AROUND
THE
HOUSE
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Sightseeing
around my house in the town of Yogya
on the island of Java
of the Republic of Indonesia,
would give you some visual salad --
what is new and what is old, hundreds of years and an instant,
tradition and novelty, stagnant lair and flowing river,
real estate and real landslide, the natural and artificial,
the disposable and the eternal, and a hybrid of
too many things to be named in a blink.
Abridged: like.....me!
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Yogya
| Java
| Indonesia
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Japan
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Around
sixty years of peculiar republican existence [see
History of Indonesia], the town has grown used to self-dubbed
hermits, socially scornful recluse, and virtually every brand
of artistic eccentricity. Nature endorses this tendency -- it
is everywhere, so hideouts like this could get
easily built [see 'The Province of Yogya'].
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But
the so-called development cannot be but embraced, for whatever's
sake; these past few years, hybrid houses have been taking
over what used to be local homes. Most of such colorful newcomers
are vacant -- owners prefer to live in Jakarta, the republic's
capital, where the humdrum of moneymaking is [see
'Indonesia'].
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This
is a typical village road untouched by governmental
meddling except for the slapdash asphaltization. Interprovincial
roads lined by sturdy teak is everywhere on this island. One
of them is two cigarettes away from my house (see how the Javanese
give direction later).
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Banana
trees have been treated as if they are totally worthless
since 1970's, even as the Javanese still depend on them quite
much. Everything bananaese is used and virtually not a single
shred is wasted. In Java, banana flowers are 'vegetables' (they're
ingredients of several dishes), so is the innermost layer of
banana tree's trunks. The leaves are food wrappers and salable
as such.
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Kiki,
one of Riska Andriyanti's cats, in an unfinished house around
her place. See the scary-looking bamboo tall bench? That's what
Javanese construction workers work on all day without any such
a thing as an insurance coverage for possible accidents. Riska,
the 7 year-old neighbor, was infected early on by my and my
little sister's cat-keeping habit [see 'Blue
Rose Monday' and/or Asada
Kanae's pages].
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Captain
Nemo, volunteering guardian of the neighborhood; he was
sort of mad at me while this picture was taken -- but he stopped
barking for a few secs, resuming it again after the flash died
down. Genius dog! His house is there at the background, where
he lives happily with Asada Kanae and
Santo Banana, in a Japanese-Javanese artistic & private
bilateral collaboration [see 'Soul Tattoos'
and/or Asada
Kanae's pages].
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Pedicabs
are the main public transport for those (I) who can't
stand overcrowded buses. More or less 25 pedicab drivers live
in my neighborhood. Despite the obviously hard work and low
pay, most of them have somehow secured ownership of houses of
their own, and so far 2 kids of those families have been university
students, hoping for some different future from that of daddy's.
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Riverbed
is as well done as any spot in the long, unpredictable, generally
migraining dry season's merciless sun. It just lays there undescribable
until the first rain comes -- usually around the time orange
leaves fall off the trees in the Ozarks [see
'Thru the Window'].
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The
road leading to my house -- though every road
might be -- long, narrow, worn-out, it shows what every other
suburban and country inroad has upon their faces. If you get
lost, enquiry for direction would elicit the characteristic
rural Javanese replies, such as "Baron beach? Take a U-turn
here, then turn right until you reach a pair of cypresses, then
turn left after a tobacco plantation, and from there it is one
cigarette-smoking length of time to Baron beach."
A
bamboo grove by the river in my neighborhood.
Bamboo to the Javanese have been as significant as they are
to the Japanese, and not just for architectural projects. The
young sprout is harvested as vegetables, the leaves are used
as food wrappers. And the Javanese sharpened bamboo sticks to
fight against the Japanese and the Dutch in 1945 -- the
Indonesian War for Independence.
At
the right: Javanese can't live without chilli.
They'll eat anything as long as there is some chilli sauce (pounded
with salt and garlic) around.
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Rice
fields where some other chunk of my neighborhood is kept
busy in. The exact same view can be gotten anywhere around Asia;
but I can't leave this pic out because otherwise the portrait
of the neighborhood wouldn't be complete. Right behind the back
wall of my house is already a rice field. Besides, I know the
names of the water-buffaloes that work hard day by day when
these fields were plowed. For two thousand years this planet
has never been very kind to farmers -- and when the repeated
failure of communism, socialism, populism or of whichever name
it is has been buried and forgotten, next thing you know the
land has been a private property of a Jakartanese CEO. I know
how hopelessly outdated this feeling is, but I wish we all be
a little grateful for what we eat daily -- that there are people
like my neighbors to work on what we either can't or not willing
to do, under the scorching tropical sun and fiercely pouring
rain, day in, day out, for almost financially nothing.
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Some
quirky items on sale in the traditional market. Dried
corn skin is used as materials of Yogyanese handicrafts,
but it has been serving another use since the year 1000 -- to
roll traditional cigarettes in.
Plucked
roses are daily merchandise and much more often seen
here than whole roses -- which are something imported from the
caucasian diehard habit of getting unseasonably romantic. Plucked
roses are the thing we go to funerals and graves with, to be
further plucked on the spot and the petals are then scattered
on the ground. In the form like you see in the pic above, it
is for some sort of ancestor-worship or offerings at home.
But
there also exists some bounty nobody planted but nonetheless
reaps, like papaya and guava. They are nearly
worthless in Java; we consider them the lowest-ranked fruits,
together with pineapples.
Javanese
apple trees are grown in large orchards in East Java.
In my part of Central Java, it is only some kind of a hobby
to my neighbor who has 5 or 6 of these at his backyard. Javanese
apples are harder, smaller, and greener than those grown in
Washington, D.C. and New Zealand. Even when they ripen, the
color is orange-green, never red, the flesh stay hard, and the
taste sweet-sour. It's one of the fruits for the lower economic
class of the denizen, and not sold in supermarkets, only marketed
by mobile and roadside vendors.
Francesco Coco (the
cat at my library window above) and a typical Javanese
seafood restaurant near my house (at your right).
Such
places are always built upon the ponds where the fish et.al.
are kept. All tables are as low as Japanese tables are, and
we also sit on pillows on mattresses made of woven natural fibres.
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Harvest
time, and a roadside vegetable vendor. Routine
images here around my house. So is the flood of year-long and
seasonal fruit -- like the overloaded mango tree in a
neighbor's front yard:
and
cassava (some sort of sweet potatoes) field that Fanta
Gelo patronizes:
and
some sort of sweet potato we call 'talas',
exactly the same as the Japanese's 'satoimo'. The leaves
are fed to cows and goats. The people take the roots, often
sold already boiled. A very very cheap source of carbohydrate
-- plus vitamin C as a bonus.
In
Japan, they grow a certain variety of chrysanthemums
and eat the flowers. In Java we eat the leaves of the variety
locally named 'kenikir'; the flowers
are used in bouquets like normal.
Most
of the construxion is made of bamboo. The guys who own this
particular joint are in everlasting war against my guerrilla
cats, as a matter of course.
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© 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 M. Amin Mukti, Andrianto, William Dunlop,
Cynthia Siregar, Bunga Jeruk, Nin
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