Beirut, Lebanon
So, we’re in Beirut.
I was going to write about Jakarta and then we were going to have a week to hang out in Java and wait for our flights to Beirut, but we were getting tired of Indonesia and we didn’t have anywhere particular in mind to spend that week, but it was clear we didn’t want to stay in Jakarta any longer, so we changed our flight and now we’re in Beirut.
Beirut is amazing. Parts of this town are so beautiful it would knock your socks off, and other parts of this town are so broken and ugly it would knock your socks back on again. More than 15 years after the civil war ended, parts of the city are still in ruin. There are at least two ruins that are more than twenty stories tall still hanging in there on the horizon, full of bullet pocks and bomb holes. Other parts of downtown, though, have been completely and beautifully reconstructed, and there are dozens of construction projects busily building the new Beirut.
Beirut is a very European city. People here dress like Parisians, except that most of them have bigger noses than most Parisians. The architecture is European with a few Arabic flourishes, and most of the population speak Arabic most of the time, except that they say merci, when they want to say thanks instead of saying it in Arabic.
I haven’t learned to say thank you in Arabic yet — I’ve been too busy saying merci. I did learn to count to ten in Arabic on our flight over here, though. The plane had TV screens with movies and video games on demand, and one of the video games was a Berlitz language game that could teach the speakers of any of thirty different languages how to say fifty or so words in any one of twenty-nine other languages, so I learned how to count to ten in Arabic. The flight attendants must have thought I was Erin’s pet mental defective, sitting there, ordering free cheap scotch and counting to ten in their native language under my breath over and over again.
Counting to ten in Arabic is hard. I swear I’ve learned to count to ten in at least a dozen languages over the years, including Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Mongolian, Mandarin, Thai/Lao, Malaysian/Indonesian and now Arabic. (I’ve never been to Japan, but I took a judo class when I was 8 or 9.) Oddly, I am incapable of having a conversation in any language other than English. I am a genius at memorizing a few superficial words and questions in other languages, but I am an utter moron when it comes to actual fluency.
We’re staying in a hotel across the street from the American University of Beirut, which has had that name since 1920. The neighbourhood is full of students, and consequently, kebab-sellers. Nearby is a high street where Parisian-dressed locals clop up and down the street in their high heels and shop for clothes. That’s where Erin and I went clothes shopping. Winter in the middle east isn’t the same as it is in equatorial Indonesia, and we don’t have anywhere near enough socks or pants to hang out here for long without starting to stink.
So, I’m sure that many of you have been watching the news and getting the impression that the whole region is about to go up in hellfire. We arrived in Beirut just before midnight, and when we woke up in the morning, the first thing the man on the tee-vee said is that some pack of morons in south Lebanon launched some rockets into Israel. This is the kind of thing I was worried about happening, but I’m finding it hard to be scared here. The locals just keep shopping and going to school and dressing like Parisians, and none of them seem to be worried about a thing.
I’ve talked to a few of the people about the security situation, and their finely-tuned understanding of the politics of the region tells them not to be worried about a thing. The rocket attacks weren’t officially Hezbollah-sanctioned and the Israelis know that. So far, the news has borne out their analysis. It’s difficult for me to quiver and cower when I’m surrounded by happy college kids and businessmen in suits and mothers with children, all of them going about their daily business. What makes me so much more fragile than these people, that I have to run and hide while they go on working and saving and shopping and building?
We are going to leave Lebanon soon, though. There’s no point in keeping all of our loved ones in nervous suspense, wondering if Erin and I (of the millions of people in the country) are going to be the first two in Lebanon to get bombed by Israelis.
TV news makes the world a scary place. Actually being in the world isn’t very scary at all. I can’t wait until TV news start covering traffic deaths — nobody would ever get in a car again. More than 2000 Canadians die on the road every year! Kinda makes being scared of war seem silly — Canadians haven't died at that rate in a war since the 1950s.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Indonesia on the Street
Jogjakarta, Java, Indonesia
Erin and I have just arrived in Jogjakarta and are staying in an actual hotel room, not on the street. Thank you, thank you, we do deserve your applause. The Indonesian Christmas/New Year’s rush is abating and things are returning to normal — meaning that we can now drift around without ever making plans or thinking anything out more than a day in advance, and find all the facilities we need available to us. We even were able to get train tickets to Jakarta today, not on economy class, nor even on business class, but on a prestigious air-conditioned express Executive Class train.
In the last couple of days, Erin and I visited 1100+ year-old temples at Prambanan:
And Borobudur:
There isn’t much to say about those places that these photos won’t render inadequate. We had a sober New Year’s Eve in Borobudur in a hotel full of sober Muslims who were partying in that special, desperate way that sober people have of partying. We were equally sober, but at least we had the good sense to sleep and not to try to dance sober.
I actually have no idea if any of the sober people danced; we were in bed before 10:00 because we were getting up at 5:30.
That night in Borobudur brought us through our New Year’s exile and the next day we were able to come back into the city. Jogjakarta is a fantastic city, and we’re both happy to have a couple of days to just hang out here and enjoy the streets. (As I sit here typing, Erin is also writing a post on her web-log at www.erinmillar.ca about Indonesian streets — it’s nowhere near as good as the post you're currently reading, but it’s probably still not bad. Feel free to check it out.)
Many of you know that I’m a bit of a nut for city planning. I won’t harp on the subject for too long, because I know how my planning conversations with my brother can bore all bystanders until their tongues hang out and their eyes roll back in their heads. I’m going to take three paragraphs to talk about it, and then I promise I’ll go back to talking about Indonesia like a normal human being.
In the past week I’ve seen a very instructive contrast between Solo and Jogjakarta, which to my mind fully vindicate Vancouver’s downtown streetscape policies (which conform to the ideas of new urbanism).
Many of Solo’s streets are too wide, have buildings set back too far from the streets, have blank walls facing the street far too often, and have huge spaces between the access points at different buildings and complexes. The result was that many of Solo’s streets were dead and boring as all hell. If it wasn’t for all of the cart-borne vendors filling in the spaces, even the main streets would have had tumbleweeds blowing down them.
Jogjakarta’s streets, on the other hand, are a chaotic riot of beautiful, vibrant urban life. I’m sure there was very little planning involved in making the streets like this; the city began with a solid framework of streets of varying width, most of them narrow, and frequent enough that there are few large blocks. Then a developing-world entrepreneurial class with little regard for the needs of vehicular traffic was unleashed on it and allowed to fill it in at whatever densities the local non-car-owning population considered economical. The streets contain no dead space; they are densely populated, and they contain hundreds small of small businesses in narrow shop fronts and hundreds more smaller businesses run out of carts and rolling down the street on the backs of bikes.
Okay, I’m done blathering.
Erin and I spent a good couple of hours wandering around today, first through the streets and back lanes of Sosrowijayan (some of which are less than 2 meters wide) and then down Jalan Malioboro, Jogjakarta’s main shopping street. Between the intense riot of activity and interactions with the friendly locals, we had a thoroughly entertaining time. Sure, the locals are often friendly because they’re trying to sell you something and they’re not always up-front about what it is they’re selling, but they’re good sports and they can usually take no for an answer.
Jalan Malioboro is one of the best streets I’ve ever been on in my life, although it’s fairly useless as a transportation artery. The west side of the street is a wall of narrow shop fronts, mostly containing small businesses retailing all of the bricabrac and whathaveyou of everyday Indonesian life. Immediately to the east of the shop fronts is a narrow channel of pedestrian traffic, crammed with people shopping and walking, but not getting anywhere particularly quickly. To the east of them, occupying a great deal of sidewalk space that the pedestrians would love to be using, are small merchants selling more bricabrac and whathaveyou from tables.
I bought a belt from one sidewalk vendor for $4.00, marked down from $8.50, because I’m a foreigner (yeah, right). He then tried to convince us to visit his family’s marionette manufactory just to look, not to buy.
To the east of the tables is a lane of traffic, choked with becaks (bicycle taxis), horse-drawn carriages, the odd motorcycle and the few braver pedestrians who actually want to get somewhere. Separated from this flow of traffic by a narrow median is the one-way two-lane main road for petroleum-powered vehicles, most of which aren’t going anywhere particularly quickly. I’m not sure what was to the east of that; it was hard to see. It’s fair to guess that in most places it was a mirror image of what is on the west side of the road. For at least part of the road, a relatively pedestrian-accessable shopping mall stretched down the west side, but Jalan Malioboro carried vibrantly along in spite of it. It’s too strong a street to be ruined by one shopping mall.
There are no parking lots for cars on Jalan Malioboro. I can’t remember seeing anywhere whatsoever to park a car. The street does fine anyway.
As far as I can tell, the two best things you can do in an Indonesian street are to ride in a becak, and to eat bakso, but never at the same time. You can get a becak ride clear across Jogjakarta for about $2.00 if you speak 50 words of Indonesian like I do, and if you have exactly my level of stubbornness. I’m sure that more persistent tourists are able to get it for half the price I can, and I’m even surer that the locals are paying a quarter of what I pay.
Even at $2.00, it’s good entertainment value for money. Becak seats are always slightly too narrow to fit both mine and Erin’s asses comfortably; we are wide-assed people. I’ve seen as many as four Indonesians share one, but only when at least one of them is a child and another is a particularly skinny teen, and the four have no boundaries of personal space between one another. If you can cram yourselves into one, the discomfort is worth the ride.
Becaks move through the city at a leisurely pace, but they are considerably quicker than walking, even when the man pedaling the becak weighs a third as much as his cargo, as is always the case when Erin and I are riding. This is largely because becaks have their own rules of the road and don’t have to wait to cross streets like pedestrians do. Becak drivers have a firm belief that they have the right of way over absolutely everyone else, regardless of the color of the traffic lights. Other drivers may not agree with this belief, but Indonesians drivers are reluctant to murder the 1 to 5 people riding in each becak, so the question is resolved by fiat in the becak drivers’ favour.
There is no better way to see an Indonesian city than in a becak. They move slowly enough that you can see all the details, but quickly enough that you will eventually get to where you’re going. More importantly, you don’t have to constantly watch for who might run you over, like you do when walking; you can just sit back and take in the scenery and trust the becak driver and whatever divine beings you believe in to worry about the traffic.
Bakso is another Indonesian urban delight that takes a fair amount of faith to enjoy. The moving or semi-stationary carts that sell the stuff have no running water, leaving it an open question as to how they cleaned your bowl and silverware after the last diner. It’s well worth your while to put your trust in your divine beings and your immune system and dig in, though.
Bakso is assembled before your eyes out of yellow noodles, pieces of pre-fried tofu, balls of daging sapi (cow meat), and broth ladled out of the cart’s broth bucket. You then add crushed chilis to taste. A healthy portion of bakso (i.e. one small enough that it can’t overwhelm your immune system) will run you about sixty cents. If you have a bowl for lunch, you’ll be fucking starving by the time six o’clock rolls around, as I am now.
So I’m going to go get supper. I end this web-log post with my remaining bakso photos, accompanied by five minutes of whale song.
(Please imagine five minutes of whale song while looking at the following photos.)
Erin and I have just arrived in Jogjakarta and are staying in an actual hotel room, not on the street. Thank you, thank you, we do deserve your applause. The Indonesian Christmas/New Year’s rush is abating and things are returning to normal — meaning that we can now drift around without ever making plans or thinking anything out more than a day in advance, and find all the facilities we need available to us. We even were able to get train tickets to Jakarta today, not on economy class, nor even on business class, but on a prestigious air-conditioned express Executive Class train.
In the last couple of days, Erin and I visited 1100+ year-old temples at Prambanan:
And Borobudur:
There isn’t much to say about those places that these photos won’t render inadequate. We had a sober New Year’s Eve in Borobudur in a hotel full of sober Muslims who were partying in that special, desperate way that sober people have of partying. We were equally sober, but at least we had the good sense to sleep and not to try to dance sober.
I actually have no idea if any of the sober people danced; we were in bed before 10:00 because we were getting up at 5:30.
That night in Borobudur brought us through our New Year’s exile and the next day we were able to come back into the city. Jogjakarta is a fantastic city, and we’re both happy to have a couple of days to just hang out here and enjoy the streets. (As I sit here typing, Erin is also writing a post on her web-log at www.erinmillar.ca about Indonesian streets — it’s nowhere near as good as the post you're currently reading, but it’s probably still not bad. Feel free to check it out.)
Many of you know that I’m a bit of a nut for city planning. I won’t harp on the subject for too long, because I know how my planning conversations with my brother can bore all bystanders until their tongues hang out and their eyes roll back in their heads. I’m going to take three paragraphs to talk about it, and then I promise I’ll go back to talking about Indonesia like a normal human being.
In the past week I’ve seen a very instructive contrast between Solo and Jogjakarta, which to my mind fully vindicate Vancouver’s downtown streetscape policies (which conform to the ideas of new urbanism).
Many of Solo’s streets are too wide, have buildings set back too far from the streets, have blank walls facing the street far too often, and have huge spaces between the access points at different buildings and complexes. The result was that many of Solo’s streets were dead and boring as all hell. If it wasn’t for all of the cart-borne vendors filling in the spaces, even the main streets would have had tumbleweeds blowing down them.
Jogjakarta’s streets, on the other hand, are a chaotic riot of beautiful, vibrant urban life. I’m sure there was very little planning involved in making the streets like this; the city began with a solid framework of streets of varying width, most of them narrow, and frequent enough that there are few large blocks. Then a developing-world entrepreneurial class with little regard for the needs of vehicular traffic was unleashed on it and allowed to fill it in at whatever densities the local non-car-owning population considered economical. The streets contain no dead space; they are densely populated, and they contain hundreds small of small businesses in narrow shop fronts and hundreds more smaller businesses run out of carts and rolling down the street on the backs of bikes.
Okay, I’m done blathering.
Erin and I spent a good couple of hours wandering around today, first through the streets and back lanes of Sosrowijayan (some of which are less than 2 meters wide) and then down Jalan Malioboro, Jogjakarta’s main shopping street. Between the intense riot of activity and interactions with the friendly locals, we had a thoroughly entertaining time. Sure, the locals are often friendly because they’re trying to sell you something and they’re not always up-front about what it is they’re selling, but they’re good sports and they can usually take no for an answer.
Jalan Malioboro is one of the best streets I’ve ever been on in my life, although it’s fairly useless as a transportation artery. The west side of the street is a wall of narrow shop fronts, mostly containing small businesses retailing all of the bricabrac and whathaveyou of everyday Indonesian life. Immediately to the east of the shop fronts is a narrow channel of pedestrian traffic, crammed with people shopping and walking, but not getting anywhere particularly quickly. To the east of them, occupying a great deal of sidewalk space that the pedestrians would love to be using, are small merchants selling more bricabrac and whathaveyou from tables.
I bought a belt from one sidewalk vendor for $4.00, marked down from $8.50, because I’m a foreigner (yeah, right). He then tried to convince us to visit his family’s marionette manufactory just to look, not to buy.
To the east of the tables is a lane of traffic, choked with becaks (bicycle taxis), horse-drawn carriages, the odd motorcycle and the few braver pedestrians who actually want to get somewhere. Separated from this flow of traffic by a narrow median is the one-way two-lane main road for petroleum-powered vehicles, most of which aren’t going anywhere particularly quickly. I’m not sure what was to the east of that; it was hard to see. It’s fair to guess that in most places it was a mirror image of what is on the west side of the road. For at least part of the road, a relatively pedestrian-accessable shopping mall stretched down the west side, but Jalan Malioboro carried vibrantly along in spite of it. It’s too strong a street to be ruined by one shopping mall.
There are no parking lots for cars on Jalan Malioboro. I can’t remember seeing anywhere whatsoever to park a car. The street does fine anyway.
As far as I can tell, the two best things you can do in an Indonesian street are to ride in a becak, and to eat bakso, but never at the same time. You can get a becak ride clear across Jogjakarta for about $2.00 if you speak 50 words of Indonesian like I do, and if you have exactly my level of stubbornness. I’m sure that more persistent tourists are able to get it for half the price I can, and I’m even surer that the locals are paying a quarter of what I pay.
Even at $2.00, it’s good entertainment value for money. Becak seats are always slightly too narrow to fit both mine and Erin’s asses comfortably; we are wide-assed people. I’ve seen as many as four Indonesians share one, but only when at least one of them is a child and another is a particularly skinny teen, and the four have no boundaries of personal space between one another. If you can cram yourselves into one, the discomfort is worth the ride.
Becaks move through the city at a leisurely pace, but they are considerably quicker than walking, even when the man pedaling the becak weighs a third as much as his cargo, as is always the case when Erin and I are riding. This is largely because becaks have their own rules of the road and don’t have to wait to cross streets like pedestrians do. Becak drivers have a firm belief that they have the right of way over absolutely everyone else, regardless of the color of the traffic lights. Other drivers may not agree with this belief, but Indonesians drivers are reluctant to murder the 1 to 5 people riding in each becak, so the question is resolved by fiat in the becak drivers’ favour.
There is no better way to see an Indonesian city than in a becak. They move slowly enough that you can see all the details, but quickly enough that you will eventually get to where you’re going. More importantly, you don’t have to constantly watch for who might run you over, like you do when walking; you can just sit back and take in the scenery and trust the becak driver and whatever divine beings you believe in to worry about the traffic.
Bakso is another Indonesian urban delight that takes a fair amount of faith to enjoy. The moving or semi-stationary carts that sell the stuff have no running water, leaving it an open question as to how they cleaned your bowl and silverware after the last diner. It’s well worth your while to put your trust in your divine beings and your immune system and dig in, though.
Bakso is assembled before your eyes out of yellow noodles, pieces of pre-fried tofu, balls of daging sapi (cow meat), and broth ladled out of the cart’s broth bucket. You then add crushed chilis to taste. A healthy portion of bakso (i.e. one small enough that it can’t overwhelm your immune system) will run you about sixty cents. If you have a bowl for lunch, you’ll be fucking starving by the time six o’clock rolls around, as I am now.
So I’m going to go get supper. I end this web-log post with my remaining bakso photos, accompanied by five minutes of whale song.
(Please imagine five minutes of whale song while looking at the following photos.)
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