Idul Adha

Have you heard the one about the Muslim who walks into a bar? Ok, just kidding.

A cab driver in Yogya told us a joke. There was a very respected Muslim man walking into a hotel one day when a reporter stopped him and said, “Sir, which religion is the closest to God?”

“Christians,” the Muslim answered.

“What?!” said the reporter. “How can that be?”

“Well, to Christians, God is their Father or their Son,” said the man.

“All right, then which religion is the second closest to God?”

The man answered, “Judaism, because God is their Uncle.”

The reporter was very confused, and he said, “But sir, where do Muslims stand?”

The man laughed. “Muslims are the furthest from God because we need a loudspeaker to reach him.”

I think a few months ago I wouldn’t even have understood the joke, but it’s a reference to the “azan,” or call to prayer, which plays loudly (I mean LOUDLY) to remind Muslims it’s time to pray. It starts at around 4am.

So in the effort of understanding, and therefore caring, here’s a very brief Islam 101 with Professor Katie:

The legend is that in the biblical story of Sarah and Abraham, Sarah was worried she wouldn’t be able to conceive. She told her husband to sleep with their servant Hagar. She got pregnant and gave birth to Ishmael. Later, Sarah got pregnant like God had promised her, and she had Isaac. Sarah then ordered Hagar and Ishmael to leave, because she wanted her son to be the heir. Jews, and then Christians, descended from Isaac, and Arabs descended from Ishmael.

Islam is based on the Five Pillars: a profession of faith, praying five times a day (as reminded to by that delightful loudspeaker), giving money and food to the poor, fasting during Ramadhan, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime.

(When I go to the travel agency to book my tickets, it always surprises me to see special “Hajj” fares. For some reason I feel like the pilgrimage should be some sort of spiritual hike or exhausting journey, but most of them buy plane tickets and take taxis like any of us would. And apparently, there are some good deals.)

The area of Aceh in North Sumatra adopted Islam centuries before the rest of the island, and it’s the strictest today; that’s where they were trying to pass the adultery stoning law and where two American English teachers were targeting in a shooting last week.

You know that much of the conflict in Iraq surrounds the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam. Sunnis are in the majority around the world, and Sunnis are the heavy majority in Indonesia.

Muslim women wear a head covering in daily life because they choose to; the scripture only says they have to cover their heads during prayer. Indonesians Muslim boys must be circumcised, and it’s usually done between the ages of 6 and 11. I won’t be too disappointed if I miss one of those ceremonies. Muslim men are allowed to have two wives, with permission from the first, but polygamy here is very rare, and I haven’t met anyone who practices it.

Idul Adha—

This Muslim holiday takes place 70 days after the end of Ramadhan. It commemorates the story where God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son.

I have never liked this story. Mostly, I blame my Sunday School teacher who asked, probably with innocent intentions, “Do you think your parents love God enough to kill you?” I remember saying, at maybe seven years old, “My mom would never kill me. She wouldn’t do that.” And the teacher said, “She would if she loved God and he asked her to.” Shudder.

Anyway, in the story, God can see Abraham’s devotion, so he spares his son and Abraham sacrifices a ram instead. Can you see where this is going? All over Indonesia, people sacrifice rams, goats, and cows. There's some discrepancy about who God ordered Abraham to sacrifice, though. Genesis says it was Isaac, but the Koran says it was Ishmael.

It’s difficult to get a straight answer out of most people here, but here’s what I’ve been able to learn about Idul Adha:

The animals are expensive. An average teacher at my school makes $150 a month, and a goat is about $120 in Palembang. They sell them on the side of the road for about a week before Idul Adha. Each goat “counts” for one person; same with a ram. A cow “counts” for seven people, but cows are very expensive.

"Moo."

You don’t have to have any religious position or title to do the sacrificing, but you have to read some passages aloud from the Koran first. There’s also some correct way to slaughter the animal, but you’re getting outside my realm of expertise now.

Some families, like Yana’s, sacrifice one goat a year and dedicate to a different family member. This year was Yana’s year. They don’t eat the meat themselves; they give it to their mosque, which distributes it among the poor.

Since I was in Yogyakarta, I wasn’t able to participate in the festivities here. Oftentimes schools will sacrifice animals, too. Christine’s school killed a whole slew of animals on the basketball courts.

As with everythingggggg in Indonesia, no one really had a concrete time that the sultan’s sacrifice would be taking place. First they said Thursday at 9am, but when we got there they said it was the next day. That night, people told us we’d missed it and it was actually that morning at 10 right after we’d left. Then they said it was at 5am on Friday (the actual holiday). It turns out, the sultan’s two cows were sacrificed at 9am on Friday, and we got there at about 9:15am.

At first I was disappointed we’d missed the climax of the ceremony, but I got over that pretty quickly. The cows were still twitching and trying to get up, and their heads were just barely held on. I expected the whole ceremony to be a lot more… holy somehow, and less like someone had just cut off a cow’s head in a parking lot.

No more mooing.

Later that night, at the beauty shop getting our manicures, one of the beautician’s husbands came in and sat down. He knew a little English, so he was excited to talk to us. We told him about the sacrifice. He said he’s Muslim, but he thinks “sacrifice is bullshit.”

Well, yeah, I can understand feeling that way.

“It’s just killing an animal.”

Then he started asking us about religion and it’s very important for everyone to believe in God “in case Titanic happens again.” I think I understand what he was saying.

Then he said that George Bush was a Christian, and he didn’t like George Bush, and that made it hard for him to like Christians. I don’t like George Bush either, but for some reason, that really upset me. Here I am, spending nine months in the largest Muslim country in the world, and he doesn’t like Christians because of what George Bush did? What if I said I didn’t like Muslims because of September 11? That would be ignorant. No, maybe stupid. I think that would be stupid of me.

Then he said he liked Obama but was waiting for him to actually start making some changes.

“President Obama is a Christian, too,” I said.

“Yeah, but he’s from Indonesia.”

No, he’s not from Indonesia. Sigh.

My class really liked my Thanksgiving lesson! It was an especially fun week to teach. We played “Thanksgiving BINGO,” watched clips of the Macy’s parade, listened to “Over the River and Through the Woods,” and looked at pictures of my family’s Thanksgiving feast from last year. I think the message was important, too. They really see Americans as fast-paced, greedy people (not that they think that’s bad necessarily), and I liked saying “See? Sometimes we slow down and say ‘thank you.’” And the older classes thought it was hilarious that the President pardons a turkey every year.

I had them list some verbs and adjectives to describe the nouns food, family, and football. I let them use their dictionaries, and most of the higher-level classes did a really good job learning new words. When I got to adjectives for families, though, one boy kept shouting out from the back, “Broken! Broken! Brooooo-kennnn.”

I tried to ignore him, because he knows that’s impolite, but I finally looked at him. “Your family is broken,” he said.

“Your face is going to be broken,” I said. I thought maybe that was going a little far, but the whole class erupted into laughs. Even the boy clapped with delight. Who knew?

At the end of the lesson, I handed out big pictures of turkeys, and the students had to write a reason they were thankful of each of the six feather.

The results ranged from “I am thankful for my father because he pays my tuition” to “I am thankful for my mother because she taught me devotion and love.” Every single student wrote that he or she was thankful for God.

I taught them the phrase “keeps me company” when I said I was thankful for my princess cat Callie, and that appeared pretty often. It’s funny which phrases they really like and which they don’t care about.

One boy who messes up his pronouns wrote, “I am thankful for my god because she give to me everything and I accept her, whatever she is.” That’s not what he meant exactly, and we took some time rewording it, but I liked his original better.

One girl wrote, “I am thankful for my second boyfriend [she meant ex-boyfriend], because he was my whole world and my every happiness until he broke my heart into pieces.”

Uhh.

I said, “Maybe you could be thankful that you can now meet a cuter, nicer boy who won’t break your heart into pieces?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

My favorites, of course, were the ones that said, “I am thankful for Miss Catty [that’s me!] because she gives us fun games to learn English and always tries to make us laugh.”

I’m thankful I’m having an adventure, however exasperating it can be.

Lots of luck in Yogyakarta (Part 2)

When we last saw our heroines, they were walking the bird seedy streets of Yogyakarta, devouring turkey sandwiches, and watching princesses burn themselves alive at the ballet. That was just on Thursday.

The duo head to Solo

Friday started early, and Christine and I took the train an hour-long ride into Solo. Solo is smaller than Yogya, but has quite a lot of culture of its own. For some reason, it’s also a hotbed of political unrest. But not on the day I visited, thankfully.

I’ve heard many Indonesians say that Palembang is the “rudest” city in the country. I would like to suggest that maybe Palembang is the second rudest city. The citizens of Solo were, without question, the pushiest, grabbiest, loudest bunch of people I’ve ever seen.

We ate lunch at a yummy Italian restaurant. Sadly, the Office of Tourism was closed for the holiday, so we explored by guidebook alone. Supposedly, the largest batik warehouse in all of Indonesia is in Solo. Again, we arrived by becak (a bicycle with a small cart in front for passengers), and we couldn’t believe we were where we wanted to be. But a nice old man appeared like he always does and pointed in the direction of a large building surrounded by shouting food vendors. We dove into the mayhem.

There was definitely a lot of batik inside, but most of the booths were closed like the tourism office. The booths that were open were home to the bravest and boldest vendors, apparently determined to make a sale if it meant literally stealing the money from our purses. Some people wouldn’t even let us through; they blocked our path with crazy colorful shirts. I tried to buy a scarf, and the woman insisted on trying to sell it to me for about three times what she was selling it to Indonesians. We speak enough Indonesian to communicate that with her, but she just shook her head and refused to budge. The Indonesian women in line were laughing because they knew she was cheating us, so we finally abandoned our souvenirs and walked away.

Everyone shouted and grabbed us. We tried to be nice and say “Tidak, terima kasih.” [No, thank you.] Then people mocked us! One woman flipped her hair and batted her eyelashes and strutted around saying “oooh tidak tidak tidak terrrrrimmaaaa kassssiiiihhh.” I tried to give her an international look of death.

We read about one restaurant that served cobra. There, you can also drink the snake’s blood mixed with an energy drink or a glass of wine. We decided it was at least worth a visit.

The “restaurant” wound up being a lone food stand and the cobras, the only item on the menu, were just restrained in cloth bags. The vendor saw us coming and let three of them out, who circled around him and bit at his hands. It was pretty terrifying. He offered to cook one for us, but I’d already watched something die at the sacrifice earlier in the day (more later, promise), and I wasn’t in the mood to do it again. So we just paid him for the cost of one anyway and ran as fast as we could in the opposite direction. We could still hear the snakes snapping at him as we rode away.

Snakes alive! (heh)

The train was an experience in itself—filthy and crowded, but delightfully cheap. It was just $.70 for a ride. It was hard to find our own seat to share, but people (not Solo natives, I would like to point out) were nice enough to shift around to let us share.

I think I can I think I can...

The salon

Chris and I were walking around on Thursday night, and I was in one of those vacation moods. You know the one: you’re tired, you had a full day and a camera full of new pictures, but you’re not just not ready to cross off one of your precious vacations days and declare it over. So we walked around the streets near our hotel (lucky for us, right downtown).

We spotted a few salons advertising a bunch of things I’d never heard of at really terrific prices. Chris was thinking about getting her haircut, but wisely decided that these joints probably weren’t the safest bet. Regardless, we were curious.

Have you ever heard of a cream bath? Maybe they have them in the US and I can’t afford them there; that’s very possible. But I COULD afford the $2.50 listed on the sign out front. In true Indonesian fashion, they were excited to get us inside and then tried to charge us $4 because “our hair is so long.” (Our hair barely reaches our shoulders.)

It was great—cream baths are basically glorified conditioning hair treatments with an added upper back and shoulder massage. (Don’t worry, there’s no taking off your clothes at all.) Judging by Chris’s grimaces and muffled whimpers of pain, her beautician was rubbing a lot harder than mine. But mine was perfect and relaxing. My only disappointment was that the water they washed our hair in was cold, of course. For some reason, I’d forgotten.

Rub a dub dub

We (or I) enjoyed it so much we went back for $2.50 manicures the next night. This one wasn’t quite as terrific, but it was still an adventure. They pulled tools out one by one from a mass of metal in a grubby cardboard box. They cut, trimmed, yanked, and filed. Honestly, I think they were afraid of messing up for American customers. Sadly, this didn’t stop them from chopping Christine’s nails into something that looked like a profile of the Rocky Mountains. Poor Chris. Although, I have a chronic case of bad luck ordering food in restaurants, so we’re even.

Borobudur

Another ancient structure. I always have lofty goals of one day seeing some forever-old monument or building and truly being moved. Now, however my thoughts follow a familiar pattern, something like Hmm, that sure is pretty. It must have taken an awfully long time to build. I’m so lucky to see this. I should take a picure. (I do.) Woah, I’m pretty hungry for 10am. Did I eat all the toast they gave me at breakfast? I wish I’d remembered a granola bar. Do I even have any left or did I eat them all? I bet Mom would send more. Hmm, that sure is pretty. I should take a picture.

The more I know, though, the more I care. (Surely that’s a universal truth, right?) So I made myself carsick on the ride to the temple reading everything about what we were going to see. And I’m glad I did, because it’s a point of pride that I am annoyingly well-informed on ways to bring yourself good luck and other anecdotes.

Indonesians pay $1.50 for admission. “International guests” pay $10. I suppose that’s fair—although I don’t think their taxes go to upkeep or the natives who can afford to travel here need a break on the cost of a ticket more than I do. In a proud little turn of events, they accepted our police ID cards as proof of residency and admitted us for $1.50 each. I walked through the gate with my head a little higher. Oh, hello, all you visitors. I live here.

We walked around a garden before attempting to scale the steps to the temple. (Weren’t people shorter then? Why do ALL ancient temple/pyramid/ruin steps I’ve ever been to require me to step up a yardstick at a time?) The temple, and the view from it, truly is beautiful. Unfortunately, terrorist attacks and natural disasters have robbed almost all of the little Buddhas of their heads.

Getting good luck

It started to rain while we were at the top, and we decided we’d better move toward the ground quickly, lest the rain would make the stone slippery and we would slide down meter by meter on the steps. Luckily, before it started raining, we made sure to get our good luck by reaching in through the stupa and rubbing the Buddha that sits inside for good luck.

Banyan Trees

There is a sultan in Yogyakarta. I had no idea about this until we got a cab at the airport and the driver proudly told that his president and his sultan were good men. I’m glad about that, at least. I have since looked it up. There IS a sultan here, and Yogya is the last province with a monarchy in the country. He acts as an elected governor, though.

What I understand perfectly well… is that he has a palace. A real palace with a huge concrete wall surrounding it. Thousands of people live inside that big concrete wall, but sadly, it was closed to outsiders (literally, with a deadbolt on the 40-ft tall doors) for Idul Adha.

Outside of the palace, however, are two huge Banyan trees sitting about 70 feet apart. Buddha was supposedly sitting under a Banyan tree when he achieved enlightenment, which is obviously awesome. The Banyan tree is also featured on Indonesia’s coat of arms; it represents that the country is one, though the people (roots) are sometimes flung far away.

There’s a legend that says if you can successfully walk blindfolded from the other end of the courtyard (maybe 200 feet away) through the trees, your wish will come true. You have to make the wish before you take your first blindfolded steps.

Uh oh. That doesn't look like the right way to go.

I had to try it. I went first, and our guide secured the blindfold around my eyes. I decided I would point my hands forward and just follow them—you just have to walk in a straight line. The thing is, after about 30 seconds, it really is hard to remember which way your hands were pointing and where you are and you start to be afraid that your head will smack into the trunk of a Banyan tree at any moment.

Our guide wouldn’t help me, but he kept telling me to concentrate on my wish, and if it was meant to come true, then I would find my way. Is it cheating a little bit if I could tell that his voice was coming from pretty far off to the right? I concentrated very hard on my wish while at the same time heading more toward the sound of the guide’s voice.

He later told me that I walked completely left of the path I should have been on, then stopped and thought, and walked right back and through the middle of the trees. He said my wish would surely come true. I’m going to believe him.

I made it!

Of course, I can’t tell you what my wish was if I want it to come true, but it was vague enough that if it really didn’t come true, that would be seriously bad news. Whew!

Giving thanks in Yogyakarta (Part 1)

Yogyakarta is perhaps the most confusing word in the Indonesian language, and it’s a city with over 3 million people. Ignore the Ys. It’s pronounced “Joeg-jah-kart-uh,” and it’s affectionately nicknamed “Yogya.” The variant spellings are enough to make my head hurt, ranging from “Jogja” to “Djokdja.”

Main street in Yogya/Jogja/Djokja/etc

According to my trusted Lonely Planet, “If Jakarta is [the island of] Java’s financial and industrial powerhouse, Yogyakarta is its soul.” I think if I could have picked where my Fulbright placement was, I might have picked Yogya. It’s teeming with creativity, from young students who paint bright political graffiti to vendor after vendor selling inexpensive, one-of-a kind batik clothing.

Batik. Indonesians LOVE it. It’s very similar to Vera Bradley patterns in America. Batik is very detailed, very colorful patterned cloths. “Good” batik is painstakingly hand-painted with wax, and it will cost you between $30 - $100. The more common variety is stamped. It’s surprisingly expensive, too, except in Yogyakarta, where a cheap shirt will cost you anywhere from $5 - $15.

This is the "good" batik.

But I cheated and this picture is from Bali.

There’s quite a lot of nasty talk here directed at Malaysians who are trying to claim batik as their own. (In fact, there’s a lot of nastiness in general towards Malaysia, who Indonesians feel are trying to steal their culture.) The United Nations, however, sides with Indonesia and just decided that batik is exclusively a part of Indonesia’s cultural heritage. The country literally celebrated in style. Schools shun their uniform on Friday in favor of bright batik patterns.

Read the New York Times article (or just look at the pictures).

So we decided to celebrate our long holiday—we Americans got Thursday off for Thanksgiving and everyone was off on Friday for Idul Adha—in Yogyakarta. (More on Idul Ahda coming soon in a different entry.) Maybe Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday necessarily associated with creativity, but it is a time for feeling grateful. And it’s just plain easy to be grateful when you’re surrounded by bright colors.

Get ready for a whole lot of blog coming at you at once.

The plan was that Chris and I would fly straight to Yogya on Wednesday evening. Cassie and Tyler, two other Fulbrights, would celebrate Thanksgiving at the American Consulate in Surabaya and would head to Yogya on Friday afternoon.

One thing that Chris and I are very good at is reading our guidebook and researching online, finding something that sounds a little curious, and saying, “All right, let’s go there.” (I think doing that is one of my favorite things about being here. Just hearing about something and immediately setting off to actually experience it.)

Pasar Ngasam [Bird Market]

Hence our first Yogyakartan adventure: Pasar Ngasam, or the Bird Market. Like so many things in Indonesia, we get dropped off somewhere that looks completely unremarkable. We say, “This can’t possibly be where we intended to go.” At that moment, some little Indonesian man will amble over and point us in some seemingly random direction or lead us down a sketchy narrow street. And suddenly, we’re in the middle of something.

I have enough germs to deal with

without having to handle a domesticated pigeon...

The bird market was exactly what is sounds like it is. Hundred of colors and types of birds, most locked in a rainbow of cages. A few young owls just sat on top of tables, blinking slowly and watching us walk past. A baby owl, we discovered, is only $10. If I thought I had even the slightest idea of how to care for it properly, I would have bought one on the spot, along with a pretty pink princess cage, and named her "Professor."

There weren’t just birds, though. Cages were full of lizards, bats (“flying dogs” to Indonesians), rabbits—for eating!, cats, dogs, and piles and piles of crawling, disgusting, buggy bird food. Pigeons—mostly for training, though some for eating—are overwhelmingly the most common bird. They live in little houses with their names on top and vendors sell an astonishing variety of decorated pigeon whistles.

Taman Sari [Water Castle]

Our personal self-appointed guide, who we met among the chicken heads and boxes of cockroaches, then led us to an old building right next to the Bird Market. The Water Castle was used hundreds of years ago by the sultan. (There’s still a ruling sultan in Yogya, by the way.) He used to keep his many wives in the tunnels and pools below ground so he could admire and enjoy them at his leisure. (This is eerily familiar to the myriad of birds in cages we just saw.)

If this is a water castle...

that makes me a water princess, right?

The sultan wanted his underground water castle to be a secret, so he killed the architect after he finished designing and building the royal waterpark. It’s empty today, but the people of Yogyakarta are slowly restoring it to its original splendor.

Prambanan Temples

I am not, by nature, a person who is into cool structures. I can see a building or temple or monument and understand that it is cool, and still, I really have to prod myself into being interested.

The ancient Hindu Prambanan Temples are about an hour outside of Yogyakarta. The most remarkable thing about them, to me, is that they were almost completely destroyed during a 2006 earthquake, and now Indonesia is painstakingly taking the millions of pieces of broken rock and trying to rebuild it.

Extreme Temple Makeover

Most of the holy symbols inside the temples were stolen by the ornery Dutch people. Poor Indonesia. Dutch people are to blame for the ruin of many ancient structures here. (They did, however, give Indonesia the gift of delicious pastries and an abundance of fresh, sweet bakeries.)

Chris and I had signed up for an afternoon/evening car tour that included the temples and the Ramayana Ballet. This was Thursday: Thanksgiving. We wound up sharing a travel van with one other couple. I don’t know who they are, but I do know that they were not very friendly.

They told us they were Italian and that they didn’t speak any English or Indonesian. (I imagine that would make traveling around Indonesia impossibly difficult.) Anyway, Chris FRASCARELLI tried to tell them her family was from Italy, but they remained indignantly uninterested.

Our tour gave us three and a half hours to spend at Prambanan. We read every sign, walked inside every temple, and took every forced goofy photo we could think of. We took as long as at the temple and surrounding vendor stands as was humanly possible. Then we circled the souvenir booths again, in case we didn’t catch all the cheap ashtrays and temple keychains the first time around. I bought a $2 pair of “Gurci” (not quite Gucci) sunglasses and Chris bought some ripe rambutan. Then we had two hours left. It was pouring.

The Italians sat inside the visitors' center until our van was scheduled to leave again, despite everyone’s best attempts to communicate to them that we could leave earlier if everyone was ready. This is when I decided that the couple was an affront to the country of Italy. The Italian language is beautiful; it sounds beautiful even if you don’t understand a word of it. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a whole book about how beautiful it is! Dom Caristi speaks in Italian and his words don't mean anything to me but they still sound awfully pretty! But these people were speaking some sort of miserable-person pseudo-Italian in which they groaned their words to one another and occasionally glanced around all shifty-eyed. That’s why I didn’t feel bad when we abandoned them at a plain, boring restaurant in search of something more fitting for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Dinner

We told our driver we really, really, really wanted to eat turkey for dinner that night. He was definitely familiar with what turkey was, but he said there was nowhere in the entire city of Yogyakarta to find it. (We didn’t even find a turkey at the bird market, not that we would have, like, killed it and cooked it ourselves.)

He first took us to a traditional Indonesian warung, which means it was pretty grimy and crawling with things. We asked if maybe we could go somewhere nicer for the special occasion. He then took us to a restaurant within walking distance of our next destination, but the menu only had about 5 choices, and I killed 12 ants on the table with my spoon before I even sat down.

We tried again, finding our driver and asking if we couldn’t have turkey, could we at least go somewhere where we could eat indoors and get a cold drink?

It was at that moment that a big black van pulled up behind ours in the otherwise-empty parking lot. It was fate. A man stepped out, and our driver asked him if he knew anywhere that served turkey in the city. He said, “Well, I’m a restaurant owner, and we have turkey on the menu!” Coolest. Thing. Ever. It went something like this:

Us: “Really?! You have turkey?!”
Him: “Yes, yes. Turkey.”
(Dials his phone. Asks if they still have turkey left. Shuts his phone and grins.)
Him: “Yes, still turkey.”
Us: “That’s wonderful! Can we go there?”
Him: “Sure. Did you know that today is a holiday in America where many people eat turkey?”
Us: “Um, yes. We’re Americans. “
Him: “Oh, that’s why you want turkey!”

We paid our driver some extra rupiah to drive us forty minutes back into the city. (Even with the 3 ½ hours at the temple, we were 2 ½ hours early for the ballet.) The “turkey dinner” ended up being plain turkey sandwiches, but the restaurant’s atmosphere was calming and elegant, just exactly what we needed.

gobble gobble gobble

We took turns saying what we were thankful for.

I’m thankful that water heaters exist in the world.


I’m thankful for cell phones that work internationally.


I’m thankful for turkey sandwiches in the middle of Indonesia.


I’m thankful this country has so many different, crazy places to travel.

Ramayana Ballet

After dinner, we rushed back to the Ramayana Ballet. The performance was similar to the Kris show we watched in Bali, but the stories are different and the costumes for the ballet aren’t as elaborate. Throughout the show, the dancers were struggling not to laugh. I thought this was supremely weird; they usually take the cultural shows so seriously.

The story is a sort of Indonesian Romeo and Juliet… but not really. The bride sees a beautiful deer and she begs her husband to go capture it for her. Unfortunately, the deer is the bad guy in disguise and he uses the absence of the groom to capture her. He wants to marry her because he thinks she’s his former love reincarnated.

"Burn, baby, burn" says Rama

Battles ensue, complete with monkey armies and plenty of violence. Finally, good triumphs and the groom wins back his bride. THEN, though, he doesn’t believe she’s pure enough anymore, and he says he doesn’t want her. Doesn’t that figure? She sets herself on fire to prove her innocence. The god of fire spares her, her loves takes her back, and everyone lives happily ever after. Except for the monkeys, that is, who I saw for sale in the bird market earlier.