still married in the U.S., I would probably have the presence of mind to lie to him about it.

Patty's father, though caring, does so in a very Chinese way, amplified by the fact that he's a teacher in the old-school style: namely lecturing and laying down the law. As such, I am often given helpful admonitions and advice such as "Don't smoke, it's bad for you." "When at home you need to speak Chinese to Patty so you can improve faster." "You haven't finished the honey I gave you yet?! You should eat more, it's good for you." "These beef tendons are special. You should eat more." "Getting married is a once-in-a-lifetime event (*menacing glare added for emphasis*)" "Drinking too much is bad," and other such imperious fatherly dicta.

I know he cares. He cares doubly because Patty is their only child. He cares triply because in a matter of months I will whisk her away from them for a new life in the United States. This came as even more of a shock, as they were beginning to believe she would never marry and had, to some degree, begun to lay out plans for her future with them in Taiwan. He's also seen one of his friends' daughters duped by an American military hotshot, and though he wants to trust me, he's doing what is in his power while I am here, because when I steal her away and bring her to America, he'll be powerless. That's hard for any daddy to face. (He has pointedly warned me that he doesn't want to receive any sobbing phone calls from Patty when she goes to the U.S. -- how's that for fostering amity?!)

Patty's mother likely shares most of the father's concerns, though as she is content with him serving as the family's mouthpiece, I don't have such strong impressions of her, other than that she is trying, that she wants me to feel comfortable (especially where food is concerned, always the food here in Chinese society!). She's much milder and has occasionally stepped in when Patty's dad gets a bit carried away with his sermons.

On that fateful day when we had "the meeting," the day of our wedding celebration was declared, even though I had not yet proposed to Patty yet. I was going to propose in Indonesia, but... you all know how that turned out. Who'd want to permanently scar the memory of a wedding proposal with the kaleidoscopic miseries of Sulawesi? I guess, in visiting the parents, my intention was relatively clear, but wow, her father picked up the ball and ran with it after that. "I'd like to have a small celebration," he said, "and invite some of my friends to the banquet." Though this was not a great surprise, Patty and I had not necessarily planned on getting married in Taiwan, and if we did, we wanted our wedding to be small.

Since then, the wedding has taken on the ballooning proportions of many a wedding in Taiwan, despite Patty's punctuated requests for a "simple wedding." From this is derived the title of my epistle -- the state of the wedding industry in Taiwan. In the U.S., weddings are indeed known for being an expensive spectacle, but the Taiwanese seem to get trapped in spiralling heady fantasies of the perfect wedding, involving such largess and expense that many guests are invited merely so that they can foot the obscene bill. There are entire streets in Taipei devoted to wedding photographs alone, much less wedding agencies, wedding gown boutiques, caterers, and stores that sell the requisite overpackaged tasteless dry cookies given to every guest of the wedding. One of my co-workers just attended her brother's wedding ceremony, telling me that there were 120 tables of 10 guests each -- that's ONE THOUSAND, TWO HUNDRED guests!

Are the majority of these guests actually friends of the bride? Of the groom? No, a large percentage is actually from the parents' list of friends and well-wishers. It sounds expensive, but it's actually a brilliant money-making scheme. Each guest, compelled by convention, must bring a hongbao (red envelope) which includes a sum of money, usually somewhere between $100 and $150 USD. Because it's money, it's very easy to directly evaluate who's being cheap and who isn't, so there's additional pressure to be a bit more generous. At the entrance to the banquet hall (usually reserved at some fancy hotel) there is a table where these hongbao are accepted. In bigger weddings, there may be two such checkpoints, one for the groom and one for the bride.

At these weddings, the guests are served DELICIOUS SEAFOOD - shivering slices of abalone doused in a viscous sauce, dead fish laid out in a sludge of seasonings, staring back at you with their still-intact dead-white eyes; ludicrously expensive sharks-fin soup, bloated lumps of sea cucumber, MSG-infused prawns slathered in butter and garlic, and many other kinds of DELICIOUS SEAFOOD. DELICIOUS SEAFOOD seems to be the celebratory food of choice here, be it a company retreat, a business banquet, or a tasteful wedding gala. The logic, I suppose, is that you eat normal food the rest of the time -- when celebrating, why eat something familiar when you can eat DELICIOUS SEAFOOD?

What a wonderful way to celebrate your intimate love for another person -- by inviting just a few close mobs of people you barely know and compelling them to pay an entrance fee to eat a 10-course meal as you are paraded around from table to table, usually forced to drink an alcoholic toast at each one. In some of the more crass celebrations, the bride and groom are driven by the mobs to do various embarrassing things.

Since setting the date, Patty and I have been on various missions. I had to buy a new suit and shoes (technically, you need to wear new underwear on your wedding day too). Patty's was/is more challenging -- she needed to pick out a gold chain for me (that was technically my job), new jewelry for herself, buy a wedding gown (she opted for a gorgeous black qipao and a red fengxian), find shoes that matched but don't mangle her feet (women's shoes in Taiwan are so pointy I'm surprised airline officials don't confiscate them), pick out xibing (sort of the equivalent of a wedding fruitcake given out to each attendee) and finally, she had to arrange a contract for the dreaded wedding photos.

Wedding photos in Taiwan are the sweetest plum of the wedding industry. These purveyors of sentimentality prey upon that "once in a lifetime event" and raise the moment aloft into the clouds of the cheesy, the idealistic, and the completely artificial. Their services encompass the studio photographs, the wedding photographs, the DVD, the wedding agent, wedding gowns (for sale or rental), picture frames, wedding invitations, not to mention collectible wallet-sized photographs to be given to your 500 closest friends, each one of which is emblazoned with the photography company's logo and contact information. We pawed through some sample wedding photos, involving couples gazing dreamily into the sky, prancing in frilly gowns resembling various species of gossamer sea creatures, or bowing their heads in quiet reflection while gazing at the photographer's off-camera thumb. Alongside these most poignant of pictures were pithy English phrases such as "Loving to endless," "Forever romancing you and me," "you are a beacin [sic] to my love," and my favorite, "Baby I love your way", which accompanied a photograph of the wife with her two daughters. In truth, it seems they have a database of random "romantical" Engrish phrases which is integrated with the layout software, spitting them out whenever the layout demands.

The photo shoot itself requires an entire day, even if you don't plan on any offsite photography. If you do plan on offsite shoots (many couples do), it can go far into the evening, say, 10:00, and possibly into another day. If you span two days, you still have to pay 80 bucks or so for makeup again. You can't have your bride looking like she really looks! In our contract, Patty picked out no less than 3 gowns plus 2 wedding gowns, all of which were worn in addition to the two gowns she had made for her wedding, totalling to 7 if you were counting. I wore 5 outfits in total, the first of which was picked out by the photographer to "complement" Patty's dress and outlandish hairstyle. So for 20 or so pictures I was "Leisure-suit Eric," dressed in a slightly sleazy burgundy shirt and an out-of-style black jacket. For the next shoot, I was presented with some frilly purplish lavender "dress" shirt that glinted foppishly; it was then that I opted to wear the suit I had purchased and tailored to me. The best part of the shoot involved Patty and me wearing cool traditional Chinese clothes (she looked gorgeous in that qipao, I tell you), because we didn't have to feign our emotion. Most old-fashioned Chinese photos involve a bunch of stiff-backed family members glowering to various degrees into the camera anyways. I even got to pose in a sort of Monty Burns "eeehhxcellent" shot, tented fingers and all.

We arrived at 9 in the morning, and left at a timely 8pm in the evening. We treated ourselves to the biggest pepperoni pizza Pizza Hut could deliver. Two days later, we went in to inspect the proofs.

The way the contract works is that even though they take over a hundred photos, we could only pick 30. We could pick more, of course, for more money, and they constantly bank on this. After all, it's a special event! What's another one or two hundred dollars when compared to those pictures immortalizing you and your bride cuddling with cow pillows? The process was as follows: you flip through a photo album of the proofs laid out randomly-- if you see a picture you *don't* want, you write a red X on it with a wax crayon. Eventually you pick the 130 or so pictures you *don't* want rather than the 30 or so you DO want. Does that sound efficient to you?

To make things worse, the photos are laid out in a narrow photo album which only displays 3 per page, making it difficult to gain a broader perspective of the entire collection. They didn't even group the photos by outfit! They actually seemed to be purposefully inserted in a heterogeneous fashion. We asked the wedding agent, who was sitting there even though she had nothing to do with us, if we could take them out and sort them in heaps. She leaned in towards Patty and adopted a confidential tone: "I know what you mean, but you see, our boss has a strict rule that you can't take the pictures out like that. In our experience, it's better this way." Uhhh-hunh.

So after a lot of time and bit of cursing under my breath here and there about the boss' "rules," we whittled the photos down to around 40. The agent had seen us enumerate them, and when we expressed consternation at still having to eliminate 10, she once again became our best friend and gave us a special deal: "On the day you did the photo shoot, the weather was awful -- I know you didn't get to go out to Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall for the outdoor photos, and because of that, we can get you a bit of a discount, because it was a real shame. See, normally when you select 30 photos, it costs around 800NT per shot, and if you pick one more, it's still 800NT, but if you go up to *40* photos, then you get an additional discount of 100 for each photo, each one being 700...(a flurry of business math followed, supposedly to our advantage)"

Patty asked "How much more will it cost?"

Our best friend did a bit of calculating and said it was only $5000NT (~$160 USD) more. Patty blinked and began pointing to photos: "We don't need this one, we don't need that one..."

This wasn't the only soft sell we got while there. Other store attendants would "incidentally" wander by and look through our discard pile. "Ooooh! You look so nice in this one! How could you throw it away?" "You can't just have one black and white like that, you'll need another one for the layout to work." "Why, all of these are 3/4 body shots, you have so few full-body shots." "Why are there so many of the groom?" It was hard enough to eliminate 130 $#%!@$#%! photos, now they are trying to get us to take some back? Yet another ploy to get us to opt for the 40-shot package instead of the 30-shot one.

When we thought we had finished, we then had to pick out:

- The 5 photos for wallet-sized distributions
- The BIG wedding picture to be placed prominently somewhere at our ceremony and later to be mounted above our bed
- The picture to go on our certificate
- The pictures to go on the invitations
- Some other picture for some other important wedding function I have forgotten

We then had to pick our photo album. One was a tasteful black with a brushed-metal inset for a single picture on the cover... that same inset was studded with rhinestones. Patty and I shuddered. "Can we get it without rhinestones?" we asked.

"It's your WEDDING! It should be BRIGHT and FESTIVE!"

Another one was without rhinestones was poisoned by some silly Engrish phrase like "A caress in time with you" or something equally revolting. We eventually opted for a beige photo album, as it was the only one lacking rhinestones or tacky Engrish. In retrospect, we should have gotten the rhinestone album and pried the stones from the cheap glue in which they were set. After picking the album, we were finally released into the real world.

So far, this process has taken four meetings: drawing up the contract, deciding the costumes, the photo shoot, and the proof selection. At least one more meeting will follow to approve of the album layout and to make sure it's been disinfected of any Engrish vapidity. But there are many more spaces on that appointment card, and I'm afraid to ask Patty what they're all for.

When we left, Patty told me her theory for why we couldn't just heapsort all of the pictures. Because of the nature of the contract, we are privy to only 30 of the prints; the rest will probably be shredded and chucked into a dumpster out back. Why shredded, you ask? The fear of the photo company is that if we are left alone with a heap of photos, we will pocket some of the prints slated for destruction. It's an aggravating situation, because their fears are probably not so far from the truth. As a result, somebody is always at the table watching you, directly or indirectly, to make sure you don't make off with some photos that will be thrown away anyways. But at the same time, they need to protect their business; they can't just give away all their proofs; they'll make less money that way! In the age of digital scanners and the Internet, they can't afford for their customers to view their own photos unpoliced.

This essentially brings you up to date on my wedding odyssey.

I love Patty, but I don't love weddings. I think many are wasteful, tacky, and often lose sight of what, in my mind, was the original goal -- to celebrate the bride and groom's mutual love. There are different goals out there, however -- some weddings are a religious sanction for carnal relations, others a union of families, for others even a political union. I don't quite know where my wedding will fall, but as I will probably know only a small percentage of the people attending, it has already fallen short of my ideal for a wedding. To me, weddings should be a manifestation of the personalities of the bride and groom. If they like dancing, have a glorious dance, including a few lessons at the beginning. I heard of a wedding in Hawaii involving hula dancing. Have your wedding at a lake if you like nature, or at a bar with your buds if that's where you met in the first place. That, to me, is a proper wedding.

The good news is that, when I return to the United States, I'll have a nice small gathering of friends and family for a barbecue in a park somewhere. I'll get the wedding I wanted, so with that in mind, I'm really not all that bitter about giving Patty's parents the wedding they wanted. Besides, it might be fun, and there will be plenty of DELICIOUS SEAFOOD to go around!

--Eric

P.S. As I have told some people, I consider it a favor that I don't invite people to my wedding simply due to the fact that I, for the most part, don't like attending weddings. But if your interest has been piqued and it *does* sound like fun, I'd be happy to have you. The celebration will be on September 24th -- write me for details.

P.P.S. I don't eat seafood, making me a source of ceaseless marvel to the Taiwanese. I especially do not like DELICIOUS SEAFOOD.

 

2/20/06/AD -- Hate Mail

Every once and a while, one takes a vacation that defies expectations to such an extent, it takes a while to grasp its import -- days, weeks, months... My recent trip to Indonesia was one such trip. After I had returned to Taiwan, I had to ask myself... what did it all mean?

Let me preface this epistle with a return to Malaysia: Two years ago, Patty and I visited Sarawak province in Malaysian Borneo, which was one of the best trips of our life. Eager to reproduce an experience with a similarly rewarding balance of adventure, exoticism, novelty, and comfort, I began planning a trip to Sulawesi, one of the major islands of the Indonesian archipelago along with Java, Sumatra, Borneo (Kalimantan), and Papua (Irian Jaya). I picked Sulawesi for its reputation for stunning wildlife as well as its mystery, for few tourists venture further than Bali for their Indonesian experience. We got our Indonesian experience, all right.

We had to spend an evening in Jakarta, which fell below my already pre-adjusted low standards. We discovered that, like Malaysia, one of Indonesia's national pastimes is sitting and staring. And we seemed to have arrived at peak sitting hours; the insufficient seating resulted in passageways clogged by entire families sitting on floors. I'm sure there was a purpose for so much sitting, but the number of such people exhibited a composure that seemed to suggest, if nothing else, that it was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon in Jakarta. After being mobbed by "helpful" taxi drivers who circle the airport concourse like vultures, we made it to a reasonably-priced bus heading for the train station. At the train station, we had difficulty getting our bearings; we just wanted a taxi, but the stream of more reputable Bluebird Group taxis were in a more distant lane, while a rumpled driver stood in a nearby lane cleaning his car...

Jakarta is full of such characters. I have discovered that one reason why these dodgy opportunists succeed so well in swindling tourists with inflated prices is not because of any cleverness on their part; it is instead a matter of insistence. The tourist infrastructure (if one could call it that) in Jakarta is miserable. Tourists arrive, but finding no real support facilities, they are instead hounded by the aforementioned helpful taxi drivers the moment they step out of the departure gate. More official personnel look upon the situation from afar with a detachment of some barnyard animal witnessing the predation taking place. Eventually, the insistence of the taxi drivers (who have all agreed beforehand on a basic tourist price to charge foreigners) and the dearth of any real alternatives drive the tourist to submit to this virtual extortion.

So after some hard bargaining with the taxi driver's self-appointed agent, who kept "forgetting" that we had agreed upon 30,000rp instead of 50,000, we were off to our hotel for the night... yet the driver could not find the hotel, the Yanni International Guest House. He kept weaving through disappointingly dismal surroundings, which were choked by bajaj, an awful conveyance that plagues the streets of Jakarta. These monstrosities, instead of having mufflers, seem to have installed amplifiers which hurl the sounds of their braying motor across several city blocks. They are something like a motorcycle converted to a three-wheeler with a canopy in the rear which seats two people. The drivers hail pedestrians by shouting, or through their more preferred and jarring method, honking. They made the ugly streets uglier. Conditions did not improve when we reached our hotel, discovering that it was not a guest house "well-deserving of its praise" (asserted by the Lonely Planet guide); it was instead dank and depressing. We then took another taxi to the more upmarket Marco Polo hotel, which was comfortable if you ignore the fact that something in the bedding set our allergies to riot.

Throughout the trip, we encountered hotels that were in a similar vein to Marco Polo. They reminded me of some science-fiction movie, where our spacefaring protagonists discover some society living inside the hull of a derelict spaceship, one that was once very powerful and impressive, but has fallen into disrepair due to its inhabitants' lack of maintenance and know-how. No matter which of the "upmarket" hotels we went to, there were always several quirks or neglected repairs that reminded me of this: once great monuments now crippled by overgrowth and neglect. It was still much better than the mystifyingly well-praised Hotel Yanni, so Patty and I, after a mediocre dinner in the hotel lounge, opted to turn in early rather than brave the inhospitable neighborhood in which we found ourselves situated.

However, I had fully-expected Jakarta to be the low point of the trip; our goal, after all, was Manado. We left the next day in a METERED taxi (though the driver suspiciously didn't have sufficient change for my 50,000rp, a little over $5 USD, so he conveniently received a hefty tip). Our flight was uneventful, but our arrival at the terminal was once again fraught with irritations. After weaving our way through a haze of clove cigarettes and orange-shirted porters, we were given the task of searching for our checked luggage amidst several unlabeled luggage return carousels. There seemed to be no real information desk, and just behind the glass partition separating the luggage claim from the reception area, the taxi drivers were eyeing us hungrily.

Once we found the luggage (with some cursed incredulities from me) we sat down outside to get our bearings and flip through our book. More swarthy scheming taxi drivers were instantly at our side: "Hallo!" "Hallo sir!" "You go to Manado?" "What hotel you want?" It took persistent and determined ignoring to deter them. If I said something back to them and they didn't understand, it was only more encouragement; never mind the wave of dismissal, the harried tone, the back resolutely turned in their direction, they were here to HELP me in the spirit of altruism, yessir! One of the taxi drivers aggressively assisted me in dialing the hotel I was interested in. This number did not work. The two phone numbers in Manado's phone book did not work. It began to rain heavily. The number in the book for an alternate hotel did not work. We basically stayed at the first hotel we could reach, the "Ritzy."

Wanting to go through the proper channels, Patty and I stood up (the helpful taxi driver immediately materialized beside us) and walked to the official taxi desk to buy whatever transit ticket or voucher they offered. When the altruistic driver and his associate saw us heading in, they immediately began barking and making an alarmed clamor, and began to protest to the "official" that they had helped us and deserved the fare. The official appeared unmoved, yet he ended up giving the driver the fare. Patty and I were left rather bewildered at the whole process: what is the point of having an official taxi desk when you end up in the clutches of the same vultures outside?

The "Ritzy" hotel in Manado was once the Novotel, an incredibly pricey and swank multiple-star hotel in the heart of downtown. From what I can gather, its base rate was around $130USD/night, which is a bit pricey considering few of the island's inhabitants make that much in a MONTH. The owners of this nigh-abandoned hotel consequently found themselves unable to pay the franchise's price tag and passed off to another owner, who rebranded the hotel with the classy name "Ritzy." It was another of those derelict hotels I mentioned before. Though it had a rather impressive entryway and appeared to play host to many of Manado's business-class events, its cracks were literally starting to show in the form of flaking paint, musty carpeting, and frayed towels.

Manado. Manado, according to our book, was and is one of the wealthiest cities in Indonesia, blessed by the clove plantations, coconut groves, and coffee fields that were so covetously guarded by the colonial Dutch for several centuries. Though there was a detectable hum from the flow of rupiah in Manado, it was drowned out by the din of the mikrolet, a phenomenon absent in bajaj-infested Jakarta but malignantly rampant in Manado. The mikrolet is essentially a minivan painted dirty blue and sporting a tiny illegible destination placard informing pedestrians of its destination. Though it could essentially be called public transportation, each mikrolet is privately-owned, and many owners pimp theirs out with neon lights, blinky LEDs, fancy hubcaps, and, above all, a throbbing sound system. The logic here is that the more lavish and deafening the mikrolet, the more business it will attract. Mikrolets appear to comprise nearly 50% of the traffic clogging the one- and two-lane roads strewn across the town, and are so ubiquitous that, assuming you can read and understand their destination, you need only wait one or two minutes before you get a seat on one. What they charge is a pittance (perhaps 25 cents US), but their great numbers suggest they still seem to turn out a profit.

You could see money in a more ominous form as well: the coastal development. At one point, there was a beautiful coral reef right along the southern edge of town, which was recently filled in to accommodate a seaside strip-mall half a kilometer in length; it is still under development. Though the inhabitants of the town complained, corruption runs deep in Indonesia, which reached its peak during Soekarno's dictatorship and has remained firmly entrenched to this day.

In general, I found governmental infrastructure to be conspicuously lacking where we went. Most everything was privatized and answered to money, not a government program. The mikrolets are a good example of this, swarming the city with individually-owned vehicles in place of a government-run public transportation system for a town exceeding 400,000 in population. No centralized efforts were made to promote tourism on the island, and instead the coastal area, which was once beautiful, had been overrun by what the LP guide appropriately calls "half-baked developments." Going by foot to anywhere in Manado is an onerous chore; the sidewalks are uneven (or nonexistent) and often had caved in to reveal dangerous holes to the gutters below, honking mikrolets noisly stream by, and open bins of rotting trash punctuate the journey. Not that you would even want to walk anywhere in Manado -- there is no museum, no park, no ocean view of note (save for the shabby seafood stalls tucked behind the Mega Mall under construction) Late in our stay in Sulawesi, we finally made it to the tourism office. After some clumsy grins and attempts to track down an English speaker, we were handed two pamphlets and encouraged to read them. The woman also asked me "How do you like my Manado?"

I shifted uneasily. "Well, we had a difficult time getting here. For being a tourist office, it is not fun to walk on the streets and it was hard to find you."

"Yes, yes..." she said blithely. "All is good in Ma-na-do...."

So there you have it. We both make good cases, I suppose.

And the rain continued to fall.

We signed up for a tour of the Minhasan highlands the following day, though some last minute calls were made to ensure that the roads had not washed out from the torrential rain. Apparently, it started raining after Chinese new year and hadn't stopped since.

Since this tour was taken during low season, and since the weather was ridiculously dismal, we were the only two on the tour, accompanied by the tour guide, an intern, and the driver, outnumbered 3:2. Though it rained most of the tour, often very intensely, we managed to salvage a very pleasant outing from it. Apart from the statements like "and over here you WOULD see a view of Manado.." "normally the lake would have many colors..." and "behind the mist is a volcano," it was quite a bit of fun. We visited a lively market selling Minhasan delicacies and Indonesian fruits. The most interesting of the produce was salak (http://www.gotouring.com/razzledazzle/fruit/salakphoto3.html) which was a large strawberry-shaped fruit with a peculiar snakeskin covering. Peeling the thin covering will reveal a dry but tasty fruit, tasting a bit like pineapple, and segmented into almost garlic-shaped cloves (usually two or three). They were delicious and were selling for about $.40/kilogram.

Unfortunately, we were unable to see one of Minhasa's proudest delicacies, namely, the forest rat. We arrived at the market near noon, but as forest rat is so popular, it often sells out in the morning. Our guide, Yanni, informed us that it was a party favorite for weddings and birthdays. Still available for purchase, however, was a tasty array of dogs and fruit bats. Both of these had been prepared by scorching the animal in a manner that facilitates the removal of hair, giving it a pitch black appearance relieved only by a lurid, toothy grimace. The bats were especially gruesome, larger than your fist, with a horrifying and contorted display of fangs, framed by receded lips that had been licked away by the flames. The face they bore was exactly the face you see in any horror movie where the bat flies directly at the camera, screeching and baring its teeth. I took many pictures of these delicacies, imagining them handed out to little Timmy for his seventh birthday because their parents had arrived too late and missed the rats. The dogs were fewer but just as hideous, perhaps moreso because all throughout the tour we saw dogs running about the street, all belonging to someone and all destined to have their blackened corpses laid out at the market. Yanni posed for one, holding up a black dog whose violently pink tongue lolled from its lifeless mouth. Yummy.

We continued on our rainy journey, visiting a misty and rainy lake, exploring damp tunnels used by the Japanese during their occupation (I hadn't realized those guys had gotten down that far during WWII), eating Minhasan food in shelter of the rain at a local restaurant, and climbing up to Peace Hill, the crest of which was studded with 5 different shrines of 5 different faiths, representing Manado's religious tolerance (though 97% of the population is Christian). At the end of the tour our accommodating hosts dropped us off at a hotel lying at the base of Mt. Lokon, a not-so-dormant volcano, though we never saw it thanks to the continual rain and/or mist.

That night, it rained.

We woke up in the morning ready to hike Mount Lokon and look into its smouldering crater if it didn't rain, but the rain continued, steady, unabated, and depressing. We called up Yanni to take us to Tangkoko National Park. This day we saw the worst rain on our trip; Yanni said it hadn't rained so hard for at least 5 years, lucky us. We passed washouts, alarmingly deep pools in the road, as well as people dressed in black, who recently attended a funeral for someone who died in the flooding. We didn't talk much in the car, and watched in rigid attention as Yanni forged some murky waters from which others were pushing stalled vehicles. What were we getting into? At least Manado was modestly industrialized; we were going to the borders of a national park. Would it be impossible to hike in? Would we reach a slide in the road which would block our progress? Would Yanni get us stuck somewhere and make the vacation even worse than it was?

What other choice did we have? Manado was a boring town, there was no point in staying at the base of Lokon if we couldn't even SEE it, much less climb it; and our plans to charter a boat out to Bunaken island seemed rather unwise given the weather conditions. This was our best hope.

As we got closer to the coast, the weather miraculously improved, to such an extent that we saw our first patch of blue sky as we pulled into Mama Ruus, our guest house. It was the best accommodation there, with a pitiful 10-watt fan, squat toilet, and cold water 24x7. I had expected minimalist lodging... but it would have been nice if this trip afforded us as many pleasant surprises as it did unpleasant ones. We rushed out before nightfall to see the tarsiers, one of the world's tiniest primates, and did see them after tramping through light jungle for about an hour. As we drew close to their tree from which they would emerge to feed at dusk, we could hear in the distance the exotic jungle sounds of .. a noisy herd of crass Australian tourists taking flash pictures of the nocturnal tarsiers cringing in the recesses of their banyan home. We left as it grew dark; I had a difficult time feeling satisfied with the excursion.

The next day, however, we were going to make up for our missed opportunity at scaling Lokon; instead we were going to climb one of the Dua Saudara (Two Brothers). I asked Ono, our guide, "So the two are volcanoes?"

"Yes." He said.

"Do they have craters?"

"Yes," nodding again.

"Do they.. do they smoke?"

"Of course!" He smiled, as if there were any other kind of volcano.

"Can we climb it?"

He paused, saying it would take three hours, and then one more to get to the top. It sounded quite possible, if the weather held. I felt my spirits finally starting to lift. So we headed out early the next day, with good weather above the forest canopy, a decent guide, and the shiny prospect of a mountain vista and a steaming crater. Through time, however, this enthusiasm was diminished by several realizations about the forest:

1. It's not NEARLY as teeming with life as movies and nature show documentaries would have you believe. Much of the interesting mammalian and avian activity takes place in the canopy, or at least at higher strata. The critters who do live on the ground are often shy (which is wise, since the neighboring natives eat anything that moves). As a result, you see a lot of fallen trees, fungi, parasitic plants, and other things that thrive upon the death of other life forms.

2. There is NOWHERE to comfortably rest in a jungle. When I lived in Alaska, there were always pleasant logs to sit on, rocks scraped clean by glaciers, riversides with boulders, etc. Here in the jungle, everything is damp, squishy, and mostly unpleasant. If you stop, the mosquitoes find you. So you keep going.

3. Though I knew this beforehand, I never quite fully appreciated how outright hostile the forest is. It teemed with every imaginable stinging, pricking, clinging, gouging, restraining and tripping plantlife possible. More than once I reached for something as I hiked on unsteady ground only to get a handful of thorns from another one of those goddamn rattan plants. There were incredibly elastic vines on the ground laid out like tripwires, plants with leaves like saw blades, nettle-like plants that stung our guide, seed pods that clung tenaciously to clothing, thorns that broke off and stuck in my flesh, and thorns that DIDN'T break off and raked my flesh or pulled out threads in clothing. Some sticks and stalks were rotted and broke off instantly upon contact. Others retained their rigidity and jabbed me painfully as I passed through yielding foliage. On top of this there were mosquitoes (of course), and I found one leech on my pants, but missed the other one, which despite its tiny size caused my leg to bleed alarmingly after I showered that evening, thanks to its anticoagulant cocktail.

It was all very hard on Patty, and it was wearing me down as well. I was beginning to wonder if it was worth it. What kept me going was the volcano. "The weather is beautiful, Eric..." "You don't get opportunities like this often, Eric.." "You'll regret it if you don't go all the way..." I kept going. At one place our guide charitably termed a "resting place," Patty decided to rest and wait (though she spent most of the time walking a circuit to avoid exsanguination by the mosquitoes). He said it was one more hour "to the top." I plodded on after him, slowing down by degrees as we plowed through the vegetation; the jungle didn't want me to go further, clinging and scratching at me as I proceeded, but I knew we were close... finally, we came out through the bushes to... bushes. The guide came to a fork, but took the lower of the two. I motioned to the other one and asked him "So that one leads up to the volcano?" He nodded, and said we were going to look at a couple of viewpoints. The first was a view to a resort in a nearby village. Goody. He then dragged me through some scratchy bushes for another claustrophobic vista. I just wanted to see the volcano. I was tired, and worried that I'd go back down the hill to find a Patty mummified by starving mosquitoes. He told me to set my backpack down for a rest, removed his shirt to dry, and pulled out his lunch.

I glanced at the trail we were yet to take, then peered up the mountainside. It looked like we still had a distance to go. "So we're going to head up this trail to the volcano, yeah?"

Ono looked surprised. "Oh no, it's too dangerous."

No, it's too dangerous. Somehow I knew this hike was leading to this. So far, everything about this hike sucked. It would make sense that the biggest disappointment was yet to come. "So... we're not going any higher?"

"There is no trail there. It's dangerous and -- " (he then communicated clumsily how there are many overgrown areas where one could lose one's footing easily in its instability). In essence, this crappy overgrown clump of trees was the highlight.

I'm surpised at how angry I DIDN'T get. In fact, I took it quite well. Part of me was secretly wishing to return. Part of me realized that it was a simple miscommunication. When I say "hike up the volcano," it is implied that I want to view the crater. When he heard "hike up the volcano" he assumed we were hiking up the hillside, not to the top. After all, "it's quite dangerous." Part of me wanted to return to Patty. And part of me had already been desensitized by the already numerous disappointments of this trip such that I merely shrugged it off.

We learned later from an expat-gone-native in Bunaken that our misunderstanding had its roots in... face. Asia is plagued with this phenomenon of face; its inhabitants often seek to preserve it to the extent that they postpone unpleasantness and create a situation wherein they can potentially lose even more face. According to the expat, our big mistake was not exercising caution when asking an Indonesian a yes/no question, because they assume that the desired response to such a question is "yes." Questions such as "Do you have hot water?" "Can I see monkeys in the jungle?" "Can I climb the volcano?" "Can you see the crater?" These are invariably met with the response the inquisitor wants to hear. Sometimes the Indonesians know they're deceiving you, but I think often they don't fully-understand the question but respond politely, since statistically speaking, "no" will likely merit a more unpleasant outcome.

We soon descended the hill; I kept my disappointment in check and told Patty later when Ono was out of earshot. We then trudged down the hill, feeling pain in an increasing number of joints and hotspots, and wanting the worst hike in our lives to end. The hike back down seemed to last longer than the hike up, and unbeknownst to us, Ono was taking us on the grand tour to see the macaques and hornbills, poorly reading our countenances, which shrieked to him "MAKE THIS END!" At one point, he waved to a tree that he had mentioned early in our hike -- a dying banyan tree with a hollow interior that you could enter. It was then I realized that he had been taking us on a longer return loop. I looked at him blearily and said "we just want to go *home*." He looked a bit surprised and hurt, and turned to go onwards, perhaps realizing just then that Patty's limping and both our miserable faces weren't just for show.

At least Mama Ruus' food was good. We then sat in anticipation for Yanni to pick us up and whisk us away from this hell we had created for ourselves. Perhaps to be more fair, the hell *I* had created for the both of us. Even though this whole thing had been an honest misunderstanding, I felt guilty for what I had put Patty through. It was her vacation as well, after all. At one point, I told her that I'd never worked so HARD to try to have fun as I had on this "vacation." But.. with the weather improving and a trip to the tropical island of Bunaken in the cards, things were looking up.

That morning, when we were to head to Pulau Bunaken, I decided to pull out my camera to take a few pictures from the hotel, because we actually had something resembling a view of the area. After a few minutes search, it began to sink in that the camera wasn't in the room. It wasn't in the hotel. Instead, it was in the car that Yanni had rented. Though I called Yanni to see if he could track down the camera, it was pretty obvious that I would never see it again. The guy running the rental shop said he didn't find it in the car, and the fellow who rented the car after him never saw it. How strange, don't you think? Some good Christian Manadonian knows exactly where my camera is. This understandably put me in a dark mood, and for the remainder of the trip, I was no longer in the mood to take any pictures. Half of the photographic history of the trip had been stolen, and at this point I was in no mood to make any more memories.

To go to Pulau Bunaken, one must either take the public ferry at the extremely inconvenient time of 3:00 in the afternoon, or pay an exorbitant (by Indonesian standards, at least) fee to charter a private boat. I found my principles once again defiled, as events conspired in their favor to ensure we would once again be fleeced. We clambered upon a crude but seemingly watertight boat, and our grinning chauffeurs, after halfheartedly attempting but failing to procure life preservers for us, swept us away to the sandy shores of the Bunaken Sea Gardens.

Bunaken is described in my book as a fantastic diving locale, with a rich variety of sealife instantly accessible from one of many beachside dive centers. It had two beaches. It boasts a trail to a dormant volcano, two small villages, and two beaches, where the majority of the guest houses were situated. One of these beaches, as described in my book, occasionally played host to alarming amounts of trash swept over from Manado. I prudently avoided that beach, opting for the more distant of the two. I didn't have grand illusions about the beach, and if experience here in Indonesia taught me anything, it was to lower my expectations. I didn't want to dive, especially. All I wanted was a pleasant vacation refuge, the cliche' where time stands still, the surge of the waves crash hypnotically on the beach, and the wind sways the coconut trees.... or do the cocounut trees sway the wind? These are the sorts of important questions you ask yourself on these sorts of islands, yes?

Given the overall tenor of my trip, it would not be difficult to extrapolate the outcome. As we drew closer to our destination, I began to feel that familiar draining kiss of disappointment that had frequented me so often during this trip. The beach was tiny, perhaps a half-kilometer in length. It immediately looked claustrophobic, as it was squeezed into an even smaller sliver of paradise by the high tide, rampant vegetation, and dense clumps of beachside bungalows. The small unoccupied space that remained was peppered with vacationers and divers, and the pasty fat foreigner in her black bikini did little to enhance the scene. But perhaps there was more, perhaps there was something to explore, perhaps low tide would bring new wonders?

We had a long chat with Christiana, the owner of Froggie's, perhaps the best dive center on the island. The reception area was very homey, complete with avid divers pouring over taxonomy books, friends chatting at tables, and some of the natives strumming the guitar, clownishly crooning some island songs. After I had downed most of my iced lemon tea, and as the conversation turned towards diving, Christiana gave us an assizing look and asked directly: "Are you divers?" We shook our heads. "Do you want to learn how to dive?" Patty gestured to me, saying I might want to, and I said I might, but it wasn't my priority.

Christiana then gave us a rather pointed narrative about the division of clientele and guest houses along the beach and essentially told us that we couldn't stay at Froggie's, because we weren't divers. It's a long story outside of the scope of this narrative. Her retelling of it was civilized and every effort was made to find us new accommodations on the island, but we couldn't help feeling a bit snubbed, as if we weren't good enough to stay at Froggie's. When she found us the best rates and location, she sent us packing with a couple burly islanders to carry our bags for us. As we walked along the pathetic beach, I began to feel heavy. The unsightly clumps of dead leaves and vegetation along the beach were not all that lurked in the sands, for just underneath was an undergrowth of endless trash. Plastic containers, wrappers-- Christiana herself had warned us of glass on the beach.

So here I found myself, at the last destination on my failed itinerary, surrounded by trash, kicked out of our reserved guesthouse, and tramping along a filthy beach to a guest house far removed from Froggie's. The new guest house was pleasant, with a nice view, but I was already depressed and was having a difficult time getting relaxed on this toxic island paradise. Wanting to buy thongs (tennis shoes don't cut it on Bunaken), Patty and I tramped down to the village before dusk to look for some.

The path was longer than we were told. Patty and I were still smarting from our hike, Patty moreso, but we kept a good clip so that we'd make it back before dark, as there were no streetlights on the trail. When we reached the village, we were graced with another facet of Indonesia's sparkling culture. But first, a meaningful description of the town's layout: from what I can gather in Sulawesi at least, villages are essentially just a continuum of houses built along a single road. There is little depth to a village, only length. The result is that the majority of village life happens on the only passage through the village. Dogs, pigs, chickens, kids, bicycles, parties, you name it.

I couldn't honestly tell you if the villagers loved us or hated us, because their greetings only incensed me further, so much so that if I weren't so downtrodden already I would have been sorely tempted to gouge out the eyes of the 472nd person who shouted "HALLO!" "HALLO MISTER!!" "HALLO!!" Though the greeting was given through cheeky smiling faces, there was no hint of a need for further conversation, only some perverse desire for acknowledgement of their greeting. I wished I could communicate with them: "WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT?" "DO YOU WANT MONEY? A CHANCE TO SPEAK ENGLISH? TO SHOW OFF TO YOUR ENGLISH MIMICRY TO YOUR FRIENDS? WHY DOES EVERY ONE OF YOU NEED TO SAY HELLO, AND HOW IN GOD'S NAME COULD YOU EXPECT ME TO ACKNOWLEDGE EVERY GREETER? SHOW SOME HUMANITY!"

It was much akin to someone walking down a road and spotting a dog: wanting to get its attention, one may click their tongue, whistle, and generally harass until it looks disinterestedly in the direction of the commotion. For some reason, this gives people (myself included) a certain satisfaction, as if they had somehow truly interacted with this stray animal they needlessly bothered, or as if this person's life is somehow more complete or important having distracted another living entity from the course of its life. Now imagine that poor dog being prodded 5-10 times a minute by such people. This same dog who spent lots of time and money to go to a polluted island to "get away from it all" and who just the previous day suffered through the shittiest hike of his life. That's one wretched dog.

The villagers probably felt I was a complete snob, as my responses were ranged from halfhearted waves of dismissal to icy glares. What the hell kind of getaway is this? Having procured my thongs at the price of my steadily-eroding sanity, we proceeded in the half-light back to our dwelling, greeted with less-frequent but still agitating hAllos from passerbys. It was pitch black when we made it back, and we had difficulty finding our place. As I neared my bungalow, desperate to shed the memories of the last hour away in silent reflection, I heard the increasing *thump thump THUMP *T*H*U*M*P* of some island hot shot's kickass stereo system (which he can only run from 6pm to 6am due to electricity constraints). Furthermore, he was never satisfied with the music, forever tweaking the volume, switching tracks; at times it disappeared, only to resurge to new infuriating heights. It reverberated through the bungalow. I felt it under my skull. I felt myself being crushed by the music, the crowded beach, the price-gouging, the musty hotels, the clinging jungle bushes, the rain, the barrage of hallos, essentially all of the cumulative failures of the trip. It shredded the last remains of my composure, and I finally broke. I gnashed, I cursed, I clawed and hit things. All the bitterness and profanities that had been building over the entire trip bubbled over and erupted, hissing through clenched teeth and angry tears.

That night, I didn't eat. I didn't interact. I simply imploded. Nothing worked out on this trip; even now the fine weather and clear skies, viewed through my bitterness, were simply there to illuminate the heaps of glittering plastic scattered about the beach. I really, really, ... really tried to stay positive. I really tried to salvage something from this. The effortless fun and adventure we had discovered in Malaysia found its acrimonious nemesis in Indonesia. So I spent the better part of the night sitting down on the least fetid patch of the beach I could find, willing the trip to end. Patty, seeing me completely dysfunctional, acted with impressive alacrity to arrange transport the next morning, adopting a cover story for my behavior: something about "bad news from home." Bad news, all right. Her efficiency, though appreciated, depressed me even further, as I had dragged somebody else into this expensive nightmare along with me, and she had demonstrated through her actions that she was as eager to escape as I was.

The next morning, skipping breakfast and ignoring my protesting stomach with resolute asceticism, I boarded the boat gloomily with as little eye contact as possible. The public ferry, of course, was late. When it did arrive, it stopped at HALLO Village to pick up more bottles to ship out. Their beach was almost as trash-ridden as ours, though a cleanup crew was working on it. We were told earlier by a woman in the guesthouse that the garbage had been swept from the Philippines by the monsoon rains, and that the beach wasn't usually this filthy... which makes sense, since our luck had been this way since the outset of this debacle. Two days later, the crew was going to clean up OUR beach. You think I would have found that a bitter comfort -- at least others could enjoy what I was robbed of. But as I watched the crew, I began to sense that not all of the garbage came from the Philippines as they said. I watched as one worker raked dead vegetation, styrofoam chunks, cups and miscellaneous trash into a tidy heap. In front of the heap, he dug a shallow hole. He proceeded to FILL IN THE HOLE WITH THE GARBAGE, which he then covered up with the 3 or 4 inches of sand he dug out to begin with. With a few pats of a shovel, it was a job well done. I scanned the beach and witnessed every member of this so-called cleanup crew doing the same.

Garbage swept in from the Philippines by a big storm? Do they ever wonder why there is so much garbage after a storm, when waves are rougher, reach higher, and wash away more sand? Where the hell do they think that buried garbage goes?

I think it's important to note here that even though Bunaken is a place tourists visit, one with facilities for diving, it is first and foremost a place where people reside and earn a living. A pretty beach is nice, but when you're out fishing, or running a coconut plantation inland, this is a very low priority. Perhaps one day Bunaken will actually turn into a real tourist destination instead of a point of interest, and more emphasis will be put on the proper maintenance of the beaches. But ... how can they even call this cleaning? This concept of cleaning up boggled me, even in my morose state of numbness.

As a fitting sendoff from Bunaken, we were dropped off in a reeking fish market, whereupon it instantly began to rain, heavily. No taxis were in sight, only mikrolets with inscrutable destination signs. Lugging our rapidly soaking luggage in the direction that the mikrolets were going, I asked an old lady at a market stall for help/directions for a taxi (in Indonesian, "taksi"). Typical of the hospitality we received, the hag only laughed with a toothy indifference. I was apparently no longer there, as she resumed doing whatever business it was she had there. In desperation, we boarded a mikrolet, and basically stayed on the bus only as long as we didn't see a taxi or a travel agency. We saw the latter first.

I'll trim down the story from here, as it's getting pretty lengthy. At that moment, we just wanted to go home. We took a taxi straight to the airport, but it seemed that everybody wanted to get out of this crummy town, because it was fully booked. We had one and a half more days to spend in Manado, and we did it the best way possible: we stayed cooped up in yet another derelict hotel, this time with a disturbingly green swimming pool, and watched Indonesian soap operas and advertisements for skin-whitening cream, venturing out only for provisions. We had enough. Though climbing Lokon Volcano was still a possibility, I was far too gun-shy and weary to try anything that ambitious again.

One and one-half days later, we boarded our (delayed) flight to Jakarta, spent a quiet evening at perhaps the best hotel we had stayed in during our entire trip -- I think I had finally developed a skill for reading in between the lines of my travel guide's blinkered and nearly delusional praises for various squalid guest houses. The next day we were back in Taiwan, and I had never been happier to see the end of a vacation.

Perhaps I've come across as a little bit negative towards Sulawesi, Jakarta, indeed, all of Indonesia, and possibly any cartography companies that acknowledge Indonesia on their maps. I have to admit, I'm feeling a deep dissonance about my experience. I planned this. I got myself into this. Though some things were perhaps beyond my control (weather, vile beaches, flooding and death), many others weren't. And somehow I feel as if I made all the wrong choices. This returns me to the very first question I posed in my letter: what did this trip mean? What can I take with me to my next trip? Have I learned anything?

Why was I there? WHY wasn't it so fun? Some things were obvious, but others were less so. As this trip was entirely my idea, I had a hard time accepting it as a colossal failure completely of my own design. Was there *anything* good about the experience?

Perhaps the best thing about the trip was the food. It was cheap, tasty, and spicy. Patty and I savored Ayam Rica-Rica (a nuclear-spicy chicken dish), as well as corn perkedel (a loosely contiguous fried biscuit of sorts made from batter, onions, and corn). We had satay more than once, and a delicious accompanying dish called dabu-dabu, which was remarkably similar to pico de gallo, though it was thoroughly mined with explosive little peppers. We even ate babi rusa, which is an elusive, exotic, and probably endangered species of wild pig, but it was served to our intimate little tour group and... it was already dead. I wouldn't have ordered it myself, but it had been ordered, so what was there to do? The coffee (kopi) they serve in Manado is delicious, and they often just dump the grinds in a cup, add hot water and sugar, and serve it to you as a drink that you chew as much as you drink. The tea is adequate, but it's typically far too anemic with far too much sugar.

Our first day on the tour was also quite nice, as well as that night in the distant Highland Resort, perhaps the only day we truly spent at leisure with nothing to do but sit in the quiet. Perhaps that day was also pleasant because we still felt all sorts of untapped potential in the island, unlike the last few days, when there only seemed to be potential for calamity.

I still haven't mentioned what I learned, but I honestly feel like I didn't learn anything except for the extent of abuse one can take in Indonesia. But this, maybe... well, maybe is the root of the issue. I think one of the reasons for my disappointment is that, like Bunaken, Manado is a place where people *live*. Their jobs have little to do with tourism. They eke out an existence selling rambutan and rats they trap in the jungle. They pick coconuts, grow clove trees, and drive mikrolets for other villagers. A mega-mall is under construction, but again, it's more for the people than the tourists. The waterfront has been essentially decimated for the purposes of commerce, not tourism, though some seaside hotels brag of a view of trash-laden Bunaken. This was probably the most primal country I have ever been to -- on our very first day in Jakarta, Patty and I saw more naked kids than I have seen since teaching swimming class to my kindergartners at Cambridge. Few houses have hot water, many "bathrooms" simply have a tub of water that is periodically filled with rainwater or well-water, from which water is scooped to douse oneself when bathing. Add to this a government rife with corruption, which has been accused on many occasions of robbing the other islands of their resources in order to build up Jakarta and the island of Java itself. Never having been in a third world country, I can't say for sure if Indonesia counts. But it's certainly the biggest taste of the third world I've had, and... I don't like it.

It's hard to travel in countries like this. I was right when I told Patty "I've never tried so hard to have fun," because it's a lot of work. You can't assume basic necessities, and need to live without some creature comforts, such as hot water or a sit-down toilet. I still don't know quite what I've learned from my trip, other than I never want to return to Indonesia, and I'm now highly suspicious of Southeast Asia as a whole. There's a whole world out there; I think it's time I tried a different continent.

Thanks for reading what is probably my most excessively long missive to date. Even Gmail's spell checker accused me of writing a letter that was too long to check! Anyhow, I hope you are well, and that your own journeys are leech-free.

HALLO! from Eric

1/28/03/AD -- Friggin' Air Conditioning

I have been told by foreigners and natives alike, Taiwan is a country where logic doesn't work. I could recount numerous proofs, but the most poignant is also the most salient: the buses run their air conditioning year-round. For those of you who think that Taiwan is a tropical paradise, it can be, but not 12 months out of the year. Four months are actually pretty cold. Below room temperature cold -- even down to 10 degrees cold. That may not strike you as too alarming, but when you get up in the morning, creaky and cold from your apartment which has no heating just like most apartments around here, and you clamber on to a school bus that is running air conditioning so that it is actually 3 degrees less (with wind chill), you will quickly appreciate this bizarre practice, manifested by your suffering. Add to that a stuffy nose from the foul air quality in Taibei, and you're pretty miserable.

Why do they do it? To defog the windows. And to provide the students with "fresh" air. And the parents put their kids in this meat locker for up to an hour and a half, yet they are concerned when I take the kids out to play on the playground in weather that is actually WARMER than it is on the bus.

1/26/03/AD -- An Inspiring Dictionary Cover

Hey everybody, I updated my webpage! I added a bit on Dancing in Taipei, and added a link to my semi-functional and somewhat dated summary of my current employ, the Cambridge Bilingual School. But even more importantly, I added this dictionary cover for posterity. Perhaps you might mistake it for any old dictionary cover at first, but the smirking youngster who holds the center quickly dispells that notion. Click on the image for details; I find it really amusing. There are four things that I have identified that are wrong with this cover:

9/13/02/AD -- Waiguoren in Taiwan

Today Vincent took Karin and me to the Brown Sugar club, which required that you buy at least $480 NT in food & drinks in order to listen to the live band show. The singer was this largish black lady, and apart from Rudy, the band was strictly a group of foreigners (waiguoren). There were a few more waiguoren sitting around, but for the most part it was a Taiwanese audience.

Ever since I've started to go to bars/pubs/whatever the euphemism, I've come to the rather cynical conclusion that it really is just an upgraded opium den. You go there to pass the time, get a nice buzz, spend a lot of money, and hence be more 'sophisticated.' It was fun sitting there and scanning the room for a while. But the music eventually picked up and became more interactive. The singer, who was now dressed as Tina Turner, sang a few songs after her opening "Simply the Best" performance, and she involved the crowd. She made us do the Twist, the Tail Feather(s?), the Monkey, the ... cocopop?, the pony, the itch (my favorite), the swim, and a couple of others. So I found myself one Long Island Iced tea and one Brown Sugar Iced Coffee later standing alongside Karin on a chair performing for the audience, as the singer had called us both up on stage (Karin was there for much longer; she only called me in near the end). Karin was pretty awesome. I didn't quite know what to do with my hips, though, after having been trained to do Cuban motion in Eugene. Still, it was amazingly fun, and we thanked her for it at the end of the set. Then she said, to our understandable puzzlement: "Now you can tell your friends that you danced on chairs in front of everybody in Singapore!"

So, hey everybody, I danced on chairs in front of everybody in Singapore!

9/4/02/AD -- Tips for Beginning Pedestrians in Taiwan

Adjusting to new traffic patterns and social conventions whilst navigating the streets of a new culture can often be a harrowing ordeal for new arrivals to Taiwan. The following are some tips that one should find extremely helpful.

8/22/02/AD -- Betel Nut Culture

In my page on Kenting, I described the betel nut girls along the road from Kaoshiung. Yesterday, my roommate Vincent took me downstairs to an eatery next door, which also happened to sell betel nuts (bing1 lan3). Before I really knew what he was talking about, he had bought one for me to try out. It was a rather innocuous-looking whitish nut, but still fresh so that it was still moist and a bit woody. It was wrapped in a green leaf. After reading about it, and after hearing his description of it ("spicy!"), I expected an explosion of flavor, but instead I found myself chewing on something in between a vegetable and a nut. The leaf gave it a fresh, bitter flavor. The sensation was a bit like chewing a clove, because after a while my mouth felt a tad numb (but not much.) Overall, I was pretty unimpressed with it. I was given a cup to spit in, and ... it was bright red! Where the heck did that come from? Besides its amusingly disgusting byproduct, I was quite disappointed with the nut. I give it 2 out of 5 stars. Just for the record, Vincent doesn't like it either.

8/20/02/AD -- Eric's World

My teaching certificate arrived safely at my school today! I got my air conditioner! I get my desk tomorrow! I'm so happy! I can't stop using exclamation points!

8/19/02/AD -- You Are Here

I just thought I'd throw in this picture taken on the first day of orientation; the gal on the left is Karin, another wet-behind-the ears American English teacher (though still not as wet as mine), and Gordon, a seasoned veteran Canadian teacher. We're at Xindian station (note the bastardized romanization of Hsintien). Xindian! That's where I live!

8/15/02/AD -- Unreal

Everything that could have gone wrong with my trip to Taiwan... didn't. And everything that could go well did. I have cheap housing, a good, responsible roommate who speaks scant English (which is what I wanted!) and to whom I took an instant liking; I live in a good neighborhood next to a pleasant river, everybody is friendly, my Chinese is already improving, I have already made friends, I'm going to get paid to play with blocks and ruffle children's hair with hand puppets, but most of all, the school I'm working at is absolutely (insert emphatic expletive here) brilliant! I don't know what I did to deserve this, but should any god claim responsibility, I will gladly burn a portion of my monthly salary as sacrifice. Either that or buy an air conditioner. Hmm.... I include both to edify the viewer and to satisfy my burgeoning sense of triumph a couple of pictures of a view from my school. Take that, ill fate!

 

8/14/02/AD -- mmmm.... Asparagus

Sometimes, you encounter a drink you simply must have. I felt it at Foodland in Alaska, when I saw the violently red Big Red, and when I was in Wales and stumbled across the savory D&B Soda (Dandelion and Burdock) in a local Kwicki-Mart, and I felt that familiar compulsion again today when I laid eyes on this can of delectable asparagus juice. Admittedly, what caught my eye was the bikini babe in a compromising posture, not the suspicously-shaped asparagus bunch on the obverse, and the stockers at the convenience store seemed to have noticed that, as the bikini babe was the only visible side of the can within the refridgerators. As Clive said, the design of the packaging is either very ridiculous or very clever. (BTW: It's worth clicking on the images for details. Who would have thought a close-up of asparagus juice could look so good?!)

8/13/02/AD -- It's really only Tuesday...

I am now 15 hours in the future. My plane ride was surprisingly smooth, except for when I lost my tickets in Seattle. I only once did I have to take off my shoes, submit to a body search, and allow my luggage to be rifled through; only thrice was my carry-on bag x-rayed. After a series of wheedling missives to CBS, I was promised in rather terse terms that I would be picked up at Chiang Kai Shek International Airport by one of their employees. I still wasn't sure if she would be there, however, so as I flew my last leg from Tokyo/Narita, I began to plot out alternative for lodging that evening, as I would be arriving at 9:20 in the evening, and CKS is pretty barrren at that time of night. But as I entered, I saw a very welcome "Eric Glason" sign being held by a friendly-looking Chinese woman, and knew that things would be OK. We've been put up in Xindian for the time in what seems to be a hotel, but what are actually temporary living quarters at the company headquarters. I can't seem to get my computer to recognize the dial tone here, though, so by the time you read this, not only will this message not be from the future, but it will likely be in the past.

8/05/02/AD -- Past and Present

I have an open question for anyone who cares to answer, starting with a scenario. Say that one year ago you had a fantastic time with someone. They could be a lover or a friend... it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that you had a strong bond. Then something goes wrong. You've been jilted in love, or they turn out to be an evil person, or you're simply the victims of creeping estrangement. Now you either despise them, or it's too painful to think about them, or you feel strangely dispassionate about ever having known them. When you talk about them to others, do you still call them a friend? Do you say "my friend..." or "I had a friend who...?" How do you deal with all of the pleasant memories in your mind, which evoke both pleasantness and disillusionment? How do you acknowledge someone you no longer feel good about, yet who brought you so many good times? How do you cope?

8/04/02/AD -- Mutant Duck

Grace and I went to Alton-Baker Park yesterday, because we hadn't gotten enough of feeding the ducks the day before that. Alton Baker park contains a large duck population which largely sustains itself by handouts from visitors seeking idle entertainment. The last time we had been there, we spotted this truly grotesque, truly aberrant duck(?), whom we lazily named Blackie. I have so much I want to write about him that I can't fit him here. Instead, check out my duck feature here.

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8/03/02/AD -- Required Reading

Grace bought me this cool book entitled The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Survival Handbook (Travel). It includes tips on how to survive a volcanic eruption, how to remove a leech, how to ram a barricade, and how to foil an alien abduction:

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6/02

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