Indonesia: Borobudur

Borobudur is such a popular destination - one of the top in Indonesia and absolutely the top in Java - that I don't have much to say about it that hasn't already been said.

But, a few impressions:

We got there by train - even our friend in Surabaya didn't know you could buy tickets online which you then print and redeem for the actual tickets at the station. The 5-hour ride to the nearest town (pickups are easily arranged through your hotel) cost a pittance, for a fairly good railway experience, as these things go.

Somehow I'd gotten the impression that you could walk inside it like a temple (this may be from pictures of the walkways on it, which, with carved walls on either side, could be mistaken if you are just viewing a photo as halls inside a temple), but it's actually a massive stupa.

A word of advice: don't follow the exit signs as they are posted. They lead you to some side exit that forces you to walk practically the whole way around the temple again through a neverending souvenir market that is absolutely not worth your time. Just go back the way you came.

The town itself is not nearly as unpleasant as a backpacker town with one major draw would normally be. For example, I loved the ruins at Hampi but I could take or leave the little town, which seemed mostly set up for foreigners. Borobudur has some of that, but outside of the aforementioned souvenir market from hell, the town itself is pleasantly devoid of souvenir shops and backpacker cafes. Mostly local eateries, and to get a cup of coffee we had to go to one of the fancier hotels. The only downside of it not being as fully set up for travelers as it could be is that there are several smaller temples on the outskirts of town (one of which is walkable) that you can visit in the afternoon after a sunrise trip to Borobudur. But hotels will try to set you up with a 200,000 rupiah horse carriage ride to do that - that's about $12 US, but still far more than you ought to be paying. We had to go hang out on the street and pick up one of those cycle carts for a fraction of the cost.

As these sorts of destinations go, though, I would say it's worth it. I wouldn't recommend skipping it thinking it'll be a let-down. It absolutely wasn't - even the very cliched 'sunrise visit' was absolutely lovely and absolutely worth it. Hotels will arrange to take you there on a scooter, where you enter through the Hotel Manohar and get a little flashlight for the walk up. There is a little coffee-and-pastry set-up in the waiting area before you can ascend that opens at 4:30am. You can bring your coffee and pastry up to the top - I watched the sunrise while drinking mine! (Take your trash with you of course).

I'd say, though, that I enjoyed the dawn light over the misty tropical landscape just as much as the actual stupa - it's Buddhist, in an very Indian style, and doesn't feel particularly Indonesian at all (the temples on the mountains near Surakarta/Solo feel much more attuned to local history and indigenous cultural aesthetics). It at times felt like a repeat of the many, many, many similar temples and sites I saw in India, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar.

A few more quick tips: you can buy postcards at the Manohar, and if you stay there you can get a discount on admission to the site. The Manohar also has a cafe where you can see Borobudur from a distance while drinking or eating - a great place to write those postcards. We didn't stay there though, because we're not rich (this was actually a 'we can't work anyway, so let's take a budget trip although technically we can't afford it right now' trip). An a smaller road off the main thoroughfare there is a guy who does satay on a long grill and it's excellent, and our hotel (Cempaka Villa) was great value for money with bathtub, hot water, Western toilet, wifi throughout and free breakfast, mostly Chinese-style food. In fact pretty much all of our Java accommodation with one exception was to a very high standard.

Enjoy!

Check out my other posts on our Java trip here (coming soon):

Surabaya
Borobudur
Prambanan
Surakarta (Solo)
Baluran National Park

Indonesia: Surabaya

Over Chinese New Year, we decided to take a quick trip to Java with a side trip to Singapore, even though it was the rainy season.

Since Blogger is being a jerk, I'll put all the text here and all the pictures below. First up - and I'm splitting trip into several posts by destination within Java so I don't have to constantly copy-and-paste from Flickr - we flew into Surabaya, a sidewalk-free, mostly industrial but also somewhat interesting city on the eastern tip of Java. A friend of ours lives there, so we wandered the city with him until it was time to catch our evening train to Borobudur.

Even our Hungarian tour guide friend, who has lived in Indonesia for years, admits there's not a lot to do in Surabaya. We met up with him both coming and going - it was great having a local-living friend to take the lead in getting around, by the way - and went to the mosque in what Lonely Planet ambitiously calls "The Arab Quarter". Yes, it was worth the trip. Yes, that part of town is run-down and struggles with poverty. There is a wealth of heritage architecture, though, mostly art deco from the colonial period, the mosque is nice, and the market street leading to the mosque very atmospheric. We walked by Chinatown on the way - don't bother.

A few things worth noting: first, there are lots of cats in Surabaya. In fact this seems to be a thing not only in Indonesia but in basically every Muslim country I've visited. I know Muhammad preferred cats to dogs but I can't quite imagine that's the reason why Turkey, Egypt and Indonesia were so cat-fully nice (especially Turkey).

Second, Surabaya is really a city of drivers. People live in family homes in kampungs in the spread-out town, which has no clear town center (although one particular massive shopping mall, Tunjungan Plaza, serves as a central point). Most roads have no sidewalks and, with no clearly delineated 'downtown', it's not clear how one even would walk around the city. Buses are a non-starter, and there is no metro or light rail system of any kind. There are bemos, but you have to know where you're going. What this basically means is if you go to Surabaya, budget to take taxis everywhere. Fortunately, taxis are generally honest, cheap and - thankfully - air-conditioned.

Wouldn't live there though. If you've read this blog even occasionally you know I DO NOT drive in urban areas and believe strongly in urban public transit. I won't live in a city without it.

Third, towards the end of this group of photos, note the mosaic on one colonial building - Dutch woman on one side, Indonesian on the other, separated by some Art Deco deity. This is just one interesting bit of Dutch colonial-era Art Deco architecture, and serves to remind one that you can admire the buildings all you like, but remember the brutality, racism and inequality of the imperial powers that built it all. Worth it? I don't think so. The buildings are nice though.

Fourth, I don't have photos here as they didn't come out well, but the House of Sampoerna (and its attached cafe) as well as the Majapahit hotel bar are both worth a stop. Or you could eat at "Papa Ron's" pizza in Tunjungan Plaza. Your choice.

Finally, do check out the zoo - just to see the Komodo dragons if anything.

My other posts on Indonesia are here (coming soon):

Surabaya
Borobudur
Prambanan
Solo (Surakarta)
Baluran National Park

The Fu-Jen Curfew Protests: religious vs. cultural conservatism

So, a few of my friends have shared this post about the protests surrounding curfews at the women's dorms of Fu-Jen Catholic University in New Taipei (link in Chinese).

I understood despite my piss-poor Chinese reading ability that the women's dorms have a curfew and are locked after that time, while the men's dorms are not - and this has not changed despite an ongoing dialogue with the administration that tends to agree and avoid rather than actually discuss the issue. The protestors (who seem to be organized as FJU Cinderella) are giving press conferences and engaging in a hunger strike.

Yes, the entire reason for the curfew is that the powers that be are terrified of female sexuality. It's not for safety reasons, or because there is some sort of known threat, or even for legal reasons. It's because those nice young university girls might (gasp!) be sexually active and do what they please with their bodies. We can't have that now can we! So many pearls to clutch, so little time!

My first thought, though, was not "Taiwan can be really conservative!" - it was not to attribute this particular problem to Taiwanese culture at all but rather to religious, especially (but not limited to) Catholicism. American-style fundie nonsense comes to Taiwan!

I realize there is a certain prudishness about Taiwanese culture as it is, and many aspects of life here are dealt with more conservatively at home for reasons that have nothing to do with Western influence or Western religion. As a friend put it, culture in this part of the world started to turn prudish in the 19th century before missionaries even got here. But, that prudishness can't be analyzed along Western lines, because it absolutely does not follow them (where in the West are you going to find sexy church dancers along the lines of Taiwan's sexy temple dancers?), and in many ways Taiwan is not all that conservative. I've said several times it is, in my experience, more progressive than any other country in Asia by a very wide margin.

That prudishness does come out in college dorm rules - but it seems to be equally meted out to men and women. At least, as far as I have been told (I have never lived in a dorm here), while women's dorms often don't allow male visitors at all or after certain hours, and many have curfews, that men's dorms do too. The double standard that men can play but women must keep their legs closed (and only the 'bad sort' of women let the men play) seems, to me, to come out later in life when wives are supposed to be forgiving of their husbands' indiscretions, men are seen as horndogs unable to help themselves, but mistresses are evil succubi and unnatural she-beasts. At college age, the censure against sex - because, again this is about sex plain and simple - seems to be aimed at both young women and men.

As per my memory, when my sister attended NCCU no men were allowed in her dorm, but she was likewise not allowed in the men's dorms. I've been told by Zhongshan alumni that the men's dorms are further up the mountain, cloistered away farther from main campus life (and therefore more susceptible to monkey invasion) than the women's dorms.

But, all I know is what I've been told by people who have actually had Taiwanese college dorm experiences. If I'm wrong about this or you have counter examples (or examples that support this view), please do leave them in the comments. I'm entirely open to being wrong about this as I am not writing from direct experience.

If that is true, however, the practice of keeping women under lock and key but not men, to me, feels like more of a religious stick-up-the-butt than a cultural one. That it's Catholicism, specifically, causing the problem here with the church's outdated and frankly offensive views on women's rights and equality. (I want to emphasize this as an establishment problem, not a personal one: just because the church has views I find repugnant doesn't mean those who identify with that religion necessarily have similar views. It is absolutely possible to be an openminded, even feminist, Catholic, though it does entail differing with the church on certain issues).

That's not to say that very traditional thinkers in Taiwan aren't woman-blamers and chauvinists: many are. A student of mine from a college in Danshui told me about how her father lets her brother sleep at friends' houses, doesn't have a curfew for him when he is home, and lets him stay in the dorms at his own university, whereas she is expected to live at home with her parents and commute to college, and be home by a certain time. This attitude is not unheard of here. It just doesn't strike me as the reason why the women are locked up like untrustworthy lusty schoolgirls while the boys are allowed to hot-dog it all over town without censure. No thought given to the notion that young people are gonna get it on (to be honest, not me, despite living in a co-ed dorm freshman year - I was a hopeless nerd and kind of still am), and that's only a problem if you make it one by not educating them properly or by thinking its somehow wrong or unnatural.

That, to me, feels particularly religious in origin. I hear echoes of the Republican party and religious right in it. Hell (pun intended) it's one of the many reasons I left the US: as an atheist I was sick of public discourse being skewed so far to the right that moderates in the US look conservative in every other Western country, and liberals in the US are moderates by any reasonable standard elsewhere. I am a flaming liberal by American standards but pretty moderate by European ones, and I see myself as a moderate. I'm not a Communist or anarchist after all and I am married, which is a pretty establishment thing to do, although I would not say I have a traditional marriage. I was sick of being demonized for not only not believing in God, but not believing in the whole raft of misogynistic bullshit that seems to come with strong religious faith. The whole aspirin-between-the-knees victim-blamey "she had it coming wearing that skirt" "boys will be boys" purity ring flood of pure stinky douche that has poisoned and divided my own clumsy culture by creating a culture war that nobody with any sense wanted.

I would hate to see it start up here. Taiwanese culture grows more progressive by the day. The last thing it needs is a bunch of Western-style fundies screwing it up.

Sad buttclown nobody cares about calls Tsai "extreme" because she's a single woman

"She's so extreme because she's single"


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This is the entirety of my opinion on the matter and I will defend it to the end as succinct and accurate.

Taipei: The New Old Berlin

So I was reading this article about how Berlin has changed and, as I read it, something about the old, pre-cool Berlin that the writer describes felt familiar.

I can't point to any one quote that captured this for me, just an overall feeling - a modern, capitalist, free city (well, half-free) that was not particularly inviting to outsiders, was off the beaten track, and was full of grubby neighborhoods that you could live in if you wanted cheap rent. If you were there it was because you wanted to be there, and not anywhere else, but anyone who wanted to be anywhere else generally did not give Berlin a second look. The "beautiful people" were in other cities (London, Paris, Milan).

And I realized, it reminded me of Taipei now. Taipei is not particularly cool. It doesn't have the cachet with Westerners that Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong or Tokyo (or more recently, Seoul) do, or even Bangkok or Singapore. Tourists from other parts of Asia come here but it is not a global tourist hotspot by any standard, and wasn't a tourist hotspot at all until Chinese tourism opened up. You are here because you want to be here - at least I am here for that reason - and not anywhere else. It's very local, and looming just across the straight is a massive Communist threat. I highly doubt Chinese missiles are going to rain down on my head anytime soon, but some days you can't help but wonder and be reminded of that during the occasional air raid drills. The beautiful people are in those other cities, and with them their beautiful overpriced nightspots and commercialized bar and restaurant scenes.

It can be nice and shiny and new - look at Xinyi (or don't - I kind of prefer not to). But entire neighborhoods are a bit grubby, and you have to look more deeply to find their charms (which they do have). It's so cool because it's not cool at all.

And, like that older version of Berlin, you have to work to understand it, and you might not always like it at first. You may remember that I did not really like Taipei when I first arrived. It was hard - foreigners generally make friends with coworkers when they first land but I didn't care for most of mine (the ones I liked I still didn't feel that close to, and they have pretty much all since left Taiwan). I cried on my birthday, after eating dinner alone at a terrible Indian restaurant, two weeks after arriving, on the Muzha line MRT because I could look down through rain-streaked windows at people on the street all going somewhere they belonged and probably seeing people who cared about them in lives that were anchored in some way, and I had none of those things.  It took another year or so before I felt like Taipei was alright, and probably another year after that before I began to really feel it, and Taiwan, was someplace special.

As an aside, so far I can count on one hand the number of people who know why this blog is called Lao Ren Cha. There is no special reason why I don't publish the reason publicly other than I never really felt like it. The people who know I felt, for whatever reasons I had at the time, deserved to know. Some still do! But, it's not a big deep secret, and perhaps someday I will write about that. What I'll say now is that it was very much intentional - not just a pretty name - and is very much directly related to my experiencing Taipei first in a muddy, dark, monochromatic sepia and only later a stunning, clear azure blue. It took more time than you would ever think such a thing would require.

And I'm not alone - when my cousin visited recently and stayed for a semester, he took time to adjust too. At first absorbing everything, then feeling a bit down due to the unrelentingly bad weather, then finally realizing one day that he had a solid group of friends and that Taipei was a super cool city to be in. The Taipei effect is not immediate.

I do wonder, as Taipei gets cooler - maybe not Seoul-level cooler but cooler nonetheless, with its plethora of perfect little cafes and increasing number of tour buses, increasing rents and gentrifying neighborhoods if it will start to become a victim of its own coolness. Part of me hopes it will bypass the Brooklyn effect, as it feels like it's already become too expensive to truly be a hip haven - and all the cool kids are already taking advantage of the better weather and cheaper rents in Tainan.

I wonder, I guess, if in 10 years (assuming I am still here, which I may be), what was an off-the-beaten track choice for building a life in Asia will start to be THE place to be and it will start to lose some of its street-level vibrancy and slightly grubby charm. Will I feel like that disaffected old expat in 10 years, complaining about all the new kids and how "this city isn't what it used to be"?

Yes, I do realize expats before me have already said that, but I wasn't here then so LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

Part of me wants Taipei to get that international recognition. Part of me wants it to stay the way it is.

1992 Whiplash

image from here

I should start by saying that literally nothing qualifies me to comment on this other than the fact that I majored in International Affairs in college, which is about as relevant as someone who studied psychology in undergrad and then became a Starbucks barista trying to diagnose your clinical depression.

But, it was very interesting to read all the different takes on Tsai's deliberately vague and careful language surrounding the "1992 Consensus" (scare quotes intentional because it's not a real thing).

The English translation of what she said was this:

We will also work to maintain the existing mechanisms for dialogue and communication across the Taiwan Strait. In 1992, the two institutions representing each side across the Strait (SEF & ARATS), through communication and negotiations, arrived at various joint acknowledgements and understandings.

So she explicitly acknowledges that a meeting took place, which is fine because it did. She acknowledges that there was a spirit of communication and attempts to find common ground, which I suppose there was. She said there were some "joint acknowledgements and understandings" but declines to define what those were. At no point did she say there was a "1992 consensus" that, according to contemporary rhetoric, involves both sides agreeing that there is "one China" with "different interpretations" of what that means.

To hear New Bloom talk of it you'd think she'd acknowledged the 1992 consensus (which, in my view, she didn't) - they frame it as her acknowledging it "in all but name", and that her vague words "can be understood to mean acceptance of the 1992 consensus or would allow her some wiggle room".

I can't say I agree with this - to acknowledge it in all but name would mean to say - far more clearly than she did - what those "various joint acknowledgements and understandings" were, and to tack that on to what people say the 1992 Consensus was. She didn't do that.

On the other side, South China Morning Post talks about how she has pissed off Beijing by "failing to acknowledge" the 1992 Consensus. This makes sense, New Bloom is on the far left, and SCMP, while not a mouthpiece of Beijing, sometimes acts like one and is, shall we say, not that far too the left. Not by my standards anyway. Of course they'd report their interpretation of the same words differently.

You could say it makes no difference - "stopping short of acknowledging the 1992 consensus" and "acknowledging the 1992 consensus in all but name" sure do sound the same. In the real world I suppose they are - or at least they are so close to the same thing that you could swap one for the other.

But statecraft is not the real world - it's a world where entire oceans of meaning are found between sentences, in single words or words not said. Tsai was absolutely right to be as careful as she was, and showing her diplomatic and negotiating chops in good form.

So, in my totally non-expert opinion, she did not acknowledge the 1992 Consensus, but she did accomplish something far more deft.

By mentioning that the two sides met in the spirit of finding common ground is a way of coming close to what Beijing wants to hear without actually caving in to them, making it harder to criticize her (her words were intentionally vague), allowing her to say she called for peace and acknowledged history in her speech even as Beijing was denied the exact thing they were pressuring her for.

To which, if Beijing complains, Tsai can say "well I did acknowledge that 'various agreements were reached' in 1992!", and if Beijing says "but you didn't SAY 1992 Consensus" makes Beijing, not her, look bad. Like big warmongering babies for being angry that she - a democratically elected leader not technically under their control - did not stick to the exact script they laid out for her.

At the same time it allows her to say "hey, I didn't cave - I didn't give them the exact words they wanted" to her base, and even Taiwanese not in her base who still have pride in Taiwan and don't want their elected leaders to parrot words Beijing throws at them.

What I don't get - because again I am not an expert, I just majored in it - is why no major news outlet is reading it this way, talking about it or showing any sort of understanding that this is what she did, this is why she did it, this is the brilliant trick she managed with the crappy hand she was dealt, and it was very intentional, and very smart. Either they say she acknowledged it or they say she didn't, often defaulting to their own biases.

This is statecraft. I don't always agree with it (I'm a burning radical at heart) but this really is how it works. It does make a difference. As much as the crazy lefties like me - whose heart would rather follow Chen Shui-bian-style China-taunting even as her mind knows that's a bad idea, who would rather occupy the legislature (hi Sunflowers!) than work within it* - and the other activists and progressives and strong independence supporters would like it to be otherwise, this is how the game is played and if you play it well, you just might win.

Tsai plays it very, very well. I may not agree with all of her choices, and I may be generally suspicious of the 'establishment' as a whole, but I'll give her a chance.

*now you see why, despite preparing for a career in the foreign service, I did not go down that path. Would have been a terrible idea for me.

BREAKING NEWS: Taiwan swears in pants-wearing president

Newly-inaugurated troublemaker Tsai Ing-wen

TAIPEI, CHINA: Taiwan swore in pants-wearing president Tsai Ing-wen today in Taipei, the capital city of Chinese Taipei, a move that the KMT and other world leaders decried.

Donald Trump, whose opinion is always important, said, "I promise the American people that not only will I not wear pants at my inauguration, but that my presidency will be a pantsless one. The inauguration will be the best inauguration anyone has ever seen, without any pants at all. Very classy."

"Those troublemaking DPP and their pants," said KMT lawmakers, who were quick to point out that former Troublemaking DPP president Chen Shui-bian also wore pants, and "look at what happened to him."

Opposition KMT members went on to point out that their party was the only true party of peace "between the two sides of One China across the Taiwan Strait".

"I hardly ever wear pants," said outgoing melted candle president Ma Ying-jiu. "The resulting flexibility of both of my legs has made me an effective ruler leader of the Chi- I mean Taiwanese people."

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also known to wear pants, asked for his critical and necessary opinion on this issue said "Taiwan is an inseparable part of China because we say so. To feel otherwise is to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and our 5,000,000,000,000 years of culture, which you can never understand. These pants, with their split legs unlike a skirt, are clearly a symbol of the DPP and so-called democratic 'splittists' who want to tear China apart. China will not tolerate the actions of renegade pants-wearing Taiwan Province. We'll bomb them to remind them of our love."

Some say Tsai's decision to wear pants was a deliberate distancing of herself from Taiwan's authoritarian past, especially former leader Chiang Kai-shek.

Pantsless Chiang, a.k.a "Johnny No-Pants"

Chiang is known to have famously said that "the sky is not big enough to burn with the brightness of two separate pant-legs."


SEE: Our gallery of world leaders wearing pants

Asked for their opinions, everyday Chinese Taipeiers expressed a range of strong views about Tsai's bold, pantsy choice.

"Actually, I don't care," said Taipei resident Chen Ya-ling. "I just hope President Tsai will be an effective ruler who listens to the voice of the Taiwanese people and decides rationally for the cou--hey where are you going?"

"Huh? What are you talking about? Who gives a damn? I want a president who is wise and measured in dealing with Taiwan's ailing econo---really? Just walking away because my opinion is not sensational enough?" added a noodle shop owner who asked to be referred to as Ah-xiong.

Clearly, ethnic divisions run deep in Chinese Taipei, a problem China says only it can solve through "national unity between China on both sides of the strait."

Renegade Taiwan Province has been governed separately from China since the two sides separated, or something, in 1949 because obviously they were exactly the same for a million years before 1949.