Wonogiri Sukses!

I'm going to pass on writing about the rest of my airport excitement because I'm just too burnt out to even think about all of that. Let's just say my flight from Jakarta to Solo went smooth as butter and as I crossed the tarmac I could see my friends Mas Heri and his wife Mbak Leni waiting for me through the glass partition. What a relief to see familiar faces after two days of basically staying mute and anonymous. The three of us piled into Heri's new van, a Suzuki Super Carry 1.0 (almost as ubiquitous a car here as the Toyota Kijang) and drove from the airport to their house, with my eyes seared from their attempts to absorb all that passed by.

Scent is something that's all too often left out of a place's description and yet it's always been something that's really identified a location for me like a thumbprint. I can remember when I moved to Washington State, how Olympia smelled distinctly sweet like pipe tobacco, but blended in was the scent of a distant pulp mill. Chicago for me will always be wet alfalfa, and beloved S.F. of course... urine. Not unsurprisingly, Java smells completely different than any place I've ever been. There's always a scent of smoke in the air here and its flavor changes throughout the day as you travel around the island. While the neutral state is not unlike the scent of a dry sauna, the kind where you pour water over red hot rocks, the more condensed urban areas of course have a greater blend of car exhaust to them (emission standards are non existent here). But most of the time it's blended with burning wood, paper and plastic. The reason for all this smoke is not only because most people in the country still use wood burning cooking stoves, but because everyone, as far as I can tell, burns their garbage. All along the roadside you can see small smoldering fires, with wisps of smoke drifting through the trees and across the road. In the evening, around dusk, it's particularly haunting to watch.

My first day here, after getting settled in, mas Heri drove me through Solo on the back of his motorcycle. Though it seemed like a crazy thing to do at first, given the traffic here, I felt much safer on the back of a motorcycle than in the van (yes mom, I wore a helmet!) Motorcycles rule the streets here and you can make your way around slower vehicles much easier on them than in a car. Most of the streets here are about the width of an alley street, but with the traffic of a major urban arterial. If you get stuck behind a Bemo (bus) in a car, it can take forever before you can find an opportunity to pass them through the oncoming traffic. Meanwhile motorcycles will zip around you as you clutch your steering wheel in frustration. Our first stop was mas Heri's high school, which was a performance high school; which means that, though it offered much of the usual classes other high school students would take, its real focus was gamelan. Kind of like the high school in the movie Fame, but with gamelan. The first room we passed was filled with kendhang (drums), another with rebab (fiddle) and so on. We stopped in front of a room where students were practicing wayang kulit (shadow play): with one performing as the dhalang (pupeteer) and the others playing gamelan. After that we went to the college where mas Heri studied gamelan, STSI. Out front was a beautiful wooden pendopo with a couple of female students practicing dance. A pendopo is the traditional structure in the kraton (court) where, among other things, gamelan is performed. I'm not sure what the specific architectural terminology is, but the ceiling is vaulted on four sides, like a squat steeple. The building is open on all four sides as well and the gamelan resides along on edge. In the rafters above birds were roosting and flying in and out of the structure. I suppose it's much the same as with the kraton, which explains why the sound of chirping birds are always so audible in those classic gamelan recordings. There were three sets of gamelan left out there day and night and mas Heri tells me that the keys on the instruments are often stolen for their metal value.

The next day we drove out to the town of Wonogiri (about an hour and a half Southeast of Solo) where mas Heri is from and where his parents still live. This is the town where I got to perform in the wedding with mas Heri's family's gamelan. To be sure, my greater contribution to the ceremony was not my less than stellar saron penerus performance, but the novelty of my being an orang asing (foreigner, lit. "strange person"). It felt to me as though I was the first westerner in this village since the Dutch were 86'd in the 40's. Heri's father is a gamelan builder and along one side of his house were about twenty unfinished drums. The drums are carved out of either jack fruit or mango trunks, and all this is done by hand. The three days I was out there at the house a worker was slowly chipping away at what was to be a ketipung (the smallest drum, about a foot and a half long and 8 inches at its widest). At the end of that third day he'd only managed to get about two thirds through the inside. In back of the house was where all the gongs and other bronze, iron, or brass instruments were made. I would have loved to see some gongs and other bronze instruments being made, but unfortunately there was no forging going on while I was there.