RE: laatste nieuwtjes

After another confused phone-call and half an hour of waiting around, the Sumatrans picked me up in front of the train station and took me to a traditional Sumatran restaurant. You are given a plate of rice and you take what you want from a window full of different dishes. I made my selection and sat down to eat, discovering that I had taken about three times as much food as my dining companions. After weeks of eating with my right hand only (out of respect for what I understood to be local convention), I was glad to see that the others were using both hands, so I indulged myself. It's damn hard trying to pick apart fried chicken with one hand. We finished eating, I showed them the photos of my trip on my camera. They wandered who were all the Indonesian people I had photos taken with at Prambanan. Allen said "Would you like to pay now?" So, after some confusion, I covered the whole bill as they assumed that I would. I was a bit erked by this, but I remember reading that bills are generally not divided in Indonesia - it was somewhere near the bit about eating with the right hand. From there we drove to their house, which was about half an hour from the city. A tiny little apartment down a street so narrow that we had to reverse the whole way back when we left. Dadi woke his wife and 2-month old son up so that I could meet them. His wife made coffee, the baby farted and I taught them all a new English word, fart. We took the obligatory photos, and then they drove me all the way back to my losmen, I offered them money towards petrol, but they explained that I was like part of the family now. They said, on seeing the area where I'm staying, "You know, there are many bitch in this area." Confused, I asked what they meant. "Bitch, you know, bitch... like, uh... here, you can give money after making love..." Ah, so I'm staying in the red-light district of Yogya. Then we sat up smoking kreteks at Losmen 105 for a bit before they left. Incidentally, they had decided that they weren't going to Bandung afterall, but Allen offered to come if I paid for his train ticket. Ha... So today I checked out the timetable, and showed up for the midday train with my backpack only to find - after a very frustrating interchange with the non-English speaking ticket officer (my fault for not speaking Indonesian) - that the train was full and that I would have to catch the night train. And then it started to rain. So I've spent all day shifting from cafe to cafe, restaurant to internet kiosk, reading my brand new second-hand copy of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim with hand-written marginal notes in old Javanese. Yogya's a nice place - orientated towards the Indonesian tourist rather than the Western tourist - but I've been here for one day too long now. Tomorrow I arrive in Bandung at five in the morning, but I figure that I can rely on the train being at least half an hour late, which would leave enough time for the sun to come up. There's activity in the streets at all hours anyway. Street vendors work in shifts so that many of them are open 24 hours. Then there's the ubiquitous prostitutes, and I hear that Bandung is yet another place famous for their whores. I'll see what I can during the day and hopefully get the train to Bogor in the afternoon. They're playing Indonesian folk music, and this is what Paul Kelly would sound like if I had receptive aphasia. Har har.