Pulang Kampung

Pulang kampung means to return home. Indonesians often use it when they go home (back to their village or hometown) a holiday. Barack Obama used it when he gave his speech at the University of Indonesia. In this post, it refers to our family returning home to Solo.

This is B here, excerpting a bit from a recent email sent out by N, for the opening of this post (she sent it out a few days ago and I've altered the way it talks about dates so that it's accurate for today):

we went in to meet with william's specialist on monday last week and again on Wednesday, and the vacuum pump finally came off on Wednesday. it really was an amazing device. he no longer has a deep wound. the vacuum worked as it should and built up the layers of tissue so that his wound is now flush with the skin surrounding it. unfortunately, the device didn't close up the opening quite as much as we would have liked. but the doctor didn't think a skin graft was necessary--so we are very grateful for that. 

We checked out of our hotel on Thursday last week, and then flew back to solo on Thursday. We met with W's Solo-based specialist on Friday last week. And then again on Monday this week. The wound is getting close to closing up. We think it will be closed in about a week and a half now.   

we are so excited to be back in solo. it's so nice to have a home to live in again, rather than a hotel room. being in jakarta was interesting and invaluable in terms of william's wound care, but we prefer the slower pace of solo. there are fewer people, less traffic, and we have a house where everyone has their own room! 

But in Jakarta we did have one particularly delightful turn of events. we met a really nice couple at church on sunday--brent and tricia--who invited us over for dinner on sunday and then again on Wednesday. to slightly change blanche dubois' famous phrase, "i have always [appreciated] the kindness of strangers," and that's very true here. brent and tricia were so kind and generous to us. and we even had chicken enchiladas--our first mexican food since leaving america. 

W with his doctor after she removed the pump. It was amazing to see how the chasm had disappeared an a new batch of mealy flesh had grown to fill the hole. The new growth looked like grains of sand, like I could have scraped a few off, placed them in a petri dish, and cultivated a clone of W. For those of you who don't appreciate the graphic description of his healing wound, just be glad I didn't include a close up of the healing wound. I almost did, because it seemed so interesting. 

A sign in Jakarta, similar to signs that are popping up in Solo and elsewhere. The neighborhood here "strongly rejects" the named group. We were stuck in a traffic jam and I jumped out to take this pic.

Back at the home of the family who invited us over in Jakarta. This was on Wednesday night, the night before we left.

Swimming pool

W plays with the magnet used to clean the inside of the glass.

Shrimp or lobster. Brent said he got the aquarium for free from a colleague and he pays $30 a month to have it stocked and maintained.

A good-bye pic.

Back on the gang (alley way) of our own Kampung (neighborhood/village), Saturday morning, feeling happy and even triumphant. Definitely blessed.

We made our way over to a museum we hadn't yet visited.

At the booth where the man sold us the entrance tickets ($1/person), I spotted this matchbox and asked if I could take a closer look at it. It seemed so other-worldly (from the pre-postcolonial world) in its iconography. How has a matchbox design like this persisted into 2015?

The masks, the masks, but also be sure to "die pyrex die"!

It may be too late for these signs to have any use, unless it's to save the particularly careless from embarrassment.

These kris sheaths are bejeweled.

These are the krises that belong in the sheaths, I imagine.

I liked the design on the doors in the museum. I also liked how blurry S looked.

These old tiger carvings remind me of old European maps of the world, where the continents and islands and rivers are all out of proportion. I don't know a lot about tigers on the island of Java, but I don't imagine they were common even back when these carvings were made. So the carver probably wouldn't have seen one maybe? But might have seen some skins? Or a crudely taxidermied tiger? I'm not criticizing the carver. I like the carvings much more than if they were rendered with the seeming accuracy of a National Geographic photograph.

This photograph doesn't convey the scene at all. The pic looks like it might be of a few nick-knacks on a shelf. In stead, these were huge items in a room, and the shadow of the largest head (with the nose) stretched from one side of the room to the other. 

A room of gongs and gamelan instruments.

W always has his eye open to spot "offerings." He found one here.

Bad pic of a typewriter made for Javanese script.

W and I used to wear clothes like that, back in our glory days, just a month or so ago.

On the side of the museum, there was a gallery that seemed like it held items waiting to be classified. We strolled through the gallery.

Right when I thought I was familiar with the types of wayang (puppets), we see wayang rumput (grass puppets).

This wayang reminded me of the lead singer (and guitarist?) for a Provo-based band called Eden Express that I saw play at the stone amphitheater in 2008. The singer wore angel wings, and his was my favorite performance of that multi-band event.

I couldn't tell for sure, but this tea item seemed like it was carved out of a solid multi-hued stone. If so, it was like the jade cabbage in Taiwan.

Stylized volcano

We left the museum and moved toward a nearby batik museum.

We made it to the batik museum's grounds, and its fountain.

The museum was shut down for a break, istirahat, but they let us into the store, where I saw these plates on the wall. The store warned that there were no photos allowed, but I assumed they meant no pics of the batik.

Eventually we left the batik store (planning on returning to the museum in an hour when the break was over), and made our way to Gramedia, an Indonesian chain bookstore with a branch in Solo. Solo's Gramedia is right next to Balai Soedjatmoko. I liked the tile floor at the entrance.

I hereby apologize to all the random people whose pictures I ask if I can take. But really, you have to know you're not random; when you do intriguing things like carry pink balloons that say "Speak English. Go make history," you pre-select yourselves for my queries about permission to take a picture. 

After we picked up a few items in Gramedia (but we couldn't find any balloons!), we walked through the streets of a nearby kampung, giving our "Selamat sore" to all.

You would have too click and blow up this pic to see the stones propping up the bench, and the water pump, that interested me here.

Stern white cat.

We walked by a house that had, on the opposite side of the road, a big pot boiling. We asked what was in it, and we found out the family was making sate (though I'm still a little unclear on why a big boiling pot is part of the sate making process).

Still, there can be no doubt that they really were making sate. As they said, they had just killed nine chickens.

The man in the family was wearing a nice ring, and after we complimented him on his ring, he said he made rings also. And he got out his rings and raw stone for us to look at. (It seems like half of the men in Solo make rings on the side right now.)

The gold and blue ring, with the "piris" stone was the one he was wearing. He received it from his father. Through having a lot of conversations about rings, I've learned that people like it when you say, "Tapi cin-cin itu, anda punya dari sebelum ada banyak isu dengan cin-cin, ya?" (But that ring, you had that one before rings became such a big deal right?" And when I myself look for rings, I also keep my eyes open for rings that were made before the current fad.

He was such a kind and generous man, as he talked with us, strangers, showing us the rocks he was planning on grinding. I asked him how he learned to make rings, since I have seen that over at the Kraton there are classes and certificates on offer. He replied, "Otodidak." In English, I've seen the word autodidact used maybe a dozen times.

After saying good-bye, we kept walking. I liked the bench we walked by.

The announcement board of the kampung. Maybe it's function has been replaced at this point by a kampung-wide sms/txt-tree?

Among the becak, as we made our way back to the batik museum, we saw a stylized canting (one of the tools used to write with wax on cloth in the batiking process). Good thing I took a picture of it, since pictures are scarce from the museum, since they were forbidden to take. (Okay, I know that in a 100-picture blog post, no one is hoping for more pictures.)

But on our way to the museum, we stopped at a hotel that claimed to have pizza. We just wanted to see what kinds they had.

As a reminder that W is still healing.

In the hotel, there was a cool statue of a dancer.

W pointed out that the statue was made almost entirely of old Chinese coins, bound together. It was really cool, and it just goes to show that elite chain hotels can still muster something resembling a life of the soul.

The restroom/bathroom/toilet/belakang icons, promising at any minute to morph completely and irretrievably into Chinese characters.

The event on the lower right caught my eye. Utah Car Free Day? Oh wait, that's Ultah Car Free Day.

We kept walking, past the pizza place N ate at for her birthday while I was in Australia. (I was there for her actual birthday--she had the meal in anticipation of her birthday.)

We got to the museum and saw some great batiks. It reminded me of my first time at Thamrin City, the big batik market in Jakarta. At a certain point amid the swirling colors I stammered in my head, "There will never be enough batik."

These two pics are of cap (stamps) they use to stamp wax onto the cloth.

But it's not all stamping. There's also writing on the cloth with wax from a canting.

W got a chance to pretend like he was trying it.

They told him to blow on the canting to prepare it for writing. (This was all pretend.)

S got the same opportunity, except hers was enhanced because the artisan liked her blond hair so much that S had a good head brace while working.

We went to the center where N asked some questions, in Indonesian, about what events and programs were happening in Solo. I was tired from a lot of walking among batik, so I sat down.

Then we went to a market near Pasar PGS. We've been there before several times. And I couldn't resist at least taking a pic with some of the biggest chunkiest cin-cin.

N and I have started thinking about wanting a gong. We stopped by this center and looked around. It can hardly be called a store since no one seems interested in selling anything. We went to the owner and told him we were interested in asking about the different gongs, and he didn't even stand up or recognize we where there by responding to us verbally. Finally, I asked him directly if he would go into the room with us an show us the gongs. He was reluctant but went with us and told us he wouldn't bargain. It all didn't seem very promising, but we looked around a little bit and left.

At another market, Pasar Triwindu, we saw a dragon made out of a piece of wood similar to the wood I saw, the petrified flamingo, on the beach in Taiwan. It's funny that of the two pieces of driftwood I saw, I thought about packing the first. But the second one, that for some reason I didn't even think about packing, is the one I've kept thinking about.

Speaking of pulang kampung, we gave our rabbit, Blackie, back to our neighbor, who had given it to us. The kids aren't ready to take responsibility for taking care of it. And N and I sure don't want the responsibility. So we thanked our neighbor and gave Blackie back. But on Saturday night, after a big day of pulang kampung, I went out onto the front porch to take care of something, and I saw that Blackie had the same idea: pulang kampung. He had escaped from his cage at our neighbor's house and was looking around our porch. He ran to my feet hoping my toes were carrots, I can only guess.

We took him to our neighbor's house, pulang kampung Blackie, to your new kampung.