Yum City, Indonesia

Guys, this is yum city.

-- my friend Lolly

Sometimes, tempe bakar (grilled tempeh) and sauteed kangkung (water spinach) are all a girl could ask for in the culinary department of her existence.  And most of the time, these delicious Indonesian dishes suffice.  But variety is the spice of life, is it not?  Sometimes, a girl asks for more.  And this past week, she received.  Watch and observe, O ye of little faith, and you will learn what can happen when a bunch of creative twenty-somethings living abroad in Asia get a little too tired of rice:

Sunday, 14 February 2010  Valentine's Day Potluck at Lolly and Megan's.  Where do I even begin?  Lolly found some whole-wheat linguini in the cupboard of her homestay's communal kitchen, which was pretty special since none of us have seen whole grains in months (Indonesians like their white white Wonderbread, wouldn'tchaknow), and tossed it with whole garlic and broccoli which she'd bought fresh from the pasar that morning.  Megan baked eggplant with some amazing tomatoey sauce she'd whipped up, and Colin pureed carrots with basil and yogurt for an exquisite thick orange soup.  Emma and Cyrus pulled through, as always, with an Indian potato-and-vegetable curry incorporating spices they'd brought back from their holiday travels in India, and Luna showed up with a small barrel of mashed potatoes (half 'n half regular and sweet).  And my contribution?  Banana chocolate chip pancakes, courtesy of the Bisquick hand-schlepped from the USA first by my father and then by my mother, for dessert.  Heart-shaped, of course.

Monday, 15 February 2010  Day-After-Valentine's-Day-Potluck leftovers at Lolly and Megan's.  Just as delicious cold.

Tuesday, 16 February 2010  Cyrus' tourist visa ran out last week, which meant he had to leave the country and re-enter to get a fresh visa.  So while he was in Singapore for 24 hours, he picked us up what he thought were black beans -- black bean burritos, here we come!  And just as our fantasies of homemade Mexican food were getting too delicious to be true, reality reared its deceptive head and revealed that, as it turned out, these were soybeans.  Soybean burritos, here we come?  Exxxxactly.  Whipping some culinary magic outta his back pocket, Cyrus boiled those little beans down, added some veggies, and thanks to Emma's prowess with cake flour and oil, we had ourselves some mean soybean burritos that night.  Best Mexican-Asian fusion south of the equator, I swear.

Wednesday, 17 February 2010  Luna brought over some tiny round eggplants, which we sauteed and added to the leftover soybean burrito filling from the previous night.  I whipped up some Southwest-style guacamole (avocados can be good for other things besides avocado shakes, it's true) and we had ourselves Mexican-Asian fusion Night Two, with dragonfruit for dessert.  Doesn't that color make you want to dance?  Or maybe just eat dragonfruit?

Thursday, 18 February 2010 Deciding to play it easy, Emma, Cyrus and I settled on a simple gado-gado style pasta and peanut sauce dish for this evening.  It was shaping up to be heartily peanut-y, if a bit bland, until Cyrus dumped about a quarter cup of chili sauce from Makassar into the mix.  I still maintain it all ended up great, though we did spend most of the meal with tears streaming down our faces.  Better bawling than bland, right?

Friday, 19 February 2010  Friday night is jazz night at ViaVia, a tourist cafe downtown, so E, C and I took a break from the kitchen and headed down for some good eats and good music.  (ViaVia, it should be noted, also serves Storm, a Balinese beer that, frankly, knocks Bintang out of the park.)  Over a round of Storm Golden Ales, we enjoyed lamb curry, goat cheese salad, fried tempe and calamari.  Over another round of Storm Golden Ales, we enjoyed the jazz, and over yet another round of Storm Golden Ales (though only for Cyrus), we simply enjoyed the existence of Storm Golden Ale.  It wasn't cheap, but hey -- every once in a while, I'd say we deserve to splurge on brews with more kick than our usual 5% Pilsners.  Bintang's fine and good, but sometimes fine and good just doesn't cut it.  

Saturday, 20 February 2010  At around 1:30PM on this day, out to lunch with Lolls, Cols and Meg, I had my first taste of sushi in at least 7 months.  Swoon.  We were at a restaurant that serves not only Japanese food, but also Korean and Chinese food as well, so I guess I'll have to go back for kimchi and dimsum at sum point.  It was no Osaka (Western Mass represent!) but it was a Spicy Rainbow Roll -- which are hard to come by in this town -- so I'll take what I can get.  It's easy to forget sometimes, but a life without wasabi is really no life at all.

Sunday, 21 February 2010  This morning I slid back in to home plate from my week of culinary revelry the same way I started out -- with pancakes.  I wanted to experiment with coconut milk, so I just used that in place of regular milk in the batter, with favorable results: the pancakes did have a vaguely coconutty flavor.  And anyway, it's really kind of impossible to go wrong with Bisquick.  Thanks mom and dad!

So as you can see, with a few imported goods and a little ingenuity, the great eats of the world can be had, well, anywhere in the world.  Hungry yet?

When it Rains ...

... yep, you got it.  It pours.  No, but like -- it actually pours.  Such that, though one rode one's bicycle, Maurice, to work, one nevertheless finds it necessary to swim home.  With Maurice.

So, it seems that the much-anticipated Rainy Season, though unfashionably late, has arrived.  For realz.  It's been raining pretty regularly over the past few weeks, which means that sometime during the early or late afternoon clouds gather, the sky turns ominously black, and an ocean of fresh water pours forth from the sky in the form of nine gazillion fatty raindrops.  Somehow, up to this point, I've been able to avoid having to go out during the worst of the monsoons and have successfully limited my transit necessities to times when it is only drizzling.  Mission "Don't Let My Work Shoes Start Molding" thus far accomplished.

Today, sadly, this was not the case.  (I should have known, since it hadn't rained in two days and when I woke up this morning to check the weather, my iGoogle gadget informed me that it was about 88ºF with 91% humidity.  Great.)  The rain started as I walked in to teach my 1PM class, and by the time I dismissed my students at 2:45 and gathered my things to go home, the tropical thunderstorm was in full swing, complete with dramatic flashes of lightning and show-offy cracks of apocalyptic thunder.  My choices were few: 1) stay at school and wait for the rain to stop, or 2) go home in the rain.  It being Friday, I was in no mood to hang around the office, and besides, this was always going to happen sooner or later.  Time to face the music, Fiona, and pull out those flippers.

Preparing to go home in the downpour, of course, was a full operation.  First, I rolled my sleeves up above my elbows and rolled my pants up above my knees, to minimize the square inchage of clothing that would get completely soaked.  Then, I took off my work shoes, put them in my backpack, and changed into my Old Navy flip-flops that I carry in Maurice's basket in a plastic bag in case of this precise situation.  Finally, I donned my bright blue one-size-fits-all poncho, complete with reflector stripes, and fitted my helmet over the hood on my head.  Outfitted thus, I was ready to brave Noah's Ark Take Two.  Yogya doesn't have the best drainage system, so most of my ten-minute bike ride home was performed through one continuous lake of varying depths.  The better moments were when the lake was only a few inches deep; the worse moments were when the water came to pedal level, halfway up Maurice's wheels, and I wondered if we might just kind of tip over and float away.  It didn't help that I couldn't see much since Mother Earth was giving my exposed face a good raindrop scrubbing, but Maurice and I made it home without any hydroplane mishaps and surprisingly only mildly soaked.  And after I changed my clothes and toweled off my face and limbs, you almost couldn't tell I'd just invented a new water sport on my way home from work.  

Best of all, of course, was that my work shoes (in my backpack and under my poncho) stayed dry.  No mold for those loafers today!  But I'm not going to count my chickies before they hatch -- I've heard my share of mold horror stories, and with weather like this, you just never know.  It's the tropics, after all.  Stuff molds. Whatcha gonna do but keep the fan on and your fingers crossed?  And wear all your clothes as often as possible, I guess, so they don't stay stationary.  I've heard that helps.

Surrendering My Soul to Singapore

In the Lonely Planet's Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, the section on Singapore begins as follows: "One of Southeast Asia's most remarkable success stories, immaculate Singapore confirms and undermines popular stereotypes in equal measure.  Yes, it's modern, clean and organized.  No, it's not stifling, strait-laced and dull.  What you have here is a dynamic 21st-century metropolis with a culture, history and cuisine that's remarkably rich for a place so small."  As it turns out, the LP and I have that attitude in common.  Yes, Singapore just might be my soul city-country.  No, I am not kidding.

I had a good feeling about this last stop on my itinerary before I got there, and I wasn't disappointed.  After arriving by bus from Melaka, Luna and I found the nearest metro station and hopped on the amazingly easy-to-navigate Singapore Mass Rapid Transit to head out to the friend's apartment where we would be staying.  I mean, what kind of city has a public transportation system whose acronym spells SMRT?  I liked this place already.  

Our first night in Singapore, we headed down to Little India where I proceeded to consume possibly the most amazing Indian meal of my life at a restaurant called Komala Vilas.  Luna, who studied abroad in India and had just returned from almost a month of travel there, admitted that this was maybe the best dosa she had ever had.  Actually, it was the best dosa she'd ever had.  Not that I needed any convincing, but Singapore's Little India went straight to the top of my List Of Places To Return To As Soon As Possible.  The next day we explored Chinatown, where I was introduced not only to pink bubble tea but also the most aesthetically beautiful, chicly hipster and if-I-had-a-million-bucks-I-would-buy-everything-in-this-bookstore-y bookstore, called BooksActually.  Even the name was chic and hip.  I walked inside and was drooling within 4 seconds.

With a superhuman display of self-restraint on my part, I managed to exit BooksActually having only purchased two items: an bilingual anthology of Malaysian/Singaporean poetry called Dari Jendela Zaman Ini/From the Window of this Epoch, and a vintage red and turquoise notebook -- but you can bet your behind that this little independent bookstore also shot straight to the top of my List Of Places To Return To As Soon As Possible and snuggled in up there with Little India.  I decided that if I ever live in Singapore, I will just go ahead and allot a portion of my monthly salary to my very own BooksActually fund.  It will be like taking out taxes, only I will be the one withdrawing the money, and it will come back to me in the form of books and extreme intellectual and aesthetic gratification.  [:: drools ::]  Later that afternoon, Luna and I took an excursion to the grocery store around the corner, where we discovered that, contrary to our experience in Indonesia, you can buy the following items at any old corner grocery store: real bread, blue cheese, mixed-berry jam, and red wine.  A veritable feast, and then two sulfite hangovers, ensued.  I love Indonesia, don't get me wrong, but if I expect to attain any sort of long-term happiness in my life, both wine and its immediate procurability are going to have to be in the picture.  

The next day -- and last day before heading back to reality -- was spent goggling at the shopping sights of Orchard Road, wandering through the Singapore Art Museum and gorging ourselves on incredible mexican food (one more prerequisite to my long-term happiness that is sadly missing in Yogya).  And though our flight was the next morning, I wasn't too bummed out.  I mean, it was love at first step-on-the-SMRT.  And though Singapore does have its potentially creepy idiosyncrasies (the signs on buses urging you not to pretend to be sleeping so you don't have to give your seat up to grandma, for example, or the lanes that separate walking traffic in the SMRT stations), it's all just part of the package, and I know I'll be back.  Come on, I have to be back -- the whole damn country's holding court at the top of my List Of Places To Return To As Soon As Possible.  And as anyone who knows me knows, I don't take lists lightly.  No siree.

Flying Solo

For those of you who follow the "Buku-Buku" section of this blog, you'll have noticed that the book I most recently read was called "A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe." The book, which was a gift from my aunt, was a collection of essays by women telling the stories of their solo travels. I read the whole thing cover-to-cover in just a few days, and was so inspired by some of these women's stories that I just couldn't wait to get out on the road, and face my fears about traveling alone.

And as it turns out, I've gotten my chance. I left Yogya last Friday, and spent the next four and a half days with my friends Aggi and Alex, who are teaching on PiA fellowships in Penang, Malaysia. After gorging myself on Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Thai food in Malaysia's veritable food capital, kicking it around Georgetown (the main city on the island of Penang), visiting some sweet temples (see a picture of Kek Lok Si to your right), hiking through a national park to go swimming on a deserted beach, and helping Aggi ring in year number twenty-three, I decided it was time to head out on my own. Aggi and Alex had gone back to work and I had seen (and eaten) the best of Penang, so it was time to move along.

With three open days before my scheduled reunion with Luna in Kuala Lumpur on the 15th, I hopped a bus to the Cameron Highlands (which lie roughly between Penang and the capital) to see what the mountainous tea plantantion towns had in store for me. I've traveled alone before, including in countries that are not my own, but this trip was different -- in the past, I've always had the phone number of at least one person with whom I could get in touch at my destination. When I took a solo weekend trip to Granada while I was studying abroad in Spain, for instance, I was able to meet up with the friends-of-a-friend, who took me out and showed me around town. But this time, I was completely on my own -- a woman alone, as it were. Oh goody.

When my bus pulled into the bus station in Tanah Rata, the main town in the Highlands, I disembarked without really knowing where I was going. I had called ahead to reserve a dorm bed in a guesthouse mentioned in the Lonely Planet, but I didn't really want to sleep in a dorm, so I was considering that my back-up plan. All the couples who had been on the bus quickly dispersed (obviously THEY knew where they were going), which left me and the only other lone traveler on that bus, a British girl who looked uncannily like a blonde Minne Driver. (I have since entertained the possibility that she actually IS Minnie Driver with a dye-job -- the resemblance is that uncanny.) Minne clearly didn't know where she was going either, so when a man approached us offering a free ride to a guesthouse called "Twin Pines" where we could check out the rooms, we both accepted. At Twin Pines, upon discovering that they were offering single rooms for 12 ringgit (which is about US $4) per night, I was sold. The rooms were basically closets in the attic, but I wasn't planning on spending too much time there -- and besides, it's cold in the Highlands. Like, actually cold. Is this still Southeast Asia? Will somebody please wake me up?

After parting ways with Minnie in the attic hallway and dropping my bag in my closet, I went back downstairs to head out for a walk, enjoy the cool air of the afternoon, and check out the town. While I was standing on the patio examining my map, someone with an American accent said, "So, what are you up to this afternoon?" I looked up to see a bald dude of ambiguous age, sitting at a table and smoking a cigarette. "I don't know," I said. "I just got here." Forty-five minutes later, I had learned that Ernie (not his real name -- gotta protect people's privacy dontchaknow), age 43 and hailing originally from Wisconsin, had already traveled around much of the world and was basically kicking it in Asia, waiting out the economic crisis in the States. Ernie is an ex-drug addict who first went to jail when he was 15, never got married or had kids, has bungee jumped in New Zealand, has touched a great white shark while scuba diving off the coast of South Africa, has taught English in China and has never had a beer in his life. If I had been heading out for my walk with someone else, we probably would have passed Ernie right by. Instead, I made a friend. Score one for Team Woman Alone.

I think that most people who have traveled alone agree that it can be by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) invigorating and exhausting. For example, when I had to use the bathroom in the bus station, I didn't have anyone with whom I could take turns watching the bags and going to pee, and when it came time to make decisions about accommodation, I only had Minnie for solidarity. On the other hand, no one complained when I chose to eat Indian food for all three of my meals today, and I didn't have to weigh the pros and cons with my travel companion of paying for a tour of the tea plantations -- I just decided to book the tour, and I booked it. (Which, by the way, was totally worth it -- not only did I get to tour a tea plantation, watch the tea being processed, sample some tea and buy oleh-oleh for my housemates back in Yogya, but I also got to visit a butterfly aviary, hold a scorpion the size of a bottle-opener, and eat fresh strawberries from a strawberry farm. Word.) I've taken a few walks, written 5 postcards, had coffee with Ernie twice, made friends with a Pakistani girl from Australia who has promised to add me as a friend on Facebook, and eaten every meal alone. It is sometimes lonely, but mostly fantastic.

That being said, I am more than looking forward to seeing Luna tomorrow. My few gorgeous days in the Cameron Highlands have been a super solo experience, but I'm ready to morph back into A Woman With Friend -- after all, it's nice to have someone to crack a beer with, say goodnight to, and ask to watch your stuff while you go to the bathroom in the bus station. Trying to maneuver into those tiny stalls and squat with a backpack on -- trust me, it just doesn't work.

A Report from the Future

One year ago today, I wrote in my journal: "First entry of 2009! Call me crazy, but this year feels like a good one. :-)" Then, near the end of the entry: "The cosmic energy is definitely here in 2009." So now, one year later, it feels appropriate to ask: was the cosmic energy here in 2009?

Let's take a little scamper down memory lane and check it out. I wrote a small book of poems -- my academic thesis -- and graduated from college. (Bachelor's degree: check.) I spent an amazing summer visiting friends and family all over the U.S., and packed all my worldly possessions into labeled boxes which are currently being stored in my mother's basement, waiting for whatever comes next. (Thinking ahead: check.) I bought a one-way plane ticket and moved to Indonesia to teach college students English. (Plunging headfirst into the great unknown, thereby throwing all forward-thinking out the window: check.) And what have I done since I moved to Indonesia?

I've learned a new language, eaten cobra, and sat through an all-night shadow puppet performance. I've been caught in tropical thunderstorms and swum in the Indian ocean. I've hiked the foothills of a volcano, watched the sun set over Bali, and received baby turtles as a thank-you gift. I've stood on the side of a dirt road while a man I've just met shimmies up a coconut tree, cuts off a young coconut, hacks off the top and hands it to me so I can drink the water straight out of the fruit. The cosmic energy, I think, was definitely there in 2009.

And while I won't pretend it doesn't make me a little sad to be celebrating the new year so far away from friends and family, can I really complain? (I mean, who else gets to drink fresh-blended mango juice on New Year's Day?) I'm having the adventure of my life, and I have no idea what's on tap for 2010. And I like it that way. Happy New Year to everyone from me and my mom (and our becak driver) in Indonesia -- here's to hoping the cosmic energy sticks around in 2010. And to all the Americans I love on the other side of the ocean who are reading this as they wake up hungover a couple hours from now, from where I'm sitting (12-15 hours in your future) -- the chances are looking pretty damn good.

A View on Valediction

I said goodbye to my two General English classes this week.  They turned in their final papers, gave their final presentations, lined up to have their picture taken with me on various cell phone cameras, and walked out of my classroom.  The last-class photo shoot was an interesting phenomenon: first there was the requisite full-class photo (in which I stood at the center in my marmy teacher outfit with my marmy teacher smile surrounded by my hip and end-of-semester-happy students), followed by a few "Fiona and the girls" pictures and "Fiona and the boys" pictures, and rounded off with a series of one-on-one shots creepily reminiscent of prom.  And for my students, of course, no photo was complete without the raising of their hands and the parting of their fingers into the indispensable and unmistakable shape of a V. It was a mystery to me what this V might mean -- Peace out?  Vacation?  Bunny ears?  

General English paparazzi notwithstanding, I was really sad to see my students go.  The truth is, I am pretty much madly in love with them.  Teaching EFL has its ups and downs and it's definitely not something I'd want to do forever, but my students themselves are perfect.  They have stolen my heart.  I kind of hope this isn't how teachers normally feel about every class of students they ever have, because if so, I'm not sure I'll make it through next semester.

The feeling, it seems, might be mutual.  In our second to last class, I had every student write me a letter reflecting on the following four questions:

As a student:

1. What do you think you did well this semester?

2. What do you think you could have done better?

As a teacher:

3. What do you think I did well this semester?

4. What do you think I could have done better?

You better believe I got some prize responses.  And since I haven't yet hunkered down to grade the stack of final papers I have waiting for me, I'm going to treat you to some excerpts from the most complimentary 35 letters I've ever received:

I think what did you do well in this semester was you make this class to be our favorite class ... :-)

Fiona, I think you're one of the best lecturer in my first semester.  It is so nice to be your student, I really mean that.

You passion when teach me.  You always give me smile and cheerful, and I like it.

I proud of you Fiona ... and if I can, I want to be like you.

Fiona, you are the best lecture in Atma Jaya.

I like you very much ... you are so beautiful ... hehehe.

First I saw in this class, I felt you looks like an actress, ha ... ha ... ha ... you doesn't look like a teacher but you can teach your student very well ... I think.

So, you must be yourself, because I like your style in teach me, and always keep your smile to me ... I love u, Fiona ... :-) 

I think you're the greatest teacher ever!!!

I'm not sure how legitimate the claim that I am "the greatest teacher ever" is (after all, this being only their first semester of college, I'm not really up against a whole lot of competition yet), but if the general flavor of these sentiments is any indication, I'd say we had a pretty good run.  They're always going to be my very first students, the ones who taught me how to teach, and I'm always going to be that crazy American teacher with the short hair they had their first semester, who made lots of bad jokes and drew smiley faces on the board.  This much is clear: we made an impression on each other.  We're not going to be easy to forget.

So in the spirit of ends and beginnings, I'm going to go ahead and say that those V's stand for victory.  We collectively made it through our first semester -- for them as university students, and for me as a university teacher -- and I think we did a pretty good job of it.  Here's to hoping it only gets better -- and in the meanwhile, peace out.

Great, Expectations, Thanks for Nothing (or: I'll Take it from Here)

One thing living abroad in Indonesia has taught me is that having expectations is a bad idea.  Entertaining expectations that aren't ultimately met usually leads to disappointment, and in Indonesia, the only thing you can safely expect is that your expectations for any given situation will be swiftly and thoroughly dismissed.  Luna has a nice way of describing this phenomenon, which relies upon the idea that there is not necessarily any relationship whatsoever between something that is promised to you in words or writing, and reality.  For example, if you are out to dinner and see a food item listed on the menu, that does not mean said food item is actually available -- it could just as easily mean that it is sometimes available, or that at one time in past it was available, or maybe that it might be available at some point in the future.  It is according to this logic that our favorite pizza joint has been all out of medium size pizzas every single time I've been there (except for one time, and I almost didn't know what to do with myself).  See, I would have thought that if you have the ingredients to make a large pizza, the same ingredients could be used to make a medium pizza -- but that is an expectation, and we all know how dangerous those can be.

Sometimes, though, I get too comfy and forget about the danger of expectations and start having them again -- but never for long, as there is always some totally unpredictable turn of events to shepherd me back to the real world. One such turn of events occurred last Saturday, when I was invited by one of the professors at my school to witness the preparatory activities for his son's wedding, which was to be held on Sunday.  He instructed me to show up at his house around 11 so as not to miss any of the important aspects of this pre-wedding gathering.  Directions to his house and a time to arrive was pretty much all the information I received, so it is truly unfathomable why, in my mind, I assumed the event would last only a few hours and I would be home by mid-afternoon in time to do some grading and peruse the New York Times before dinner.  Expectations!  I should have known.

I got a little lost on my way there, so I showed up late, around 11:20, sweating like I lived on the equator (oh wait ... I do) and worried I'd already missed something.  My lateness didn't seem to faze my host, however, who welcomed me into his home and proceeded to introduce me to 20 members of his extended family, who then all commenced to speak to me in rapid Indonesian, most of which went completely over my head.  Many of his female relatives were inside preparing baskets and baskets of produce and goods to bring the bride's family, a litany of gifts that included such far-flung items as clothes for the bride's mother, two huge sacks of rice, a complete set of pink lacy lingerie and a couple of live chickens.  Word.  After a tour of of the gift preparation, I made myself comfortable outside in the courtyard where a smattering of relatives were camped out with snacks, and waited for whatever was going to happen to happen. After about an hour of sitting around eating sticky rice cakes and mustering up my best Indonesian to chat with one of my host's relatives about a wide range of interesting and complicated topics, such as where I am from and what I am doing in Indonesia, I started to wonder what exactly was going on with this whole wedding preparation thing, since nothing really seemed to be happening at the hour was approaching 1 o'clock PM.  At that moment my host announced that we would be "leaving soon," whereupon I learned that the main event of the day actually involved the bearing of all of these gifts to the home of the bride, and that we would be back around 5 o'clock.  It was also at that moment that all the lessons I had learned about expectations came flooding back in, and I suddenly completely understood and accepted that I had signed up for an all-day activity -- on Java, how could it be otherwise? It couldn't. It really couldn't.

The day itself turned out to be quite lovely.  After a half hour drive that took us out of Yogya and east of the city through some rice paddies, we arrived at the bride's family's home and unloaded our booty.  I was given the honorable task of carrying the box that contained a gold lacy dress intended for the bride's mother, as we all processed down the driveway and into a covered courtyard that had been set up with a long table flanked on both sides by rows and rows of folding chairs.  I deposited my gift on the table and took up residence on the edge of the audience, which turned out to be a great vantage point from which to observe the events of the ceremony.  After many long speeches in Javanese from various old men whose relationships with the two families I couldn't decipher any better than the words they were saying, the preparatory ceremonies for the bride and groom finally began.  The ceremony for the bride was first and began indoors, where (as we could see on the TV monitor outside while the whole thing was being live recorded inside -- whacky) she knelt before each of her parents in turn and requested forgiveness for her wrongdoings against them. (I should note here that everything I'm about to say only represents my best interpretations of the events that transpired -- since they all took place in Javanese or Indonesian, their meanings were obviously not rendered completely transparent to poor English-speaking me.)  This proved to be an extremely tear-jerking phase of the ceremony, as all the old Javanese ladies sitting around me commenced to weep heartily into their sarongs. Forgiveness was seemingly bestowed, and then the whole party was relocated outside to an alcove off the courtyard, where the audience could now witness the goings-on in person.

  

The bride was seated on a low bench in front of a iron cauldron of cold water into which various and sundry items had been previously deposited, such as flower petals, banana leaves and one whole coconut.  As the bride sat, members of her extended family came up to dip a gourd into the cauldron and pour water over her head -- while she was still in full dress -- presumably in an act of cleansing. After the bride had been thoroughly soaked, a lock of her hair was snipped off and she was lead back inside by her parents, her father in front and her mother behind, in a kind of train-like procession reminiscent of a conga line.  The whole process was then repeated, of course, with the groom.

The most poignant part of these ceremonies, in my mind, was how much care was taken with probably one of the most scary and painful processes two parents have to undergo: the giving away of their child to another person; the relinquishment of their son or daughter to the care of someone else.  Past wrongs were forgiven and past mistakes washed away as two families readied their children for that great adventure of marriage -- a process that is scary and painful, ultimately, because of all the unknowns it comes up against.  As 5 o'clock approached, I finally realized that it wasn't just me who had had no idea what to expect at the beginning of the day -- no one really has any idea what to expect, in Indonesia or anywhere else.  Whether it's the day before your wedding or the year after you graduate from college or any old Saturday of any old month, you can never really know how it's going to go down until it goes down. One of the things that sometimes frustrates me about living abroad is this feeling of never knowing what to expect, but when I think about it, that was always true in my life -- and if I ever thought I knew what to expect, if I ever thought that I knew exactly what was going on, that was probably mostly an illusion of control that I didn't actually have.  The bride and groom at this wedding were getting ready to embark upon a completely unknown chapter of their lives, which -- if you'll pardon the cheese -- is really just a larger-scale version of what everyone does pretty much everyday when they get out of bed.

So what about expectations, then?  While they definitely help contribute to a feeling of safety and familiarity, I think that for me, as I learn to accept more and more how fast things can change and how unknown the future really is, I might as well just throw them out the window.  When you don't expect anything in particular to happen, anything can happen, right?  Alice Walker once wrote, "Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise" -- but I'd like to think that subsisting on the thrill of surprise wouldn't have to be frugal life at all, but rather could be -- can be -- a life full of abundance and bounty.  I mean, come on -- pizza is a case in point.  Who needs medium pizzas, anyway?  I'll take a large, thanks.  And hold the expectations.