And so it begins!

How is it that the first day of traveling is always the most jam-packed and eventful?

Last night, actually this morning, I ended up finding a cozy spot on a tucked-away staircase and managed to sleep for about half an hour before they started letting people into the airport. As soon as I checked my bag, though, I was hit by my next big expense (after the Rp250,000 visa at arrival): Rp40,000 exit fee from the airport! I’m not even sure what I’m ‘exiting’ because I’m just going from the check-in desk to the terminal and my flight is domestic. Even the locals have to pay it, though, which seems like it would be quite a stiff price hike for them.

Finally!! After sleeping on a row of benches at the gate for another few hours I hear what I think is good news: “Blah blah Indonesian blah blah PADANG blah blah Indonesian blah.” (BTW: It’s pronounced Pah-dahng) I assumed this was a boarding call, which fortunately turned out to be true, and so made my way down to the tarmac to the plane. An hour or two later I’m looking out the window at mountains blanketed in lush jungle that covers everything from the tips of the mountains straight down to a thin strip of clear, sandy beach. Tiny waves crash on even tinier rocks and the newly-risen sun reflects off of the ocean in a million and one sparkles. Trust me, I would jump out of this plane if I thought I could survive the impact.

And then I’m on the ground, ready for my first up-close look at Indonesia. The first thing you notice is that it’s green EVERYWHERE (sorry, but there was no, great show-stopping gift has lear and we remembered).. The jungle is omnipresent, only giving way to rice fields, small colorful houses, and roads. Children scatter like (and among) chickens outside wooden houses raised on stilts. Fat old men sit and yell at fit young men as they spar in a decaying outdoor boxing ring. Small mosques with steel minarets poke through the trees. Tricked-out opelets, public mini-buses, go screaming by with massive plastic grills and stickers showing Mickey Mouse, Avril Lavigne and gang signs, announcing their presence by blaring Michael Jackson.

After a ridiculous fiasco with the bus that involved a lot of me yelling, “No, you take me here or give me back money”, I finally get to my place, Hotel Imanuel, and get a tiny room located in a small outdoor courtyard where the staff do laundry and eat lunch. The price is an outrageous Rp150,000, but after doing some research I found it was about average. Hungry, I walk out along the street looking for a restaurant that I would never end up finding, but as I’m checking the addresses on the buildings and waiting to cross the street a red van pulls up. Enter: Iyeli, a native Padangian girl about my age.

Over a really good lunch of blackened honey chicken and fresh apple juice, Iyeli says that she likes to help tourists as much as she can, and she certainly provides a lot of good information and speaks English very well. She says her boyfriend is an Australian surfer (not that her parents know about this because he’s not Muslim), and he just goes around SEA looking for the perfect wave. In typical fashion for this part of the world, he’s 45. We chat about boys for a while, but she’s got to get to check on her store (she sells mobile phones as well as works as a tourism consultant and civil engineer, for which she’s also finishing her thesis) and exhaustion from my early-morning adventures has set in so we make plans to meet for dinner later and she drops me at my room.

After an hour’s sleep in what had become quite a warm room, I felt ready to go see the sights. The cultural museum was only a few minutes away and had beautiful traditional architecture. I love how the ends of the roof slope upward so dramatically and gracefully. The best exhibit had mannequins dressed in the traditional clothes of the various peoples of Indonesia, but there were also models of traditional homes and the standard displays of traditional food agriculture. I’d have taken more photos, but I didn’t want to stop walking because I was being stalked by a small group of schoolboys. Just the first awkward moment of many, I’m sure.

There isn’t a ton to see in Padang, but where I went next was what I most interested in: the Indian Ocean. The beach and water weren’t overly clean, unfortunately, and there was a fair amount of detritus washed onto shore, but the water was warm and from time to time huge waves would crash against each other. It felt good to stand a while and just watch Along the beach, tired-looking men and women watch TV in squalid stalls as they wait for someone to come along and buy water, juice or boiled turtle eggs in shades of ivory and pale blue. The eggs sit inside clear plastic bags, making what look like thick columns of ping pong balls.

Next, I walk southeast to the harbor, where colorful boats are moored and across the river small houses cling to the edges of the hill. The area is a bit ramshackle; you can still see signso f the earthquake and tsunami of 2004 in the cracked roads and ruined buildings. Reconstruction seems to be going very slowly here, although there are some surprisingly nice and new places, one of which I step into for a snack while I wait for a sudden rainstorm to end. My young waiter, like most Indonesians, speaks decent English and assumes that by coming into his restaurant I have just given him permission to practice with me. He’s endlessly curious, with questions about the US, my work, my tattoos, and, of course, why I’m single. He just keeps coming back to how he “thinks it’s better for [me] that [I] have man and a family”. Thanks, kid, I will go to Singapore right now and take care of that. It goes without saying he asks to be friends on Facebook.

The rain finally ends and I meet Iyeli to go for a quick driving tour. We start across the river, and since the sun has gone down you can see into the colorful homes—everyone is watching TV, it seems—and along the docks where wooden boats seemingly too small and fragile for such a powerful ocean bob lazily in shallow water. Our next stop is further north at the official Padang Beach, which I think should be renamed Umbrella Beach for the hundreds of them stuck in the sand. They’re anchored very low to the ground in order to almost totally conceal the two chairs beneath them, where young Muslim couples sit at night and do what they aren't supposed to even think about. Apparently, the police swing by from time to time to round up these unmarried law breakers.

Finally, we’re ready for dinner. After driving for quite a while looking for a place that serves good bakso and sio mai, the dishes I’ve been told to try, we settle into a side-of-the-road dive. I try not to think about where they get their drinking and dishwashing water from. Iyeli tries to teaches me some Indonesian while I try to choke down the mystery meat in front of me, and then she makes a really interesting comment that gets me thinking. She compared Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries that are about the same age, which are in the same region of the world, and have a similar language but which have vastly different economies and general levels of development. Iyeli thinks Malaysia is in a better situation because it used to be a British colony, whereas Indonesia was under Dutch control. According to her, Britain gave much more support to the nations that broke away from the empire in the 20th century than the Dutch did: “Look at Malaysia, Hong Kong and especially Singapore. The only place they screwed up was India, but that wasn’t Britain’s fault. Indian people are just impossible to work with.” I’m sorry to have to admit that a tiny part of me wanted to agree with her after my trip there, but I just changed the subject instead.

With my stomach full of delicious, albeit unidentifiable, Indonesian food, I was verklempt. It was time for bed so Iyeli drove me home with a tentative plan to meet tomorrow morning. I dragged myself to bed and drifted off cocooned in a scarf to keep the mosquitoes off. It didn’t work.

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The Many Museums of Melaka

I think it’s hotter here than in Singapore. I took a shower before bed last night and so was able to sleep in relative comfort, but from the moment I stepped out the door this morning I have been sweating through my shirt and into the straps of my backpack.

Today I’m going to doing the museum circuit, a circle starting at the city square and winding away from Chinatown towards Little India. It all starts at the Christ Church in city square, a lively and well-maintained public gathering point. Inside, the church has whitewashed walls and mahogany floors and benches. It’s simple and Spartan, but doesn’t inspire me to feel particularly spiritual. Since no photos are allowed, I’m only able to sneak a quick shot of the most interesting item there: a pair of skulls and crossbones carved into the floor directly where the priest would serve communion to the parishioners. I’m not sure why they added this macabre decoration, but I would bet that it’s to attract those hell-bound pirates that are just so hard to get to come to church.

The Baba Nonya Museum is really intersting and very impressive.  It's set in the beautiful old home of a wealthy family and the museum has kept basically everything they ever owned.  Crystal chandeliers, unopeneed bottles of gin and rum from 1870, marble mah jong and chess sets, silk and mahogany, fine china and silver, if the British colonists valued it this family seemed to, as well.  A nice touch is the photos of the family showing how they grew from one married couple to today over 50 kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids!  No photos of my own allowed, though.

The Youth Museum is a stuffy and boring look at the history of the youth movement, but the art museum above is remarkable. It features work mainly from one artist, Allen Tan, and I would be ecstatic if I could get one of his pieces into my house one day. They’re colourful, confident, and complicated—in a word, captivating. Stadthuy’s next door is wealth of information and artefacts about Malaysian history and culture. You can walk through recreations of weddings, village homes, fishermen’s boats and schools, even if the displays are just a bit dusty and in need of a little TLC.

After that I followed the road to the Naval Museum and boarded the giant broadsail ship I saw yesterday.  Thank god for the small things, it's air conditioned.  I may spend a little bit of extra time here now!  An interesting enough way to kill an hour or so, you walk down a few flights of stairs to two lower levels where there are the usual posters on the walls and some odd exhibits of sailors in their daily activities, like being kept in shackles under the bow. 

The most intriguing museum is four floors of dilapidated displays that are barely hanging together, where each story’s focus a complete departure from the one below it, but a place bursting with so much promise that you can’t help but root for it and send up a prayer for it to find wealthy patronage in the future.
--Basement: the "3D" gallery, oooohh.  This was hilarious.  A few absolutely gigantic machines that played 3D videos about some event in Malaysian history.  It reminded me of when I was a kid because the technology is at least that old.  Also, lots of posters where when you stand on one side it's one photo and when you shift slightly it changes a bit to create the illusion of action.  Sway from side to side at the battle poster for "realistic chopping action!"
--Ground floor: cultural gallery.  The first focus was on the different peoples of Malaysia, including the Chinese, Baba Nonya, Malay, Indian, Peranak (Sino-Malay), Chitty (Indo-Malay).  Food, culture, religion, etc.  And then most of the rest of the floor was devoted to the art of top-spinning, which they really made seem really fun.  Wrap a rope around a top, yank it as hard as you can and hopefully send your top into a long, controlled spin.  PS: Your top weighs ten pounds and is almost a foot tall.
--Second floor: kite museum.  Falling apart a bit and all the colors are fading.  It's like you're actually watching someone's childhood innocence die.  Sad.
--Third floor: beauty museum.  An interesting concept supported by lots of information, but held back by faded photos and a lack of artefacts.  Displays were on the following 'beautifying' trends: lip and ear plates, neck rings, foot binding, piercings, tattoos, skin mutilation, etc.  Definitely makes you think.

Just one more stop was about all I could take before dinner and a late bus to KL, so I went to see the ruins of A Famosa (The Famous One) and St. Paul's church. A Famosa, once a massive defensive fort, was destroyed long ago, except for the main entry gate, which was busy being used by a tout to entertain a crowd of Japanese tourists.  Above, on top of a hill, stands what's left of St. Paul's Church.  The architecture isn't much, but there are some absolutely amazing tombstones from as early as the 1500s.  Lots of skulls and crossbones again, this time with wings on top. 

As you walk through Melaka it's hard not to notice that this is a city of artists.  There is graffiti and street-art all around, galleries line the roads as well as antique shops claiming to have original works, and clothing stores try to come in on the others’ coattails by selling “wearable art”. You can also see this in the homes along the street, which all have colourful, tile mosaics (or at least the remnants of one) running in a thin band between the first and second floors. Dragons, flowers, birds and geometric designs are all squeezed into a 6” tall strip and compete with their neighbours for whose will be most flamboyant.  It makes you slow your relaxed pace even more, as you stop periodically to just stop and observe.

So now it's the end of the day and I've only eaten a plate of ginger chicken for breakfast and some snacks.  I'm going to the guidebook's most highly recommended restaurant: Capitol Satay.  Apparently, you choose from loads of different kebab-style options then cook them in a bubbling pot of satay sauce right on your table.  It sounds delicious, which explains why I had to wait in line for...2 hours.  And I'm sure it would have been delicious if I liked processed meat or gigantic, whole shrimp.  So, maybe not the five stars Lonely Planet gives it, but then what was I expecting in Southeast Asia?  Time to see what Kuala Lumpur has to offer...

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