A feathered visitor

"There's a bird on the second floor, did you hear?" says Ari, our landlord. We are very spoiled, because Ari speaks excellent English.

"No, what kind?" I say, expecting a sparrow or a pigeon.

"It eats mice. You know. It says hoo, hoo."

"An OWL? There are owls in Jakarta? How can an owl live in Jakarta? We want an owl!" I blurbled.

Ari took me down to the parking area under the building. We climbed up onto the back wall. Sure enough, craning my neck, I could see an owl tucked up under the roof of the balcony, dozing.

"Do you think we could train him to eat ants?" I asked. An owl could raise a large extended family on ants in our apartment.

Ari shook his head. "I called the zoo to come get him."

But the zoo never arrived. Our avian guest departed sometime toward evening. I'm thinking of putting some plastic mice on the balcony, just in case he comes around again.

Perhaps my famous bird-artist brother John, who's in The New Yorker Magazine this week, would care to make a long (very long) distance ID? Based on my almost useless photo?

How to bathe

This is a mandi, the traditional Indonesian way to get clean. It's based on the even more traditional Indonesian way to get clean - bathing in the river.

A mandi has a tap at the top, and a plug at the bottom so you can drain it when necessary. You usually leave it half-full so the water is at room temperature. You use the scoop to pour water all over yourself, then you soap up, and then you scoop some more water to rinse off. There's a drain in the bathroom floor so you can fling the water around with abandon.

As I understand it, it's considered good form to leave the scoop sitting on the edge of the mandi rather than floating in the mandi. It's definitely bad form to climb into the mandi! One hears stories of confused foreigners trying the immersion method, but I've never met anyone who confessed to actually doing it themselves.

Mandis are kind of nice, because you can just step in for a quick rinse. That's what I do after walking to work (this is actually the one at the Post). They do make the floor wet, though, so it's inadvisable to walk into any bathroom with just your socks on.

Mary Krueger is a smart cookie

My friend Mary is graduating from law school in New Hampshire this weekend. She got a full public-interest scholarship because she's not only smart, she's got her heart in the right place. Now she is going to go out and do the impossible every day: she's going to make NH's state and local governments provide the social services they're legally obligated to provide.

She's also going to ski really well, because that's what she does. But that's beside the point.

Congratulations Mary!!! Go get 'em!

OK, we now return to our regularly scheduled Jakarta blog.

Wardrobe enhancement

It's been a momentous week: I finally acquired a second pair of pants!

I had worn my pair of basic black Old Navies for 67 straight days.* I had to conserve on clothes when I packed so I could bring 53,000 audio/video cables of every description that I'll probably never need. Say what you want about Old Navy, including that they have really annoying commercials, but those pants wore like iron (and are still going strong).

I had to take my new pants to a tailor to be shortened. This guy has a little shop in the Palmerah marketplace, right by work. He whipped out the tape measure, started cutting, and was done in 15 minutes, for the massive sum of 65 cents. Plus he put up with my bad Indonesian and let me take his picture. Now that's a deal.

I'm gonna get my next pair of pants, someday, from one of the bicycling jeans guys. They ride around on bikes with sewing machines mounted on them, and a little sign that says "Levi's." A moving copyright violation! They make them to order, which is the only way I'll ever get Levi's to fit my butt.

*Yes I've been washing them. Everything dries overnight here ....

More on rain, plus garbage!

It sounds like half the US is about to float away, but here in Jakarta we could use some rain. It's been muggy and cloudy for the last few days, and I feel like I'm walking around in Cambpell's Cream of Pollution Soup ("Now with Extra Grit!").

Whoever's burning this little pile of trash around the corner from our apartment isn't helping. The little kaki lima in the background is selling fruit (buah). Mmm! Garbage-smoked mangoes!

There seem to be two ways of dealing with garbage here. Well, three really. One is just to throw it wherever you like. The second is to put it in these little areas on the sidewalk delineated by low concrete walls. People seem to let the trash pile up till it's stinky, and then set it on fire. I'm not really sure if that's how it's supposed to work. Perhaps a more experienced Jakarta hand can explain?

The third option is garbage service. We pay $5 a month to have ours picked up. At least we assume it gets picked up ... otherwise someone is playing a trick on the gullible foreigners. But even garbage pickup is not a real solution. I just edited a little item in the Post that said the city of Bandung, about two hours from here, is literally drowning in trash. The dumps are full, so garbage is piling up on the streets and filling about a third of the central marketplace. One dump was closed in 2004 after a "garbage slide" killed more than a hundred people.

Most of the world is facing a garbage crisis, of course. It's just that here, the problems are more stark. Nobody has the time, resources, and organization to gloss over them. I don't know if that's better or worse. It's worse, of course, if you live on a garbage heap.

My seat of power

So here's a shot from just behind my desk at the Jakarta Post. My former colleagues in NH and Indiana will note that the Post is every bit as lush and well-appointed as your average public radio station. Those machines you see on our desks are on special loan from the Museum of Very Old Computers. We do get free tea and coffee, at least.

The job has worked out as I hoped - it's not too taxing, but not too dull. Basically we have a bunch of clipboards representing different sections of the paper - Leisure, National, City, etc. The editors log each story as it's finished, and then we copy editors claim and edit them.

Some stories are beautifully written. It's fun to tweak them to get their language to really flow. A few, on the other hand, are like wading through cement - especially some of the opinion pieces we get from government and NGO types. Usually in the second paragraph they'll say something like: "In order to fully comprehend this very important issue, we need to understand the past. So let us examine the history of Indonesia-Australia relations beginning in 1887."

"Oh, let's NOT," I beg silently, but unfortunately it isn't up to me. If the prose is really ponderous and bureaucratic, there's only so much I can do. I just break up the long, long sentences into shorter ones, and try to replace stuffy words like "comprise" and "utilize" with more human ones.

Occasionally we get some amusing sentences, like the one about the face cream with "an advanced ingredient that strongly appeases wrinkles." On the other hand, if I could write an article half as well in Indonesian as these guys do in English, I would be very impressed with myself.

My fellow copyeditors are a nice bunch and I'm sure some of them will become outside-of-work friends. Getting to know the Indonesian editors has been a slower process, but I'm hopeful it will happen in time.

An erupting story

Chad is back in Yogyakarta, covering the Merapi volcano. He's got a new blog devoted to the story. Drop by and have a look!

www.mountmerapi.blogspot.com