Surabaya day 2

The food is interesting. Buying from street vendors is a mystery. I can’t understand them and they can’t understand me so I often just point to things on the menu and hope for the best! I’m on my own while Freddy visits his family.

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This is a traditional drink I am told! No they are not green leeches…I don’t think.

Visited the cigarette museum today! This is the strangest museum. It is more like a marketing tool for the cigarette makers Sampoerna. None- the-less if you ever visit Surabaya you must visit this place. It is a beautiful bit of Dutch architecture and explains the history of the cigarette industry in Surabaya. Behind the museum is a cigarette factory where filterless cigarettes are rolled by hand! Yes – by hand. You get to look down on the factory floor where 470 women work flat out all day. The red hats roll the cigarettes while the yellow caps trim and the black hats pack! And there is a quality controller per row of rollers. The rollers roll a minimum or 325 cigarettes per hour, with some achieving 6/minute at an unfollowable speed – human machines. RSI must be a problem. And they sit on very unergonomic bench seats! I wasn’t allowed to take photos. Why are they all women? Because women can multi-task, are neater and can maintain focus I am told. Oh… What were the first 2 points again? I dare not disagree.

The rest of the day took in the old Arab quarter and China town on a bus tour. Is there anywhere where the Chinese haven’t been?

Tomorrow I take the train to Jogjakarta with Freddy and friend.

Surabaya

Beautiful Governor’s residence in Surabaya

Surabaya is a 40 minute plane hop from Bali. As explained earlier it is a huge industrial city on the north-east coast of Java. Not many tourists come here. Infact I was mobbed by the very underworked staff of the Surabaya Information Centre when I wandered through their doors. They are students studying English literature at the local university and keen to practice their English. Apart from them, very Little English is spoken here. Another symptom of being off the tourist trail here is that there are no Internet cafes! I’m having to blog from my iPhone, which is fiddly. I will be brief and fill in the rest when I get access to a computer.

Met the mayoress of this city of 2.6 million people today and was sung to by an amazing group of teenagers in a park!

Surabaya's centre of power (equivalent to our city council)

While wandering around the grounds of the city’s council building I was chased down by a lady who had just arrived in a group of cars. She asked me some questions about why I was here and I suddenly felt I may be in trouble for trespassing. But no, she took me over to and older lady who she introduced as the mayoress of the city. The Mayoress spoke some English and invited me inside the building to look around. She then organised for one of the security staff to show me some underground bunkers that are part of the building.

Some shenanigans while waiting for the next instructions
Some shenanigans while waiting for the next instructions

While walking through a park, singing attracted me to a performance space in the centre of the park. Teenage children, both boys and girls, were performing what looked to me like some sort of military style drill as per directions from a young man. What mad the moves interesting though is that they weren’t just set practised routines. The instructor was getting them to move a certain way purely from his instructions. Certain words meant certain moves so he was like a puppeteer…sort of.  I sat and watched and then they stopped, responded to further instructions and faced me and while looking me in the eye, sang a song. Fortunately this happened as a was using the video recording option on my SLR camera for the very first time. I got the lot (will get up here when I work out how). After playing back to Freddy that night, he explained they were welcoming me to Indonesia. I find out later that they may have been school kids doing some pre-military training. They were having a lot of fun and were very talented.

Woke up with a decent headache this morning and it wasn’t from the Bintang. I suspect the pollution here has something to do with it. Freddy says the life expectancy of men here is short. He is in his early 40s (so he says) and many of his friends have died, from disease brought on by unhealthy living. I would think the pollution would contribute to that.

There is no talk or news of the cattle trade drama here. I did see some chickens being badly treated, crammed in the back of a truck. I hope they weren’t from Australia!

McDonalds have their own style here

PS: it is hard to find a beer in this town! Is that the Muslim influence? Oh…and smoking is allowed everywhere, restaurants, shopping centers, hotel rooms! But I have a solution – I’ve taken it up so I can cope!!!

PPS. I’ve only seen three flys (could be a handy symptom of the pollution) the whole time I’ve been here and the streets have less litter than the streets of Cairns, swept continuously by sweepers with straw brooms. What an amazing society.

PPPS. I apologise for the long blogs. Initially I intended to give you the follower priority and keep my blogs brief. Now I’ve decided to use the blog as a diary, selfish I know and a test to any follower. Stay with me please!

Overnight in Bali

I’m travelling to Indonesia with my friend Freddy, Indonesian born and bred but now an Australian living in Cairns. He’s visiting his family in East Java and I’m tagging along. What a great opportunity for me to experience Indonesia with a local. We’re over-nighting in Bali, on the way to Surabaya.

We’re greeted at the airport by a couple of Freddy’s friends and because of Freddy’s love of food, taken straight to a genuine eatery. “The food here will be ‘a bit spicey'”. Great, I love spicey! Three bottles of water and 12 hours later my mouth is still on fire! The thought of hiring a bike as suggested by Lonely Planet crossed my mind but after a short taxiride on these roads, self preservation and the fact I haven’t updated my will changed my mind. We’re staying at Kuta, tourist central, and before no time at all we’re sitting outside a shop drinking tallies of Bintang and smoking Gudang Garam (Indonesian cigarettes) … when in Rome!

What a curious mix this part of Bali is. American culture has of course made it’s way here, evidenced by McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, Hard Rock Cafe, etc. They’re expensive compared to other options but the locals flock to these places on their meagre incomes just to be seen out front! Free wifi has the smart phones flocking like moths to a light, going flatout!

Midnight and we made our way back to the motel via the location of the ‘Bali Bombing’, now a carpark and shrine. Either side of this are the loudest nightclubs I have ever heard – drunken gyrating Aussies everywhere! Life goes on it seems!

Flying to Surabaya this afternoon.

The adventure begins

I woke up this morning to the realisation that I don’t have to go back to work until February 2011… My travel starts tomorrow, Cairns to Darwin to Bali , then onto Surabaya in East Java on Monday.

Surabaya is a big industrial city with a population of 2.6million and the second biggest city in Indonesia. It’s home to the Indonesian navy and a cigarette museum! What’s its appeal? It’s a big dirty busy city off the tourist trail and I like that.

To the Indonesians it is closely linked with the birth of the nation as it was here that the battle for independence began. The city is a mix of Chinese and Dutch architecture with an Arab corner thrown in. Sounds fantastic and for someone with a poor sense of direction, the potential for getting lost will be huge!