a thaumaturgical compendium

Close call on catching the flight. Misunderstood the arrival time on the Narita Express and didn’t get in until almost 10. Then we spent 20+ minutes in the wrong line. By the time we got where we wanted to go, we were rushed from place to place and very luckily made our flight.

We get into Jakarta in about 4 hours. From there it will take about two more hours to get to Denpasar. When we get in, we must change yen for rupiah. We were thinking of walking in to Kuta—about 2-3 km from the airport. We’ll have to see how we feel when we get there. We might just grab a taxi. I think we’ll try to stay at Poppies Cottages near the inland side of Poppies Gang I. If not there, we’ll try for some of the more expensive spots.

We’re about to pass over the Philippines. I need a nap and a shave…

Well, got the nap, but not the shave. I’m sitting in Jakarta waiting for the plane to get off the ground. We had a 45 minute layover and bought some Aqua (air minum) and changed 30,000 yen to 630,000 rupiah. This should last us a few days. The money is strange and difficult to handle. We have bills in 50K, 20K, 10K, 5K, and 1K. I guess I can at least estimate by cutting off the last 3 zeroes. That would mean that the Scientific American at the airport cost 14 or roughly $7 US—a deal by Japanese standards.

Like Hawaii, the airport isn’t air conditioned, but unlike Hawaii, it is not open to the outside. There was a near 50/50 mix of Japanese and fair-skinned folks, and about 50/50 young and older. Many looked tacky—the anglos in muscle shirts and shorts, smelling horrible, the Japanese in cheap, odd “travel clothes,” taking pictures of everything in true-to-stereotype form. The women were all red like lobsters—obviously staying out too long in their last days to make up for the fact that they had spent most of their vacation shopping and drinking, in the hopes that friends will say “My you look tan, where did you go for your vacation?” And they can impress their neighbors (at least for the USers, less so for the Australians perhaps).

The difference between the “Westerners” and the Japanese is far more pronounced here than it ever was in either America or Japan. It’s easy to see where the stereotypes come from. The Americans are ugly, arranged in groups of three or less, and loud. The Japanese seemed more orderly, less pissed off, and smelled better. They looked like freshmen on the first day of school. At the money exchange, the Americans were changing in factors of $20 while the Japanese traded in factors of 10,000 yen—usually three or more of them.

All the immigration people had the necessary Japanese down. They called out “passport” followed by “passport…o.” (So used to hearing English in Japanese, that it is strange to hear it passed through Bahasa Indonesia, English, Japanese and back again.) The Indonesians don’t have the same obvious disdain (hatred?) for the Japanese that, e.g., many Koreans seem to. But still, 50 years later, it must be odd to have to take in the Japanese as the most honored guests. From captive to prostitute? Maybe not: most of the people working here are two generations from the Greater East Asia Co-Prostperity Sphere.