Seorang diri means alone

Much of my time in Malang was spent wandering around aimlessly - it's such a picturesque place, with old Dutch colonial buildings everywhere, gardens, fountains, and seemingly a mosque on every block. Inadvertantly I found myself at the Malang bird market, and although most of the birds are kept in humane conditions, there is a strange practice of colouring live baby chicks with cake-pens (bright pink, green, and blue) for sale. Saturday evening I strolled down to the alun-alun - the centre of activity in Malang. Monkeys riding little tricycles as their owners beat drums and feed them rambutans, buskers walking around with chip-packets, and lots of people just sitting there watching the action from the seats around the central fountain. I sat down and was instantly engaged in conversation with about five separate people. One question that everyone seems to ask here is "Seorang diri?" (Are you alone?) To this I answer "Ya. Saya seorang diri." and the next question is usually something like "You look for Indonesian girlfriend?" I'm letting my guard down a bit now, having realised how genuinely nice most of the people are here. It's just the handful of seasoned salesmen, the few bad eggs, that you have to be weary of. I've met a few families who like to make their children kiss me on the hand, and the poor kids always seem terrified. Also on Saturday I had befriended a pair of Sumatran cousins staying at my hotel, and so later that night we all went to the local nightclub, Bale Barong. There was a band - Malang's answer to the Black-eyed Peas - and I was the only non-Indonesian in the whole place (it was packed). So the band gave me a special mention but sadly couldn't play my song request, Hey Ya. Yesterday morning I said goodbye to the Sumatrans (although we will be meeting again in Yogyakarta in a few days and driving to Bandung together) and headed off to one of the recreation parks in town to see the Kuda Lumping (Horse Trance) show that I had been hanging out for. It was a strange place, full of giant weathered fibreglass animals and delapidated carnival rides. Ten o'clock was the appointed start time, but the warm-up act played Indonesian power-ballads until midday. During this time I met some European students who have been living in Malang for six months and seemed a tad sick of it. They gave up waiting and left before the actual horse trance dancing started. The idea is that men riding cane horses dance themselves into a trance and then perform masochistic acts such as glass-eating... Eventually two adolescent boys came out straddling woven cane horses and started to dance around half-arsed while whipping eachother very gently. This went on for a good hour or so. Meanwhile it had started to rain, and the dancers kept losing their footing on the wet ground. Another half-hour went by with a different dancer doing a similar thing, and then there was an intermission. At this stage I left. Maybe they were eating little bits of glass that I couldn't see. I only paid about 75 cents to get in I suppose... The European students had said that they would be seeing a movie at the new shopping centre after dinner, so I caught one of the public mini-buses out to Matos (Malang Town Square - an enormous monster of a mall) on the outskirts of the city, hoping to find them there. After wandering around for a bit with no sign of them, I hopped another mini-bus back to town, and it was full of teenage girls who took photos of me with their mobile phones. Early to bed, and this morning seemed like a good time to leave Malang. Becak to the train station, and a three-hour economy ride to Surabaya - the capital of East Java province, and the second biggest city in Indonesia (although it's only one quarter the size of Jakarta). The train was hot and crowded, with people selling everything from fresh fruit and sate to kitchen-knives and atlases, and the same green t-shirt band that I saw coming from Probolinggo. Here I have upgraded in accomodation to a room with a tv, a/c and private bathroom because there's nothing cheaper within a walk from the city, and I found the shared bathroom at the last place a bit hard to deal with, given Indonesians' tendency to leave the entire place constantly wet. Plus, I am covered in bite-marks from whatever was on/in that mattress. Still, you couldn't get a dorm-bed in a hostel for 170,000 rupiah ($25) in Australia. Right now I'm sitting in one of Surabaya's many massive shopping centres, it's pissing rain outside, and I left my umbrella at the hotel.