Mandis and More
Since today is the only day of the week most people have off from work and school, the streets stayed pretty quiet until around 7:30 am. I woke up at nine to experiment with my mandi—the Indonesian version of the shower. There is no showerhead, only a faucet with a square basin underneath it. It isn’t a bathtub, just a container for the water from the faucet. When you mandi, you dump buckets of the water over your head onto the floor and then it flows down into a drain in the corner of the bathroom. I got down onto my knees and investigated the slope of the floor, but I still don’t really understand how all of the water flows to the right corner of the room—it looks pretty flat to me. The floor dries about 20 minutes after you’ve “showered.” The water isn’t freezing cold, but it’s not room-temperature either—it’s somewhere in between. It was vaguely refreshing this morning, but I doubt tomorrow morning at 5 am when I get up for school I’ll be quite so enamored of dousing my whole body with buckets of cold water.
Johanna, the Fulbright English Teaching Fellow stationed in Malang, invited Layne and I to her house today to meet some of her friends. The ETFs work at universities around Indonesia instructing English teachers and improving the TOEFL scores and speaking skills of students in the universities. Johanna’s house was pretty far away from mine, and her friend couldn’t find my road to come get me. Thirty minutes and no cab either, I walked out to the main road to try and find some way to the other side of town. One of the blue public transport vans, or microlets, started motioning frantically at me and pulled over, so I hopped into that. Turns out I was on the wrong one to get to Johanna’s neighborhood, but they transferred me to the correct one. The vans have open back and side doors, and there are benches around the inside. About ten people can fit on them, but at one point a woman got on and basically just sat on my lap because there were no other seats. I finally reached Istana Gajayana and for the entire half hour trip the flat rate was Rp 2,000, or 25 cents. Apparently these little vans go over all Malang and up to the mountain towns for that much.
Johanna’s friend Pak Abib and his wife wanted to take us to Batu, a mountain town, so we could buy fresh flowers. We made our way up the side of the mountain in an SUV (a majority of people here drive the largest cars possible), passing more flower stands than I’ve ever seen. Batu is the town right after Malang, halfway up one of the mountains. We bought potted flowers and hanging plants, and for some reason Layne also bought a cactus to put in her house haha. For about $9 I bought two red, tall flower plants to put by my front door, a plant vaguely reminiscent of a poinsettia, and a hanging pot of beautiful purple flowers. I brought those to my neighbors when I got home to thank them for helping me set up my house.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home