Oh Jodie

She was stern, but her hands were strong. As the robe slipped off my shoulders and fell lightly around my arms, I realized that, though public nudity probably plays a larger roll in my life than it should, I have never been so publicly undressed (verb). It was a strange thing to feel so helpless, to feel the next thirty minutes were entirely up to those tiny, firm hands. In my state of heightened awareness, the lotion was ice on my back, an uncomfortably effeminate affront to my already fragile masculine nature. And then, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter any more. There was pain, but it was oddly euphoric, a strange dichotomy that my mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around, but that my body was very convinced of.

I was getting a Creme Bath at Jodi’s Salon, the decadence of which was in stark contrast to the rest of my time in Papua. But maybe I should start from the beginning.

I crossed the threshold into a world of curling irons and steamers, a world so foreign that it might as well have been populated by bobble-headed aliens. In fact, I actually thought it might have been, until I realized the steaming-headed extraterrestrial was actually a woman getting her hair … something’d. And so I was a bit discombobulated when they handed me a folded up robe and ushered me into a changing room. Why did I have a robe? What should I take off? The shirt seemed a foregone conclusion, but what about the pants? I thought they were only going to work the shoulders, but then why the robe? Would I look sillier if I were to be wearing pants when I wasn’t supposed to, or if I wasn’t wearing them when I was supposed to be? The pants stay on, for sure. The tough decisions made, I unfolded the robe and put it on. It only came about three inches past my waist; the pants were a good choice. So far so good.

Then came the shampooing and the head massage, followed by the shoulder massage, which was where I lost all inhibitions about checking my masculinity at the door. As I sat there in a blissful stupor, she kneaded the tension out of my shoulders, alternating between deep pressure and lighter swoops. And oh the swooping. I was a fan of the swooping.

When the swooping stopped, my mind kicked back in, and I began to wonder about the other clientele in the adjacent chairs. They obviously had money (at $7 US or 70,000 rupiah, Creme Baths didn’t come cheap), but what was their life like? Papua, to me, was a hodgepodge of beaches, jungles and rivers; it was a series of ‘outsides,’ where ‘inside’ served only as a quiet, cool reprieve before one again returning to the Papuan outdoors. But a lot of the hair that I was seeing emerge from the steamers was sculpted, crafted, sometimes seemingly cajoled and magic’d into place. It was inside hair. What would it be like to experience Papua from the confines of a room? Would they be content in their air conditioning and Creme Baths, content to reduce the Papuan beauty to scenery?

I have to admit that I got on a bit of a high horse, smugly condescending on my ivory pedestal as I viewed those who have lost an appreciation for what was just on the other side of the door. The masseuse might have been a bit clairvoyant, because it was at that moment that the swoop became a decided jab, and the change in pace interrupted my thinking a bit.

When the pain subsided, I forgot that I was thinking about them, and started thinking about me. Had Beibei become nothing but scenery? How much of my time was in closed restaurants and coffee shops, or in massage parlors or living rooms? How much of my time was spent trying to manage my surroundings instead of finding ways to enjoy them? How much was I trying to be comfortable in spite of Beibei and how much time was spent appreciating Beibei itself? I feared that in some ways, I had lost touch with the very things that drew me to Beibei.

I loved the CrËme Bath, but it was more Vidal Sassoon than Sentani. If that was all that I know of Papua, had I ever even been there? Had I left Beibei long before ever getting on a plane? The questions got to be very ponderous and kindof a drag, so I avoided them by opening an Indonesian Cosmo, taking the love quiz by randomly choosing answers, and then having Jared translate my results. Apparently I’m a “handle player,” whatever that is. Either way, it was a pleasant distraction from the unpleasant questions.

Dollarsigns and Nothingness

Of the past 72 hours, I had only spend 5 in a bed. It would be another full 24 hours before I finally laid down to blissful rest on an airmattress on the floor of a missionary’s house nestled in the Papuan mountains. But now is not then. Now is hot, and now is crowded, and now is overwhelming, and now is … not good. Indonesia and I did not start off on a very good foot.

The arrival experience in five sentences: Customs was hot, sticky, and unairconditioned. Came out to find a porter holding my bag; he motioned, I followed (which was actually useful), he asked for either a $2 (20,000 rupiah) tip or a $20 (200,000 rupiah) one, I was so delusional and blinded by zeroes that I’m ashamed to say I honestly don’t know what I gave him. So he was either a divine guide or a dirty rotten bastard thief, I’m still on the fence. My taxi driver kept on calling me ‘boss,’ the enjoyment of which faded when I realized that I could get out and walk faster than our car was going. He let me off at Mastapa Gardens Hotel in Kuna beach, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tip him (no), but I was still too confusedly bitter over the porter to care if I was being culturally sensitive.

It was then, 1 hour into my 12 hour layover, that I realized something. I didn’t like Bali. Or rather, more accurately, I loathed Bali (1). The beaches are amazing, the prices are low, and the people have the sort of petite exotic beauty that I’m sure made many WWII navymen love Bali. But maybe that’s the thing. Maybe it plucks the last chord of puritanical piety left within me. I… hate… tourism. I hope you are cozy, because I’m about to climb on my soapbox.

I love the free exchange of cultures, I think it’s great when people want to see new horizons, and I’m all for FDI. Spread the love, whatever. What turns my stomach is when a location becomes a ‘destination.’ And Bali is definitely a destination.

Kuna Beach is filled with people. The ones that moved were white, the ones that stood still and hawked were locals. “Rolex? DVD?” “Hey boss, you want to buy a shirt? How about a dress for a pretty lady?” “Massage?” Being a white male walking (relatively) alone, I got a lot of the latter. Young Balinese women littered the streets, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, every twenty feet or so, offering the same service. And while their lips said massage, their lingering gazes and soft touches suggested the possibility of a bit more.

Walking down the road, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, while everyone was crowded on the same streets, no one was actually seeing each other. I felt like a walking dollar sign. And who can blame them? People don’t go to Kuna Beach to find Balinese culture, they go there for cheap eats and mass-produced “I heart Bali” shirts. Walking past a shop named ‘Suicide Dreams,’ I wondered what it said about our culture that this is what was found to be most attractive to prospective shoppers (us). After glancing in a few stores, I tried to keep my eyes on the road ahead. It just hurt too much.

Is this what we do? Drive our Explorers from the suburbs to work, play at living out our ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lives until we make enough money to go someplace else and get our freak on? Find some place beautiful enough to be distracting and poor enough to be bought? It sounds like prostitution to me. Only a fool blames the bed of the whore, especially when he is the one making that bed. There is no free love, and cheap love only exists when there are people to buy it. We have created Bali, we have created the tee-shirts emblazoned with “Drop Pants, Not Bombs” and “Toughen the Fuck Up;” shirts that we would never allow on our street corners, but that, on a street corner far far away, we find clever and hilarious. Who can blame them for looking at me like that, because I have created them, and now I must sustain them.

And us? When we look at them, we see … nothing. I don’t think we see anything. The locals are part of the background, speakers that hawk goods and disembodied hands that exchange money. We are not there for them; they are there for us. We take what we want and give them enough money to make sure that they are there the next time we want something. No one cares who it is that is behind the counter, just that there is someone there. They are interchangeable people. Are interchangeable people really people at all?

What I hate about tourism, or definitive tourism at least, is that it dehumanizes people. Tourists set aside their humanity and become pure consumers, and the local industry sets aside its cultural distinctives in favor of whatever happens to be marketable. We become dollar signs and they become reflections of our hidden self-indulgence. Sometimes it manifests itself as perverse, sometimes garish, but in a twisted sense, I don’t know if either is worse than the other. Both the keychain phallus and the hibiscus-print shirt represent our willingness to throw money at whoever will allow us to be someone other than who we currently are. Maybe the point is that they both represent our dissatisfaction with ourselves. A dissatisfaction that we find so distasteful and taboo that we ship it off to some distant country - on call when we need it - but with no thought for the place and the people who we have reduced to indulging our own guilty insecurities.

(1) My trip back through Bali was completely different, and I think it’s quite nice. Ish.

Papua Pictures

These are all old hat from Facebook, but there should be some new ones as soon as I can get my laptop hooked up to the internet. I know, there are already too many, but hey... it was awesome. And now that I've looked, I realize how neglected this blog has been. Whoops. Here are more pictures than anyone would ever want to at. Whee! The last three are from Papua.
Beibei
Earthquake
Terracotta Warriors
Halloween
Chengdu
Christmas
Papua Beach
Cliff Diving (Well, actually more of bridge diving)
Ibole (A village in the mountains of Papua)

Wo Shi Frogger

Traffic here is … special. Crossing the street is like a study in attrition, where the goal is to get out far enough into the street so that the oncoming car is forced to go around your back (a nice way of saying ‘swerve.’) Adding to the fun is the four-lane road that we cross several times daily, because it runs along the campus, in between it and anything else. Nothing says “Good morning” like dodging cars at 7:30 in the morning.

A favorite game is trying to find the ‘Perfect Cross.’ A Perfect Cross is one where you walk straight across the road at a constant speed without having to change direction or stop to avoid certain death. A Poor Cross gets you a silver medal, while a Failure to Cross is considered losing, but at that point you should probably pay attention to what the doctor is asking you rather than bemoan your failure.

Car rides are entertaining, but mostly when viewed from an American perspective. The fun gets taken away when you begin to share the Chinese casual disregard for the lines of the road. White, yellow, they’re mostly just suggestions. So it is not uncommon to find yourself speeding down the road, looking straight at the front of another car, as the distance between you shrinks from ‘acceptable,’ where there is a lot of open space between you, to ‘curious and thought-provoking,’ typified by uncomfortable memories of that video that they show you in Driver’s Ed, to ‘distressing,’ where all rational thought is superceded by the instinctual repetition of unsavory words. Then you tuck into a space that magically appears beside you, or the oncoming car swerves a bit, and the danger passes – at least until your taxi driver decides that the car in front of him is going too slow.

I think that may be one of the things I like best in China. It is a believer in natural consequences. There are no fines for jaywalking, but the penalty for walking across the street without looking might be getting squished. At least for a foreigner, it feels like there are fewer restrictions, but there is also less of a buffer if something goes wrong. It seems somehow … right. The problem with civilization is that we civilize ourselves right out of the world. Consequence gives meaning, and so a world without consequence is a world without meaning. Or a world where money is the consequence is also a world where money is the meaning. China is an opportunity to get away from that, to step out – at least for a short time –from under the expectant burden of my own wealth and comfortable civilization and live a little more simply.

Thoughts From An Icebox

I hate being cold. I spent about 10 minutes thinking of a witty way to open this up, and decided that nothing could convey the depth and sincerity of my hatred of inadequate warmth. It’s almost primal in its simplicity. There is no room for equivocation, there is no rationalization or “finding the silver lining.” I hate the cold like the cavemen hated the T-Rex. It is a simple emotion, but very, very fervent.

It’s not that Chongqing is so very cold, but that it is completely cold. There are many places much colder than here, but I think that most of those places either have heaters, or a distinct lack of life. Nothing is heated here, and so I spend my days bundled up in long underwear, sweatshirts, beanie, gloves, and three inches of down jacket. My night wardrobe consists of a long sleeve top, thick knit socks, and pants that inhabit the dubious region between sweatpants and long underwear. This, in combination with an electric heating pad, two hot water bottles, and five inches of assorted blankets serves to keep me warm enough through the night. Even still, I still wake up every morning to the sight of my breath hanging a few inches from my face like a tiny Charlie Brown cloud. I was watching a movie in my living room, huddled around my space heater, and realized that, as I exhaled, my breath would catch the light from the television and do funny things to it. While mildly amusing, the living room is no place to see one’s own breath.

I am probably less suited to the cold than most, and so my reaction has been slightly more extreme than my other counterparts. The one driving factor in my day is now to find some place of warmth. The only places that I have found heating is in the two tea houses that I have found. Bebei has been regrettably lacking in the tea house department. But these have heat, and so I can buy a glass of tea for 10 yuan (roughly $1.25, or one-and-a-half meals) and sit for a few hours in blessed warmth. Another highlight is the Chinese class that I had previously been skipping (too easy, and other things were more fun). Strangely enough, when I realized that there was free heating in the classroom, my interest in studying rudimentary Chinese grew exponentially.

The remarkable thing, though, is that I rarely hear complaints. This is not (as I might be apt to refer to it), an atrocity against humanity, but just the way things are. Rather than curse the cold, they bundle up, because there isn’t much else that can be done. That may be one of the biggest differences here. Things tend to be accepted rather than evaluated, whether due to cultural conditioning or lack of outside experience, I’m not sure. Probably a combination.

More on that later, because now it’s time to put tomorrow’s clothes under the blanket (one of my better ideas) and fire up the hot water bottle. Man, do I hate the cold.

Goodbyes

SPU left today, and Beibei was a different place. Things were colder, less vibrant, the sun was gone, and in its place there was nothing but rain. I’m actually not being poetic; weather took a significant turn for the worse that day. As Beibei cried for its loss, I scavenged through their leftovers, gathering power strips and endless amounts of laundry detergent, then closed each door for the last time. It seemed strangely appropriate that these final acts of practical frugality were so marbled with sentimentality.

The dark truth is that every ‘hello’ has a ‘goodbye’ lurking in its shadow. I have grown callous in the wake of my travels, and so I was surprised at how deeply the loss still cut. I realized that while I was used to the ‘goodbyes,’ I was always the one saying them and then moving on. This may be the first time that I have been left, and I was unprepared for the feeling of abandonment and jealousy as they went on to the ‘next big thing.’

The pain, though very real, is only important in its all-consuming immediacy. It is but temporary, and I am excited for the opportunities that will be revealed in its passing. I was at a talent show hosted by the foreign students dorm, and realized how little I am involved in Southwest, and – more surprisingly – how much I feel the lack. I very much enjoyed my time with SPU, but their presence has precluded my involvement with any SPU-independent part of Southwest.

In many ways, I am back to where I was three months ago, and the world seems full of opportunities. I hope to give a much more concerted effort to my language study, as well as spend significant amounts of time with my gymnastics and martial arts friends. Beyond that there is nothing but a big question mark, and my excitement is honed by the fear of the intangible unknown.

A Pleasantly Unmemorable Weekend.

Undying love for The Mix hostel. Anyone who charges ¥25 for a bed, maintains western toilets, and can maintain a friendly demeanor in the face of 30 loud American collegiates deserves sainthood. A few blocks from the city center, they have carved out a little piece of backpacker heaven resplendent with Tibetan tapestries and secluded by bamboo walls. I have no great stories from there, just a lot of gratitude.

Chengdu is … relaxing. Pleasantly flat and peppered with tea houses, it is a good place to kick back. While there I went to the Tibetan quarter, an oldtown Chinese tourist town, the panda reserve, a bamboo garden, an art market under a bridge, and had possibly the best burger in the world. The Tibetan quarter was blah, tourist town was a good use of an hour, the pandas were cute, the bamboo garden was peaceful, the art market productive, and the burger was … a religious experience. There. Now you know what I did in Chengdu. Mostly, I just hung out and had a good time.

I do, however, harbor great animosity towards the city’s taxis, or rather the dearth thereof. I spent a particularly unpleasant forty minutes alone on various street corners with my luggage, vainly looking for a taxi. Eventually I found what appeared to be a favorite taxi-driver bathroom and waited alongside a car as its driver was inside. When he came back I informed him that I would be riding in his taxi.

I’m really trying here, but am drawing a blank on any stories worth repeating. So, Chendgu: Great city, amazing hostels, far too few hostels. Done.