Java Wedding

I’ve been back from the West Java wedding for a few weeks now and I’m still trying to digest the experience. It was blur of transport on crowded roads, disappointingly mild tasting durian, ant infested rambutan, lost passports, fried foods, dimly lit markets, kreteck cigarettes, alternating bouts of boredom and the excitement of trying to find something not boring to pass the time, bintang beer, returned passports, Cuban rum, American Whisky, wedding singers, hello misterrrrr, batik shirts, head scarves, Javanese dancers, broken English, confusion and broken bahasa Indonesia.

The transport from Jakarta to Cianjur was unexpectedly easy. It seemed that hiring a car and driver for 550,000rp would be unimaginable for locals but split between the 3 of us it seemed quite reasonably-especially since the alterative was a 5-6 hour bus ride. The road from Jakarta to Cianjur passes though some pretty sharp hills and very quickly we were in some of the thickest fog/mist I’ve seen in a while and I was actually cold for the first time since being in Asia (outside of aircon). The hills were covered in tea plantations.

Cianjur is boring…I think more so if you’re white and non-Muslim. Maybe it’s a blast if you’re an Islamic fundamentalist but somehow I still doubt that. We definitely didn’t blend in and I don’t think we saw any other buleh from the time of leaving Jakarta until returning but the locals really didn’t seem to notice or care we were there. Back in Jakarta I felt like we got more looks and stares. One of the ways we passed the time was walking around the town and through some of the markets… typical wet markets with fruits, vegetables and meats all out in the heat together but these markets had a few firsts for me as well. 1) fresh fish- held in a small tray with about 3 inches of recirculating water so the could stay alive but not really swim anywhere 2) small arms- hand guns and rifles right there next to the chili padi and butchered chicken, most guns looked pretty old 3)some guy peeing into a plastic bottle- I have no idea why and don’t want to even venture a guess as to why.

Cianjur has a Hypermart and believe me this is a big deal - a modern supermarket and assorted goods store where we found beer which became the other way to we passed the evenings. Since no bars were to be found in the town we sat on our room porches with several beers and the duty free liquor we brought though from Singapore.

The wedding was Sunday morning, early. 9am early. But actually since Indonesian rubber time was in effect it got started more like 9:30am. It was in a smaller village about half hours ride out of Cianjur at the bride’s family compound. It began when the officials from the mosque arrived, sat down in the living room and started the ceremony. I didn’t know what to expect since this was my first Muslim wedding but it seemed like a simple ceremony. Most in bahasa Indonesia but some key points read by the groom in English: “promise to provide for you… blah blah… if I sometimes leave you for 3 years or more or if I beat you or if I don’t talk to you or ignore you for more than 2 months you can go complain to the council and I will pay you 10,000rp (1USD) per day blah blah”… just the standard wedding stuff. And that was it. Everyone stands up, greets the new couple and has some food. The entertainment was out I the courtyard- traditional musical troupe, singers and dancers. As the only buleh there we very interesting to the entertainment who were looking to maybe get some fresh talent up on stage. Through the broken English we heard mosty consisting of things like “Misterrrr, dancing” and “buleh, hahahaha” I knew they wanted us to come up on stage to dance and I could feel a consensus growing to force up onto the stage. Finally, someone that spoke English went up on stage and started working the crowd up in bahasa Indonesia, getting them to cheer us on stage. Then he would switch to English for our 'benifit' not wanting to exclude us. … It was only done in English to eliminate our excuses of not understanding the request since we found one like 2 other people there that spoke English. So we went on stage. And they cheered and they laughed. And we danced with the Javanese dancers who were pretty hot. And we danced and they danced better. Then we danced more Javanese dance and we did it as poorly as the crowd expected (or hoped) and we did not disappoint there expectations at all … and man that band played the longest song and it seemed like we were up there for like 7 minutes. A simple 2 minute song would be fine to give everyone a good laugh. At least the kids laughed. I think the older ones hated us. But we gave them what the wanted and it ended up being kind of fun. Things didn’t seem like they could get much better for us after that so we took off shortly afterwards. The rest of the day consisted of walking around Cianjur, eating diner at a food stall, and tying to find something to do. It ended with us just sitting on the porches again.

The last day we went back to Jakarta to meet up with one of our friend’s friend who had moved there a while ago. Jakarta is huge. 15+ million people and the whole city is basically sprawl with limited infrastructure so traffic gets horrible. There are some very moderns area, buildings and malls but literally block away it drops off into slums. I bought a nice new batik shirt.

I'll add in the pictures later...