The South-East's West
With Sydney I returned to a culture altogether familiar. I might not speak Strine (‘Australian’), but I speak Western. Australia may be in Southeast Asia, conscious of China’s looming shadow, but it is ‘the West’.
I was sometimes a little lonesome, but I wasn’t culture shocked. Part of what softened that blow was starting the transition in high-tech, English-speaking Singapore. Part of it was the fact that I lived in a studio apartment even more spare than our Jakarta digs (a fine thing). I was usually alone, too, so the social cultural adjustment was more gradual. Finally: with the Writer’s Festival running me 7 AM til midnight for the first week, I hit the ground running. There wasn’t time for much shock.
For the moment, I’ll just list the most simple & striking experiential differences between Jakarta & Sydney, more or less as they occurred to me:
• Height. Suddenly a huge number of people are 6’ tall or taller. Women, too; at 5’8” I was again looking people directly in the eye--or up.
• Hair! Poof! Now this magnificent, voluminous variety of hair colors, textures & styles. With all the punks, this includes a frequent appearance of the full rainbow, too. Men & women both: long dred-locks; tall Mohawks; tight curls; frizzy red-heads; afros; shaved bald; honey-blondes; aqua! crimson! green! Words carved into buzz-cuts! Seashells, beads, yard, metal bits like a crow’s nest of shiny plunder woven into giant mats or strings or braids or tails of HAIR.
• It’s cold! Wonderful, blessed cold. And dry.
• Second hand book stores & coffee shops occupy every corner of my neighborhood!
• Blue sky
• Noses. White people have huge, fin-like bridged noses. Like Morton bay fig roots:
• My pollution-cough is completely gone.
• There's a drought here, but tap water is potable, & it tastes really good.
• Crowds. There’s less of a natural flow to packed crowds here. Sydney-siders walk as unrelated individuals, rather than joining the organic flow describing Indonesian traffic & crowd patterns. On the one hand: there are clear, abided laws. On the other hand, many of these people would be hit by bajai.
• Fast pace & it’s contagious. Everyone’s walking, too, & expects me to be walking, & walks fast or at least purposefully.
• Long Distances by foot. When I ask for directions, the people I’ve met—old, young, rich, poor, men, women—think absolutely nothing of sending me off on a half-hour (or longer) walk.
• It’s a cliché of Australians, but the open friendliness & ease of people on the street was tangible & made traveling around pleasant. I felt a distinct lack of weary crankiness or wounded dignity (only demeaning myself at this café / shop / counter until graduation or my ship comes in type attitude) behind the counter. At a first take, strangers here strike me as less suspicious than Americans, more talkative & genial than Indonesians (who are maybe much more polite in general but rarely addressing customers first or so forcefully, as equals).
• A secular country! Comparatively, there's almost NO religious signs anywhere…& I hear a palpable, conscious public voice of not being associated with any religion. Yet later: also the clear presence of mega-churches in the outskirts & the arrival of American-brand evangelical, extreme Christianity. More on this to follow.
• All white audiences
• Slow Food; Vegetarian & Vegan food; Sustainably Grown, Fair Trade, locally grown, Cage Free Eggs, Hormone & pesticide free everything…everywhere. There were 6 organic & 5 vegetarian restaurants within four blocks of my studio.
• Ecological awareness & organized conservation. All sorts of people carry those reusable green eco-tote bags. I'd see a couple dozen a day. Recycling. Good public transportation (compared to Indonesia & the US). Water conservation. Even the Writer's Festival boasted being "carbon neutral", off-setting all the fuel costs of electricity & travel costs for the week-long conference.
• Sycamore & eucalyptus instead of palms or flame of the forest
• Crows & lorikeets, instead of bats & swallows.
• I can go running again: it's cool enough, clean enough, flat enough, & there are places without traffic.
• Traffic lights! Indonesia often uses one-way streets & long turnabouts instead of traffic lights, causing some routes by car to be far longer & more circuitous than walking. Running traffic lights may be more expensive...I’m not sure why Jakarta doesn’t use many.
• Bread. Bread is making inroads into Indonesia, especially in places where refrigeration is more affordable (or: afforded) & common, but there’s still not much & little that’s good. That’s one factoid people tend to know, & knowingly brandish, about life in the United States: Americans eat bread.
• In terms of sheer visible numbers, men in Sydney (& in the US, as I recall) don’t hold or care for babies & children in public spaces so much as they do in Jakarta, where the job would appear almost evenly split.
• The coffee is good. At home in Minnesota, we like Indonesian coffee. In Indonesia, the coffee was usually pretty poor & as or more expensive than US prices. Coffee often cost more than the entire meal. I’ll tell you about my favorite Sydney café, Campos, in a bit.
• Silence. In a city of 4.3 million people, I slept—God be praised—to silence all night long.
• Uncensored political protest & outrage. One thing I’ve always thought was a great genius of the US, is our government’s general tendency to ignore people, groups & shows that criticize it. I’m not suggesting our government doesn’t & hasn’t censored many things, but there is a freedom of expression that's quite patent in the west. This happens even at the level of an angry person standing on a corner all day (as there were in my Sydney neighborhood) handing out fliers to rallies, putting up posters, publishing articles, passing around petitions, & saying all sorts of hateful things—true or not—about the Australian government (& the US government. Often & at length) without fear of reprisals. You might find what they have to shout silly, but they MAY do it. In Syria, in Singapore, in Indonesia, every word of such objections can be very dangerous acts.
In Jakarta we described the Daily Show & Colbert Report to some Indonesian students in a discussion of American humor. They were speechless at the fact that these weren’t censored & their creators had never been arrested for their content.
Many good & strange things here. It's a pleasure, if nothing else, to reacquaint myself with the concept of WINTER.
Looking at that list, I can see that for all I've enjoyed, appreciated & learned in Indonesia, I am also glad to be back in familiar terrain.
I was sometimes a little lonesome, but I wasn’t culture shocked. Part of what softened that blow was starting the transition in high-tech, English-speaking Singapore. Part of it was the fact that I lived in a studio apartment even more spare than our Jakarta digs (a fine thing). I was usually alone, too, so the social cultural adjustment was more gradual. Finally: with the Writer’s Festival running me 7 AM til midnight for the first week, I hit the ground running. There wasn’t time for much shock.
For the moment, I’ll just list the most simple & striking experiential differences between Jakarta & Sydney, more or less as they occurred to me:
• Height. Suddenly a huge number of people are 6’ tall or taller. Women, too; at 5’8” I was again looking people directly in the eye--or up.
• Hair! Poof! Now this magnificent, voluminous variety of hair colors, textures & styles. With all the punks, this includes a frequent appearance of the full rainbow, too. Men & women both: long dred-locks; tall Mohawks; tight curls; frizzy red-heads; afros; shaved bald; honey-blondes; aqua! crimson! green! Words carved into buzz-cuts! Seashells, beads, yard, metal bits like a crow’s nest of shiny plunder woven into giant mats or strings or braids or tails of HAIR.
• It’s cold! Wonderful, blessed cold. And dry.
• Second hand book stores & coffee shops occupy every corner of my neighborhood!
• Blue sky
• Noses. White people have huge, fin-like bridged noses. Like Morton bay fig roots:
• My pollution-cough is completely gone.
• There's a drought here, but tap water is potable, & it tastes really good.
• Crowds. There’s less of a natural flow to packed crowds here. Sydney-siders walk as unrelated individuals, rather than joining the organic flow describing Indonesian traffic & crowd patterns. On the one hand: there are clear, abided laws. On the other hand, many of these people would be hit by bajai.
• Fast pace & it’s contagious. Everyone’s walking, too, & expects me to be walking, & walks fast or at least purposefully.
• Long Distances by foot. When I ask for directions, the people I’ve met—old, young, rich, poor, men, women—think absolutely nothing of sending me off on a half-hour (or longer) walk.
• It’s a cliché of Australians, but the open friendliness & ease of people on the street was tangible & made traveling around pleasant. I felt a distinct lack of weary crankiness or wounded dignity (only demeaning myself at this café / shop / counter until graduation or my ship comes in type attitude) behind the counter. At a first take, strangers here strike me as less suspicious than Americans, more talkative & genial than Indonesians (who are maybe much more polite in general but rarely addressing customers first or so forcefully, as equals).
• A secular country! Comparatively, there's almost NO religious signs anywhere…& I hear a palpable, conscious public voice of not being associated with any religion. Yet later: also the clear presence of mega-churches in the outskirts & the arrival of American-brand evangelical, extreme Christianity. More on this to follow.
• All white audiences
• Slow Food; Vegetarian & Vegan food; Sustainably Grown, Fair Trade, locally grown, Cage Free Eggs, Hormone & pesticide free everything…everywhere. There were 6 organic & 5 vegetarian restaurants within four blocks of my studio.
• Ecological awareness & organized conservation. All sorts of people carry those reusable green eco-tote bags. I'd see a couple dozen a day. Recycling. Good public transportation (compared to Indonesia & the US). Water conservation. Even the Writer's Festival boasted being "carbon neutral", off-setting all the fuel costs of electricity & travel costs for the week-long conference.
• Sycamore & eucalyptus instead of palms or flame of the forest
• Crows & lorikeets, instead of bats & swallows.
• I can go running again: it's cool enough, clean enough, flat enough, & there are places without traffic.
• Traffic lights! Indonesia often uses one-way streets & long turnabouts instead of traffic lights, causing some routes by car to be far longer & more circuitous than walking. Running traffic lights may be more expensive...I’m not sure why Jakarta doesn’t use many.
• Bread. Bread is making inroads into Indonesia, especially in places where refrigeration is more affordable (or: afforded) & common, but there’s still not much & little that’s good. That’s one factoid people tend to know, & knowingly brandish, about life in the United States: Americans eat bread.
• In terms of sheer visible numbers, men in Sydney (& in the US, as I recall) don’t hold or care for babies & children in public spaces so much as they do in Jakarta, where the job would appear almost evenly split.
• The coffee is good. At home in Minnesota, we like Indonesian coffee. In Indonesia, the coffee was usually pretty poor & as or more expensive than US prices. Coffee often cost more than the entire meal. I’ll tell you about my favorite Sydney café, Campos, in a bit.
• Silence. In a city of 4.3 million people, I slept—God be praised—to silence all night long.
• Uncensored political protest & outrage. One thing I’ve always thought was a great genius of the US, is our government’s general tendency to ignore people, groups & shows that criticize it. I’m not suggesting our government doesn’t & hasn’t censored many things, but there is a freedom of expression that's quite patent in the west. This happens even at the level of an angry person standing on a corner all day (as there were in my Sydney neighborhood) handing out fliers to rallies, putting up posters, publishing articles, passing around petitions, & saying all sorts of hateful things—true or not—about the Australian government (& the US government. Often & at length) without fear of reprisals. You might find what they have to shout silly, but they MAY do it. In Syria, in Singapore, in Indonesia, every word of such objections can be very dangerous acts.
In Jakarta we described the Daily Show & Colbert Report to some Indonesian students in a discussion of American humor. They were speechless at the fact that these weren’t censored & their creators had never been arrested for their content.
Many good & strange things here. It's a pleasure, if nothing else, to reacquaint myself with the concept of WINTER.
Looking at that list, I can see that for all I've enjoyed, appreciated & learned in Indonesia, I am also glad to be back in familiar terrain.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 8:32 AM
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