| HOME Doggy Style Archive On the Road Holidays Doggy Style Blog Novel |
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Part
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When I got here the exchange rate was 8500 rupiahs to the dollar. It’s great. For about $117 you can be a millionaire. And do it without having to watch Regis smirk or point. |
My first week here was spent getting acclimated. Since I’m
going to be here for a while I don’t have to run myself ragged
like a typical tourist, wondering if things are really that
different and odd or whether it’s the jet lag. I suspect that’s
why people take more photographs at the beginning of a trip—they
know they won’t remember any of it. If there’s one compelling
reason we should be spending less money on the space program and
more on time travel it’s because it would let us leapfrog over the
time zones rather than wander through them, putting an end to jet
lag. I think. I’m waiting for Stephen Hawking to get back to me on
this before notifying the Nobel committee.
Traffic here is incredible. The roads are narrow, the potholes are the size of Rhode Island, and there’s only one traffic regulation: drive on the left. Okay, so it’s a suggestion and not a law. Picture Brownian Motion with motorbikes playing the part of the molecules. The drivers wear helmets during the day but not at night when the police can’t see them. Not that it matters since most of them wear baseball batting helmets. Barry Bonds would feel right at home here except that instead of chewing tobacco they chew betel nuts, which may go a long way towards explaining the traffic patterns.
I had the hardest time
getting used to the money. It’s always tricky adjusting to a new
currency—you spend the first few days, at least, carefully
examining each coin and bill while trying to figure out which is
worth five whatever-they-use, but this is different. When I got here
the exchange rate was 8500 rupiahs to the dollar. It’s great. For
about $117 you can be a millionaire. And do it without having to
watch Regis smirk or point. Of course you don’t get to use a
lifeline when you’re standing at the ATM trying to decide how many
rupiah you want, but you can’t have everything. |
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One thing I’ve learned to do is raise my eyebrows to say “Hi” instead of waving. That’s how they do it here. I’m getting used to it but I still feel like Groucho Marx. |
Obviously nothing costs a rupiah. In fact the smallest coin
or bill I know of is 100 rupiah, which makes me wonder why they
don’t just chop a few zeros off the money and make life easier. I
went into immediate zero overload. I couldn’t tell a 1000 rupiah
note from a 10000 rupiah note from a 100000 rupiah note. It
doesn’t help that they don’t use commas on Indonesian money. I
was told to tell the bills apart by color but most of the money is
so worn you couldn’t tell what color it is if your sate depended
on it.
To make things worse, if a store doesn’t have small change they give you a piece of candy instead. Sure, it tastes better than the bills, but if I wanted candy I’d buy some. Besides, they don’t give you a choice of flavors. I need to pay closer attention because the coffee ones might be 25 rupiah, vanilla 50 rupiah, and that odd-tasting tropical something-or-other is their way of saying “Don’t come back until you have small bills.” But I have a plan. I’m not going to eat my candy change. I’m going to save them and pay for my next grocery purchase with them, though something tells me that if I do they’ll give me my change in grains of rice. I’m going to suggest to the government that they do away with money altogether and switch to candy currency. The bigger the candy the more it’s worth. I’m sure I can get the Nestle lobby to rally behind me on this.
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Just to be safe I gave the guys 20,000 rupiahs, or about $2.35. They pursed their lips and shook their heads sadly as if to say, “Baby needs a new sarong, you know?” But they were cool. |
I was sitting on the veranda the other day when two guys pull
up on a motorbike. They were neat, clean, and polite. They walked up
to me, introduced themselves, and started pulling out
semi-official-looking laminated documents. In Indonesian, of course.
I admired the nice lamination job, which of course made it appear as
if I was studying the documents. The papers looked suspiciously like
an Internet joke someone had forwarded to me a couple of days before
but I couldn’t be sure since there weren’t any >’s in front
of each line.
Their English was just good enough to get across that they were soliciting donations to fight narcotics. Or maybe they wanted to buy some, I can’t be sure. I shook my head “no” and they looked at me sadly like, “That’s a mistake.” I figured if they actually were real, it would be a mistake. And if they weren’t, well, it still could be. They handed me some receipts showing that other people had given 50,000 rupiahs and 70,000 rupiahs and I’m pretty certain it was their handwriting but how could I be sure? After all, the previous day’s International Herald Tribune (motto: “Some of the news a few days later”) said Indonesia is still high up on the list of corrupt countries, close behind Nigeria, Yugoslavia, and New Jersey. Okay, so New Jersey isn’t technically a country, I still say anyplace where they speak a strange language and wear really weird hairstyles is foreign. Just to be safe I gave the guys 20,000 rupiahs, or about $2.35. They pursed their lips and shook their heads sadly as if to say, “Baby needs a new sarong, you know?” But they were cool. They politely shook my hand, got on their motorbike, then drove down the road, making a note to come back often, I’m sure. A minute later they passed me as they headed out to the main road. Why they didn’t stop at the other houses on the road is beyond me. Okay, so it isn’t. Is it my fault I was the only white guy sitting on his porch with a flashing neon arrow over his head that said “Sucker”? As I watched them vanish down the dirt road through the rice fields I sat back in my chair and smiled. Now that the Welcome Wagon had stopped by to visit I could move onto the next phase: playing tourist.
©2000 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. . |
The exhaust fumes will
choke you in Ubud so it’s always wonderful to turn off the main
road and walk into the rice paddies towards the cottage. Suddenly
the air is fresh, clean, and humid, with only occasional whiffs of
smoke. Smoke, you see, is common in Bali since people burn their
trash in front of the house, burn the rice fields after the harvest,
and burn their dead, but more about that later. Bali is a
pyromaniac’s paradise.
All this is a problem not
just because you don’t want to throw money away, but because no
one wants the 100000 rupiah notes. The banks and ATMs give them to
you, the shopkeepers refuse to take them. Hell, they don’t usually
want to take a 50000 rupiah note. Thus you end up hording small
bills and breaking large ones whenever you can. And you find
yourself walking around with a huge wad of money getting very tired
of the traditional Balinese greeting of “Is that a dollar fifty in
your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”
One thing I’ve learned to
do is raise my eyebrows to say “Hi” instead of waving. That’s
how they do it here. I’m getting used to it but I still feel like
Groucho Marx as I walk down the street lifting my eyebrows at
people. If I come back to the states walking in a crouch, smoking a
cigar, and raising my eyebrows at everyone don’t be alarmed, just
try to cast me in a remake of Duck Soup. Or maybe a Vlasic
pickles commercial. I especially feel strange doing this when I
greet a woman because it feels like I’m leering. Okay, so I am.
But they don’t need to know that.|
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