Category: General

We had an interesting weekend.  Nothing too exciting, but a couple of neat things to talk about.

1.    Jean-Claude Van Damme’s fight sequences look more real than do most other fight sequences in C-list sequels to crappy movies (we watched Universal Soldier: The Return this weekend on TV).  It seems that the Muscles from Brussels really can do fairly well for himself, especially when compared to the shoddy acting in the laughable Operation Delta Force IV: Deep Fault, which was also on.  We watch these bad sequels because they seem to be the only English-language entertainment available on some Indonesian channels.  You can always MST3K them.

2.    We went to the ethnic Chinese section of Jakarta, Glodok, this weekend to look around.  You can still see the remnants of the violent mass rioting of May 13-14, 1998, as many buildings are still mere piles of rubble.  It’s really crazy.  This area is known for its electronics, but we were disappointed to find that the prices were not much different than what we would expect in the US.  We also didn’t find many DVDs there, but in other places we have seen quality DVDs for a whopping 60 cents.  Let us know if you need The Hunt for Red October or Crossroads.  It was interesting to look at the people in Glodok.  After spending so much time with indigenous Indonesians, you can really tell the difference when looking at an ethnic Chinese Indonesian.  Of course, they speak the same language and all, but their faces betray their ethnic origins.

3.    It is deceptively difficult to get a hair cut in Indonesia.  Not so much that it’s hard to walk into a salon and have them cut it, but explaining what you want is not as straightforward as you’d think.  Now, I (TP) often have a hard time communicating what I want in English, so this was extra tough.  When you think about it, saying "reproduce this haircut, shorter on the sides but still a little longer on top" is hard to translate.  Do Indonesian’s refer to the crown of their skull as the "top," or do they use some other word like "peak"?  Do they use the words "short" and "long" to describe hair, or some other vocab words?  It’s not straightforward–I ended up pointing and saying "this part" a lot.  But the hair cut is pretty OK.  In one of the more bizarre scenes of this weekend, an Australian expat getting a haircut at the same time whipped his shirt off for no apparent reason.  Everyone seemed to take it in stride, though.

4.    We had a very nice cab driver yesterday who was eager to practice his English on us.  It was good…he spoke in English, we replied in Indonesian.  He claimed to try to memorize two new vocab words every day.  Yesterday’s new words were "compliment" and "queueing."  This led to the following question: is "macho" a compliment?  We told him it was.

5.    We visited a great Indian buffet for lunch yesterday.  Of course, we were the only two people in the whole giant restaurant, and there were at least four waiters, in addition to hostesses, cooks, the owner, and a maitre d’.  For a mere $6.50 a person, we had all-you-can eat North Indian food.  We consider ourselves to be connoisseurs of Indian buffets in the United States, and we can say hands down that this was the best that we’ve ever had.  It was just far more spiced and flavorful than the comparatively bland stuff we’ve had at home.  Plus, in keeping with the overstaffing problem, they brought loads of unidentified bonus snacks right to our table.  Very cool.  On a funny sidenote, the brochures for the restaurant suffer from comically bad English: "Our food is served with ethnicity."  We think that they were describing the fact that the Indonesian waiters and waitresses pasted dots to their foreheads, just like authentic Indians.

6.    It actually does really rain a ton during the rainy season.

This is a saga of corruption, bureaucracy, and annoyances on a scale that we have never experienced before.  Before we begin, we must admit that we should shoulder some of the responsibility for these proceedings.  But not that much.  We mostly blame the system.

When I (TP) applied for my visa to visit Indonesia, I applied for a six month visa.  My funding source gave me enough money to cover six months in Indonesia, and so naturally I tried to set that up.  Applying for a visa itself has about a million steps, but essentially I had to get permission from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) to get approval for a visa, to be issued by the Indonesian Consulate in New York.  Somehow, LIPI screwed up.  I got permission for a five month visa.  Now, if you’ve ever tried to fight a bureaucracy that has made a mistake, you know how hard that is.  Try doing it in a foreign language, halfway across the world, with a 12-hour time difference.  Not happening.  We took the five months.

Then we find out that you don’t actually get a five month visa.  It’s either two, or six.  In effect, we got a two month visa with a three month extension, because we were only going to be here for five month.  If we had applied for six months, we would have gotten a six month visa.  Well, we did apply for six months, but that’s neither here nor there at this point.

When you arrive in Indonesia there is a process that you have to go through if you are not a tourist.  It involves reporting to LIPI, getting residence approval, reporting to immigration, reporting to the police, reporting to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, all sorts of bureaucratic goodness.  Luckily, we had help from AMINEF, the American-Indonesian Exchange Foundation, who provided us with a helper who knew the ropes and expedited the process.  We thought that the immigration stuff was taken care of, but apparently we were wrong.  We made a deal with the AMINEF folks to have them help us with the visa extension for mid-November (after our initial two months).  We even emailed them to remind them that our visa was running out.  But we heard nothing.  Knowing that we sometimes don’t know what’s going on, we didn’t do anything else.  This was our mistake.  The visas expired during the Idul Fitri holiday.

The AMINEF people called us on Monday to let us know that we might be invited to the US Embassy Thanksgiving party. (Didn’t happen.)  While on the phone, I mentioned that our visas expired.  The woman said, "Oh, go to LIPI and get it straightened out."  And so it began.  We took off the rest of the day to go to LIPI to get a letter requesting a visa extension.  After I left to go to a scheduled interview, they gave JM a hard time because she hadn’t applied for a six month visa.  She bit her tongue.  This process took an hour and a half for a single form letter that they produce all the time.  This does not count taxi times and the fact that we had to quit what we were doing for the day.

Tuesday, we took the letter to our local immigration office, and the real fun began.  This place was a nightmare.  People everywhere.  Passports everywhere.  Smells like a bar from the cigarette smoke and lack of air conditioning.  No signs.  Tons of officials sitting around in uniforms doing nothing.  We found a security guard who showed us where to buy our paperwork and get photocopies of our letter.  We filled them out, went upstairs, and handed them to the guy behind the window.  He proceeded to call me back into his cubicle and yell at me for overstaying our visas for six days.  "The office was closed for the entire week of Idul Fitri," I said.  "You should have come earlier," he said.  Well, OK. We had to pay a hefty fine, and we won’t make that mistake again.  Tellingly, the fine was denominated in US dollars.  How many rupiahs is that?  He didn’t know.  We had to go find the official lady with a newspaper and a calculator.  After 10 minutes and a bunch of tries with the calculator, she came up with a number.  We went and got the cash.  Then we went back to the first guy, who gave us our paperwork and bills.  Then we went back to the cashier to pay the regular fee, this time in rupiah.  Then we went back to the first guy again, who told us to come back the next day.  Then he changed his mind and told us to go downstairs with our paperwork, and present it to some lady.  She took it, did something to it, and told us to go back upstairs.  So we went back yet again to the first guy, who took our passports from us and told us to come back the next day.  This was somewhat frightening, but we had no choice.

So, Wednesday we went back to our friend behind the counter, who wasn’t there.  So we asked another lady and gave her our receipts.  She looked at them, looked through a drawer, didn’t see our passports, and then told us to come back the next day.  No way.  So we went back into the cubicle area and found a bunch of officials sitting around, and explained our situation.  They claimed that the person who was supposed to sign our paperwork had DIED overnight, and so our paperwork wasn’t ready.  Does this sound like a plausible excuse to you?  Neither did it to us.  So we finally called AMINEF and found the enforcer, an Indonesian woman who is tough as nails and likes to pretend that she is from the American Embassy when talking to officials on our behalf.  After not believing me–the story sounded too ridiculous–she insisted on talking to some officials there.  My phone got handed around as the yelled at several low-level bureaucrats.  Finally, she told me that yes, we would have to come back the next day.

We were about to leave when one of the officials yelled at us and said, "Wait!  Be patient!"  And twenty-five minutes later, our passports emerged.  Of course, this was not quite it.  We had to go around the corner and pay a lady to photocopy everything again, then bring our stuff back and sign out our passports.  But we had them.  Whew.  Of course, then we looked at the dates.  We thought we were getting a three month extension.  No, they don’t have those, but they do have three one-month extensions.  And instead of an actual 30 day extension, we got a 29 day extension, and have to show up before the 29th day to extend them, but of course that’s on a Saturday, so we have to show up the day before that.  It’s a 27 day extension.  And we have two more to go before we leave for Malaysia.  And if they keep pushing the length back one day at a time, we won’t be able to make it to the date of our carefully-calculated plane ticket.

But the joke’s on them, because we’re telling the story in a sarcastic manner on our blog.  Right.

(Lest you think that we are the only ones experiencing such problems, we are not.  Our friends’ experiences getting driver’s licenses reveal that Indonesians themselves have the same sorts of problems.)