If a trip was capable of having mental disorders, this one (to Biak) would be diagnosed manic-depressive the second it walked into the office. No inkblots, no portrait exercises of the soul, no long multiple-choice tests filled with bubbles. I can run it down in two columns: the happy, exciting column and the terrible column, and, chronologically, they stay equal and extreme. Behold:

☺: Upon arrival in Biak, which is dumping rain like mad, we run into a nice man that happens to also be our neighbor in Jayapura. He offers to give us a ride into town.

☹: Nick somehow manages to use one of those American expressions to accept his offer that means yes but sounds exactly like no. The man climbs into his car and drives away alone.

☺: The taxi fare turns out to be Rp. 1500.

☹: But we have no idea where we are going or whether there are any hotels.

☺: We run into a coworker’s sister while we are wandering aimlessly around town (having arrived there mostly by luck). She takes charge of us and leads us on a tour of every possible hotel in town.

☹: The hotel we like won’t let us rent a double room because we aren’t married.

☺: The sister tries to bribe them. This is funny even though it doesn’t work. We find a better hotel, lie about our marital status, and are subsequently given a double room.

☹: Now I have to think of Nick as my husband. Creepy.

☺: We take a walk down to the beach and find a beautiful grove of palms. We decide to explore.

☹: The palm grove turns out to be a graveyard. The villagers are visibly upset that we almost trod on their dead. One of them walks over, looking menacing, and…

☺: …after some friendly conversation, offers to drive us to a good beach in East Biak the next day.

☹: He flakes.

☺: But as a direct result of his flaking, we meet another man, who, upon discovery that we aren’t rich tourists, offers to take us along for free on a snorkeling outing to the outlying coral islands he’s going on anyway with a couple of Russian tourists the next day.

☹: It rains, so no snorkeling trip.

☺: We find a nearby restaurant that serves shrimp and squid, Chinese-style. It is indescribably delicious.

☹: It gives me mild food poisoning immediately, waits a day, then gives Nick severe food poisoning.

☺: We run into Snorkeling Trip Guy, who’s actually really nice, at the fish market. He lends us a snorkeling mask and puts us on a public taxi to East Biak, where we find a gorgeous beach positively encrusted with nearly untouched seashells and a nearby cliff to dive from.

☹: Then there’s a gigantic thunderstorm.

☺: New Years Eve fireworks!

☹: New Years Eve fireworks shot haphazardly by drunk people out of backyards, off roofs, down streets, at people, etc! Bottle rockets sweeping policemen’s feet out from under them! Truckloads of people with firecrackers all clamoring to throw them out the window at the same time!

☺: The next day is sunny and we are able to go on the original snorkeling trip.

☹: But unfortunately it’s New Years Day, and everything is closed – supermarkets, tokos, warungs, everything. This means we have no breakfast and can’t pack a lunch for the trip. We are so hungry all day we almost die.

☺: In my delirium, I don’t remember that I always get seasick. So I don’t get seasick. I am able to pay attention to the swarms of flying fish that skim the air around our boat.

☹: The Russians are Supertourists. They don’t like the snorkeling area. They have a sneaking suspicion that the boat driver isn’t a certified Snorkeling Operator or something. The woman walks around in her bra and underwear, unaware that she’s being entirely culturally inappropriate. There is a lot of yelling and complaining. The sun hurts them. They know better than the boat driver which way is the correct way to go. Etc.

☺: We catch our plane home without any dramatic fuss.

It starts and ends with smiles, right? So I guess it was a success.

Awards to Things I Brought In My Suitcase

Most Useful:
Laptop Computer, but that’s cheating, I think, so A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Most Ridiculous:
Warm fuzzy slippers

Most Weather-Appropriate; Unfortunately, Also Most Culturally Inappropriate:
A red bikini

Most Initially Useful, But Eventually Gave Me a Painful Esophageal Infection:
8 bottles of Doxycycline malaria-preventive pills

Most Unethical:
A DVD set of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! that I forgot to return to my friend Molly before I left the States

Most Curious to the Locals:
Contact lenses

Most Regrettable:
A relatively expensive, heavy speaker system that cost me $50 in overweight baggage costs and then promptly fried the second I plugged it into the wall here, despite the presence of the appropriate voltage converter

Most Reminiscent of Home:
Blueberry body lotion, or a necklace of dried roses

Thing I Most Wish I Had Brought, However Unexpected This May Sound:
100 packets of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Mix

December 21, 2006

All my interactions with people here are accompanied, always uncomfortably, by The Smile. You know the one. It’s the fog of nonthreateningness that you wear when you know that very very few actual words are getting through. The Smile persists through every kind of encounter; with fruit vendor dudes, with chicken saté dudes, with post office dudes, with random dudes on the street who want to have conversations about where I live, etc.

The Smile is distinct from the tight-lipped half-smirk that Americans give to each other when two strangers or remote acquaintances pass each other in a place where it would be considered rude not to look up. Here we call this the bulesmile because nobody uses it except white people. I’ve seen a few white people here, and they all do it. Look up from the ground, twist the lips, look back at the ground. Like ‘I see you, and I don’t want to get into anything with you, goodbye.’

This is not at all like The Smile. The Smile is broad and toothy and involves the entire face. It puts a laugh in the voice of the person using it. The doggedness of it made itself clear to me today when I wore it all through the following encounter with the guy who works in the package room in the post office. I was picking up a package sent to me by my dad. The postal service had failed to actually deliver it, like always. Instead they hoard it in the far reaches of the post office (I’m writing it in English for obvious reasons, but it was all in Indonesian):

Post Office Guy (smiling): Okay, that’ll be Rp.10,000.
Me (smiling, pointing at the postage mark, which reads $34.15): Paid already.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes, but you must pay 10,000 to pick it up.
Me (smiling): No.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Yes.
Me (smiling): The people at EF told me I shouldn’t have to pay.
Post Office Guy (smiling): Oh yes, yes, of course, that’s okay. Goodbye, Merry Christmas.
Me (smiling): Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too.

Like, that’s the conversational equivalent of smiling brightly, laughing a tinkling laugh, and saying ‘Hey, you’re trying to extort money from me because I’m a bule and ostensibly don’t know better, and I totally see right through you! Tee hee! And now that you know I speak Indonesian and have actual knowledge, you’re trying to pretend that you never tried to extort it in the first place! Ha ha ha! You’re an asshole!’

But even if I could say all of that in Indonesian, which I can’t (the closest I can come would come out something like ‘You person not good’) I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to make him angry. If I make him angry, he can pretend my packages never arrived in the first place, or steal them, or do any number of things I don’t want him to do.

Another conversation inappropriately permeated with The Smile:

Guy Who’s Bothering Me While I’m Trying To Write A Song On The Beach (smiling): Do you like Indonesian men?
Me (smiling): All individual men are different.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Can I come to your house?
Me (smiling): No. Definitely not.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling): Am I disturbing you by sitting next to you?
Me (smiling): Yes.
GWBMWITTWASOTB (smiling, continuing to sit next to me): Oh, okay.

What’s especially perverse about it is that it’s the exact same Smile I use when I’m having pleasant conversations with nice people (contrary to what my blog may have you believe, these people do exist):

Woman in the Back of a Taxi (smiling): Hey, hey! You dropped your motorcycle helmet out the window!
Me (smiling, relieved because I would have lost my helmet): Thank you SO much!

or

Fruit Vendor Dude (smiling): You buy rambutan so often, today you get half free.
Me (smiling): That’s nice of you!
FVD (smiling): You must watch out for that man – he is trying to touch your butt.
Me (smiling): Thank you, I will.

So it’s an indiscriminate Smile, which makes it even stranger. By looking at me, you would never be able to tell what kind of conversation I’m having, or how I feel about the person I’m having it with.

The Smile is also often accompanied by the Awkward Southeast Asian Half-Bow of Acquiescence, but we won’t get into that. Let’s just leave it at the fact that it’s mostly used for everything except acquiescing.