This past week and a half has been busy, tiring and super fun. I finally found myself some Mexican food thanks to a recommendation from my pal Jesslyn who has given me an extensive list of places to eat in Jakarta. On last Tuesday night Ega and I tried a place called Hacienda and it was quite good. Of course I'm still on my life-long quest to find the world's best Chile relleno so I tried one at Hacienda and it was pretty tasty :)
The rest of our week was fairly uneventful as we worked and prepared to head to Singapore for the weekend. On Friday afternoon we braved traffic and headed off to the airport. At the airport we got some coffee and then checked in and had dinner before our flight. After we landed in Singapore we had struggles with our phones, the wifi, and figuring out the train so we took a cab to our airbnb. The cab driver was relatively nice, but annoying about letting you use a credit card to pay for the cab.
On Saturday we woke up early and headed out to the Botanical Gardens. Singapore is often called "the city inside a garden" and I have no questions as to why that is. The botanical gardens were beautiful and the air was so fresh that you felt as though you were getting healthier just by breathing in this beautiful place. The gardens were also huge, so Ega and I spent three hours exploring them before heading out to find a place to eat chili crab for lunch.
Singapore's chili crab was recommended to us by a colleague back home, so I was excited to try it. It was so much fun to eat despite being extremely messy (see pictures of me and my bib below).
After eating lunch we decided to make our way to the national museum to learn a bit about Singapore's history. It was a smooth trip across town since the city's buses and trains are so fast, cheap, and easy to use. The national museum was certainly a little propaganda filled as they depicted the colony under Britain, the occupation of the Japanese during WWII and then the move towards Singaporean independence. As they discussed how Singapore developed into the country it is today they claimed to have reduced unemployment to 0%, that there's total religious freedom, and racial harmony which made Singapore sound pretty utopian. Of course the city is wonderful and people are certainly well-off, but if you dig a little deeper it's clear that there are unemployed people, and obvious racial tensions. Despite feeling as though I consumed a lot of a government fairytale inside the museum, I learned a lot of history and culture.
After the museum we took off to go to Marina bay which is a giant hotel/casino/mall/museum next to the bay. We walked around, ate dinner, saw a light show, and even gambled a little (total losses haha). It was a fun night and we were very worn out by the time we made it back to our beds.
On Sunday we ate breakfast with our airbnb host, and then Ega visited a friend while I went to the National Gallery. It's my personal preference to explore a culture through its art, but I had no idea what kind of treat I was in for. First I was trying to choose what type of ticket to buy at the museum when they gave me free entrance to all of the exhibits because I was a student. It was really kind of them and I was thrilled to see everything. Most of the art was contemporary/modern with a few Chinese Singaporean impressionists and an exhibit on reframing modernism. I was practically in paradise. It quickly became clear to me that I've been starved of Asian art as I discovered all of these fantastic Southeast Asian artists who produced work at the same time as Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Georgia O'Keefe. I guess when you spend most of your time in the west you find yourself looking at the work of white artists, but maybe things are slowly changing since I saw a really great Yayoi Kusama exhibit in Copenhagen in the fall (if you haven't heard of her and you're a modern art fan then please please look her up).
The most striking thing I learned from the pieces I saw was concerning the struggle many Singaporean artists seemed to feel about being stuck somewhere between the East and the West. These artists were living with an almost English heritage after being a British colony and studying in Europe, but still distinctly Eastern in their skin tone and geographical location. Some of the artists chose to reaffirm their connection to the east by using traditional Chinese characters in a western style impressionist painting, or by mocking the Russians by painting an oil painting that looked like a water color of a Chinese village after being told that no one could ever create an oil painting of scenery in China.
Others expressed their dissatisfaction with western influence by constructing a suit out of fake $1000 US dollar bills as a protest against consumerism. One artist painted himself yellow and got in a giant pot to make himself into "yellow curry". The piece originally received a negative response, but I found it a very powerful statement against how the Asian body is so often enjoyed and exoticized either through the food western people indulge in or the Asian fetishes that are all too prevalent. Maybe I am projecting some of what I have learned at Wellesley about Asian American performance and applying it to Singaporean art, but I couldn't help but see the similarities in the struggle to define yourself beyond the East/West binary that Europeans constructed so long ago.
British people landed in that island, began teaching people English, and created "white" Asian people all those years ago that were even referenced as "gentleman of the East" in their own Singapore National history museum. For some reason the more western an Asian person seems to become the more they are championed; at least that's what I felt I found in Singapore. It makes me sad that so much of this art portrayed a seemingly unavoidable identity conflict that comes from being in a country/city where your heritage carries Malay, Chinese, Indian, and British culture mixed together like vinegar, oil, and water. A substance that sits together and pulls apart from itself seeming to deny the existence of a truly diverse identity.
After seeing the art museum I walked across the city to meet Ega in Little India for lunch. It was kind of surreal as I passed from whiter/Chinese tourist downtown, through Chinatown, and into Little India. I noticed I had seen relatively few Indian people in the city before crossing into their neighborhood. It was like being in a completely different city with a different language on the buildings and Indian music emitting from every shop. In that moment I wondered if the separation between races in different neighborhoods was intentionally enforced or independently chosen in Singapore then I figured maybe it was a bit of both.
We ate at a little hole-in-the-wall place that was really delicious. There isn't too much Indian food in Jakarta, so I was really happy to try some in Singapore. I enjoy Indonesian food too, but I'm not sure anyone else in the world knows how to season things quite like Indian people seem to. Needless to say we enjoyed ourselves.
After lunch we walked to the train and headed to the airport. A few hours later we found ourselves back in Jakarta ready to get back to work.
By Saturday night my friend from Wellesley Hans arrived in Jakarta for her summer internship here. We met up on Monday evening to go to dinner together and catch up. I wanted to attend the World Refugee Day celebration in the city so I dragged Hans along with me. Once we got there we realized it was really too hot inside and we could not hear or understand what was being said on stage. So, we decided to go find someplace for dinner. I looked up a restaurant nearby with reasonably good reviews, then we set off on a walk through narrow sidewalks passed countless street vendors and noisy cars. Once we arrived at the restaurant we quickly realized we were under dressed and that we had gotten way more than we bargained for. The doors flew open as we approached and a xylophone was played to announce our arrival. Apart from about 20 people who were working there we were the only people inside. It was too late to turn back, so we sat down and were given menus with western food on them (we later found out they do this to anyone who speaks English because the Indonesian people got different food than us).
After we ordered they started bringing all these little appetizers to our table. As we were sitting and talking there was music playing and a woman who came out to dance as this procession of food was brought to a table of Indonesian people that had come to eat there after us. It was crazy. Then what I can only describe as the equivalent of an Indonesian Mariachi band came out to play music for us. I think both Hans and I turned bright red as these three old men serenaded us. Then they wrapped this cape around Hans and waited for me to take a picture before coming around and putting the cape on me. It was so funny.
At the end of this ridiculous meal we hailed a taxi and made our way home laughing about how this was one of the craziest restaurant experiences either of us had ever had.
Tuesday I went back to work as usual and then met with Hans this morning to work a bit in a coffee shop together. I'm happy to have another friend here in Jakarta and to have even more adventures. This weekend Hans and I will go on a sailing trip to an island nearby Jakarta to go snorkeling. It should be a blast.
I've bought a few post cards, but have not found a post office or the discipline to write them. So, forgive me if I mail your post card from Oklahoma in August. If you want to be sure you're on my list of people to send a post card to then please let me know you'd like one!
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