Little green men

These diminutive tubes of toothpaste are from the hovel -- er, hotel -- where we stayed in Taipei on our way back from the States. The fact that they were made by the Taipei Daily Chemical Company was a bit worrisome, but they seemed to be ordinary toothpaste.


And since Flavalicious Luscious Lychee hasn't been on the market for a while now, I've had to get used to ordinary toothpaste again.

Outback vs. Backcow

In Lima, Peru, the Outback Steakhouse lost its franchise after an unfortunate choking incident. The owners walked outside, pondered their storefront for a while, then changed the name to "Backcow" -- undoubtedly one of the finest restaurant names since Say Seng Pig's Organ Soup.

Unfortunately in Jakarta we just have a plain old Outback. It's in the Ratu Plaza electronics mall, so it's a convenient place to collapse with a Diet Coke when, in the words of the great Frank O'Hara, you have been practically going to sleep with quandariness while trying to figure out which gizmo you need for your computer.

Junk food of the week: I Will Follow snacks

These little crispy things often show up at the Please Sit Down store in our neighborhood. I think they're made by a local small business. These ones are labeled "WHERE YOU GO I WILL FOLLOW." Maybe the owner of the company is a U2 fan or even a Little Peggy March fan. Or maybe s/he's just a creepy, stalker-ish type.

Which reminds me of Sting, who once said he was disturbed to learn that people were playing his marvelously creepy stalker anthem "Every Breath You Take" at their weddings. I guess there's a thin line between love and craziness. Maybe thinner for some than others.


Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, I Will Follow snacks don't come close to the line. They're basically little bits of fried dough sprinkled with sugar. They were okay, but I wouldn't follow them wherever they went ... unless it was to a good chocolate shop or something.

"I had been betrayed"

In Surabaya I talked to an organization that does anti-trafficking work. They have offices in the city's many red-light districts, where they supply HIV testing and counseling, hand out condoms, and offer a sympathetic ear. Many of the people they serve are just kids. Out of the four current and former sex workers I talked to, three got into the business at age 13 or 14.

An anti-trafficking poster warns against being tricked by offers of easy work with big rewards

One 16-year old said, "My boyfriend cheated on me. We were about to get married, but then I found out that he was having an affair. He was having sex in the room when I got there. I should have slapped him in the face, but he slapped me instead. I wanted to slap the girl he was with, but she slapped me instead. So the next morning I ran away to Solo (a city in Central Java).

"I wanted to work as a maid in Solo. I asked the man who took me there, is there anyone who needs a domestic worker. The man said he did not want to hire me as a maid because I ‘had been with boys’. He offered me a job (as a sex worker) in a discotheque instead. So, I accepted the job because, what the heck ... I had been betrayed."

Prostitution is not just a matter of poverty, workers at the organization said; it's also closely connected with culture. In towns where girls marry young (age 12, for example), and areas where prostitution is seen as a valid career choice, young women are at high risk. If a girl gets divorced and is left to raise children on her own, or her father dies and there's no one to support the family, sex work is sometimes the only option she can see.

Flights of fancy

In the middle of my mud tour (see yesterday's post), the driver stopped at a town to pass on some kind of message to his nephew. While I was waiting for him, I wandered around the corner into an amazing scene.


It was a pigeon race, right on the edge of the disaster zone. Guys (it seems to be a male sport) were lined up with their birds, and they'd release them on cue. The pigeons had to fly five times back and forth between their handlers and the other end of the field. The fastest bird in this particular race would win a million rupiah, or more than a hundred dollars U.S. They were even videotaping the whole thing in case of close finishes.


The little black thing near the right edge, above, is a pigeon in flight.


"This pigeon won a car," said one guy. I protested that birds can't drive, and the owner told me he was happy to handle that part himself.

I knew pigeon racing was popular here, but I'd never actually seen it. The whoops of the handlers, the speed of the birds and the overall excitement were kind of intoxicating, especially in the middle of touring a bunch of ghost towns. "Java is an amazing place," I said to the driver when he came back, but I don't think he knew why.

Mud revisited

While I was in Surabaya, I went down to Sidoarjo and took an ojek tour of the mud disaster zone. It was interesting to see how the landscape has changed since April. It's like mud has become the full-time industry. There are pipes and machinery everywhere.

This goat was having a nice scratch, which reminded me of the time when a US Senator told me -- with a straight face -- that drilling for oil in Alaska benefited the local wildlife because "bears love walking on the pipelines."

The abandoned houses have been pretty well picked over for roof tiles. Now the bricks are going.

Things have dried up a bit, since it's the hot season. This guy was scavenging firewood from a dried-out village with a becak.

Some places are so deeply buried, there's only a kind of moonscape left.

I kept thinking of the Shakespeare line, "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." I don't know if they had sweet birds here before, but "bare" and "ruined" definitely fit the bill.

Irony's wastebasket

This was in my room at the dubious hotel near the airport where I spent my last night in Surabaya. The combination of its Chinglish slogan, its filthiness, and the fact that it was broken, all seemed somehow poetic .... or maybe I was just really tired.

I spent a few days researching different topics, including human trafficking, HIV prevention, and a return visit to the Sidoarjo mud disaster. More on those later.