Kediri dan Jawa Timur pada umumnya

[Word of note: I wrote this post back in April, but never got around to editing it because I was so busy during training. It’s interesting to look back on it from here in West Java (I will hopefully have a post coming soon about my impressions of the same), which is quite different from Kediri, with a few more months’ of experiences under my belt. But in the course of editing I’ve tried not to add in too many new bits in order to retain the spirit of my thinking at the time the post was originally composed.]

I want to talk a bit generally about what I’ve seen of Kediri and East Java.

First, the landscape. The very first thing I noticed about Indonesia flying in to Surabaya on the plane from Singapore was the color: green everywhere! On the ground, green is also by far the dominant color. I’ve never been to a place that’s more lush than here. Even in the middle of Surabaya, one of the largest cities in the country, I was struck by how much vegetation there was everywhere.

Before coming to Indonesia I’d read about how Java is the most densely-populated island in the world, and how therefore the term “rural” is a relative one here. It’s true that so-called villages feel more like neighborhoods as they all bleed one into the next; but I have yet to get the urban fatigue I felt sure of. Between human fauna and natural flora, the latter definitely seems to have the upper hand. However, most of the greenery has (somehow!) been tamed—rice paddies stretch on forever, trees are planted in neat rows, and exquisite gardens abound.

All I can think of is how much work has to go into beating back those hardy vines in a place that’s essentially a enormous, fabulous petri dish: warm and humid forever. It’s actually a process I got a front-row seat to, when once during language class, where we would sit on the terrace facing the garden at my friend’s host family’s house, his family undertook the task of clearing up their enormous, exuberant garden to prepare for the arrival of an important personage. Language class was slow that day, and we all found it much more interesting to watch men with very long poles with metal rods on the end of them shimmying up nearby trees to drag down the vines. The vines pulled free easily, but they were just so thick and ingrown and so obviously reveling in their ideal climate conditions. No doubt about it: they would be back, stronger than ever, and soon—some distant brethren of the ever-swallowing kudzu.

Despite the hard-won landscaping, the land still feels wild enough to fill my need for nature. In Kediri on any semi-clear day you’ll always have one mountain or another in view. Most salient, of course, is Mount Kelud, which actually erupted spectacularly (seriously, look up the images on Google at once!) only a few years ago and buried the city of Yogyakarta, 500 km. away, in thick ash. It’s usually too hazy in the distance to see Kelud well, so my friend and I have made a game out of trying to glimpse its peak. The only times I’ve been successful are once in the early morning, and a couple times at sunset when it turned dramatic silhouette against a deepening orange backdrop, like something out of Monument Valley.

To get to Kediri initially we had a three-hour drive from Surabaya by bus, and one of the most fun things about it (besides knowing I’d never be seeing all these things with the same fresh eyes of initiation again) was the sudden reveal of enormous volcanoes in the near distance. Of course one of the things I was most excited for about Java is the volcanoes, so they shouldn’t have come as any surprise; but still, actually seeing them there, ruggedly climbing up to scrape the clouds, was astonishing.

Something else I love is how omnipresent water is. I’m not referring to the obvious ocean that surrounds the island, but rather the million streams and vast rivers everywhere. So many villages feel like canal towns, with crisscrossing bridges connecting the roads at every few meters. There’s also the daily downpours (we’re just coming out of the rainy season) and the thick wetness of humidity in the air that makes me sweat even though I’m usually not actually that hot (but it makes my skin look fabulous!). The incredible green itself is probably the best reminder of what a wet place this is. I wonder what will happen in the dry season. Will everything turn to brown? Are there problems with fires?

Let’s talk about design and architecture. I know I’ve been using a lot of superlatives thus far in the blog, but I can’t help it. I really, really like this country. I think it’s awesome. It’s beautiful and has a rich culture and I feel so lucky to get to stay here. So, to add another semi-superlative to the list, Javanese architecture and design is some of my favorite I’ve seen anywhere in the world. How to describe it? Houses tend to be plaster, with beautiful wood features—large, wood-framed windows; ornately-carved doors; thick, gorgeously-carved benches and chairs on porches—surrounded by ornate, often colored, wrought iron gates. There’s a lot of color in general, and it all looks great: houses that are a pleasant shade of orange or green, or even an unusual pink-and-yellow combo I saw today that was really easy on the eyes. Besides wood, there’s a lot of tile. Out of all possible flooring choices, given the climate, tile just makes sense. But tile is also used in creative decorative ways, where I’ve seen some buildings with colorful, tiled exteriors that are mosaic-like. There’s a huge cultural value of design here, and I honestly can’t think of a single house or building I’ve seen that I found distasteful. Everything seems functional, but functionality is by no means the sole aim, with lots of care given to other elements whose sole purpose is to be aesthetically pleasing. I appreciate that. Every street is a feast for the eyes.

To totally switch subjects, Indonesia has some interesting links with India. Sure, everyone knows that Bali is majority-Hindu, which is truly fascinating (after a recent Hindu holiday—which constituted a day off for people of all faiths, by the way, because every major holiday for each of the five government-recognized religions is a national holiday—I enjoyed watching an animated children’s show on the public broadcasting channel about the tales of Krishna); but that seems like a more historical tie. So too does the fact that some Indonesian words are Sanskrit-derived. How about modern-day connections across the ocean?

Well, Bollywood films and Indian soap operas are very popular here. I’ve also seen some Indian actors in Indonesian dramas. My host family often watches the channel on TV that’s solely dubbed Indian soap operas—Anandhi is their favorite. (From what I can gather, the eponymous heroine is a sweet, rich girl who has suffered more than her fair share of cruelty at the hands of the people around her. Also, major love triangle drama.) As an aside, there’s some lowkey TV censorship here, such as the blurring of ladies’ necklines that are deemed to dip too low (I once saw Heidi Klum on an episode of American Idol subject to this, and so too an animated female on the Japanese anime series Naruto), and this also extends to the Indian dramas, where thuggish men will whip out their menacing guns…which are just blurs in their hands.

There’s also a number of Indonesian dishes which taste purely Indian to me: different kinds of curries and turmeric rice, for instance. Actually, my host family were the ones who first called these foods “Indian foods in Indonesia” to me. One dish that’s popular archipelago-wide is Nasi Padang, and though it’s from the city of Padang in Sumatra, it tastes Indian to me. For the record, it’s one of the most delicious Indonesian foods that everyone should try: dark greens with a spicy curry and baked chicken over rice. There’s also nasi kuning, literally “yellow rice,” which is turmeric rice, usually paired with goodies like fried noodles, bits of sweet tempe, and cucumber slices. Out of a long buffet I’ll choose nasi kuning any day. Interestingly, it’s the food traditionally eaten at birthday parties. (Imagine a giant platter of yellow rice sculpted into the shape of a bear for a child’s party, or tiered like a cake for an adult’s.)

The single biggest modern tie between Indonesia and India that I see, which relates back to the popularity of Bollywood here, is dangdut. Dangdut is, to my knowledge, the most popular music in at least Java, if not all of Indonesia. It’s impossible to go a day, let alone a couple hours, without hearing it blasting from somewhere. I have somewhat mixed feelings about dangdut, but they overwhelmingly skew positive. Dangdut sounds exactly like Bollywood music and, surprise surprise, that’s what it’s derived from. (I know nothing about the history of when and how this came about, though.) I’m sure if I didn’t hear dangdut in context I would never guess it wasn’t Indian, despite the fact that it’s sung in Indonesian. The singers mimic that Indian style (it’s not exclusively a Bollywood one) exactly—high-pitched female singers, a certain kind of warble, etc. You know what I’m talking about. Dangdut’s also got the “Indian” wood flute going on, the thick tabla in the background…

Anyone who knows me knows I love Indian music. (Okay, pretty much anything Indian whatsoever.) Give me a wood flute and a tabla and a high-pitched female singer dueting with a deep-pitched male singer and I swoon. This is why my feelings about dangdut are almost all positive. However, not all dangdut is created equal. A lot of dangdut, rather than feature actual tabla, uses an electronic tabla sound that I find grating. It just sounds too processed to me and makes my heart race. But the more traditional stuff, yeah, sure, I’ll happily listen to that for a few hundred hours. I have a hunch by the end of two years I’ll have listened to it for a lot longer than that.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise, but there’s also a ton of Arabic influence in Indonesian culture. Of course it’s due to the Islamic connection. As in other Islamic cultures, certain religious-derived Arabic expressions are common: Assalamu aleikum; insh’Allah; Alhamdulillah and so on. The phrase “Assalamu aleikum wa rohmatulohi wa barokatuh,” which means “peace be upon you” and a few other polite blessings which I don’t recall, said with a very precise rhythm and cadence, is used by people of any faith to open an address to an audience. Many people also say it simply to enter a room, and in many classrooms, the students must say it to the teachers at the start of the lesson. The required response, which must always be provided, is “Wa-aleikum salaam wa rohmatulohi wa barokatuh.”

Aside from the five-times-a-day call to prayer, mosques broadcast quite a bit more from their speaker systems as well. At any time (I can’t pin down a schedule if there is one) there will be Quranic recitations or chanting, often by children. Some chants are short; some seem to go on for an hour. I can recognize well all the familiar voices and know the chants by heart. It’s much more often that I hear some chanting in the background than not, especially given the sheer number of mosques and mushollas (smaller prayer halls/places for prayer), at least two per street where I live in Kediri.

Maybe it’s the fact that Kediri is a conservative Muslim city, maybe it’s that I live just a block from a large Islamic university, but I’ve met so many people here who have studied Arabic to a very high level. It feels like most men I’ve met have had a very solid religious training at the least, which includes proper Arabic pronunciation and training in Quranic recitation. What this probably means is they went to a pesantren for high school, an Islamic boarding school. Obviously I love this. All my energies are going to studying Indonesian right now, but I’m really hoping after a year or so I can start taking Arabic lessons as well from someone in my community. Arabic knowledge seems to be so widespread and commonplace. It’s really exciting.