Crafting and Celebrity Sightings

Sunday was my first full day in Indonesia, and it was a pretty full day. I started with the buffet breakfast at the hotel, which is going to do me in y'all. I know writing about a breakfast buffet pretty much sounds like the most boring blog post ever, but this is not your average breakfast buffet. For breakfast today, I had broccoli and cauliflower gratin, kimchi turnips, stirfried noodles, miso soup, and a fruit called mangish that tastes like gummies. (Pictured below).

Mangish

After breakfast, we got a lesson on the history and culture of Indonesia, which was extremely helpful and I will do an entire post about it later. Knowing the history of colonialism in this country is really going to help me notice its impacts more as I experience the culture. For example, I can see how the exploitation of the natural resources by first the Dutch and then the Portuguese has impacted the current economic state of the country. I believe that I can see its impacts in many aspects of the culture, and I have been reading some Indonesians' perspectives on how it affects people's mentalities here. I would like to find a way while I'm here to ask some locals about their thoughts without being intrusive. While my focus question for this trip is about Muslim student performance in schools set up to support the Islamic faith, my recent Xito conference on decolonizing our curriculum is impacting the way I see things here and many of my wonderings.

After lunch, we headed out to the Museum Tekstil Jakarta and were taught how to make batik fabric. Batik is the traditional fabric of Indonesia, and is made by drawing designs on the fabric with wax before dyeing. Where ever the wax is applied, the fabric will not be dyed. So in order to do fabric with multiple colors, wax designs must be done multiple times to cover everything that should not be that color. Here is a beautiful batik from the gallery:

I knew by looking at it that it would be extremely hard, but we got to practice ourselves to understand firsthand just how hard it is. We used a canting, which is a small copper spout attached to a handle to apply the hot wax. We were shown how to fill the small container with hot wax, the angles at which to hold the cloth and the canting to properly apply the wax, and we were told that if we made any wax spills, we should just create a new design around it.

The tools of the trade

When I dropped my first bit of wax on to my design, I could not see how it would be possible to make a design of it, so I just left it and prayed that I wouldn't do it again. Spoiler alert: I did it again. Many times. Each time, I just felt sorry for myself and moved on, knowing I would have splotches on my design. I just didn't see how I could turn any of these splotches into anything other than a splotch. When I finished, I handed over my cloth to be dyed, and I watched some of my colleagues working on their batiks. Other people who had repeating patterns stretched out their splotches and then made a matching ones that repeated so that you couldn't even tell they were mistakes. A teacher next to me was doing a design of Ondel Ondel, giant puppets from Jakarta. She was doing great, with very few mistakes, until the end when she made a giant spill off the side of one of her puppets that looked like a giant poop. I felt so sorry for her, because I didn't know how it could possibly be anything other than a poop. She then proceeded to change the shape of it and add a matching designs all around it until it almost looked like part of the original design. The poop was gone! This activity was definitely a lesson for me in the value of patience and creativity. I'll get working on those right away.

Dyeing a batik with some nice butts

My finished piece, complete with splotches

Some of these fabrics take up to two years to finish. True artistry!

I plan to buy some fabrics to take home, let me know if you need anything!

Finally, we stopped by the grand mall of Jakarta for an hour. I am not a mall person back home, so I was giving some serious side eye to the idea of going to the mall while I am visiting a foreign country. Silly me, how little I knew. We walked into the mall, and there was a huge mob of people around someone, everyone aggressively pushing and trying to take pictures of someone. The mall is seven stories high, and there were people on the upper levels all flashing pictures down below as well. We asked the people around us who was here, and were told it was the president of Indonesia! Indonesia is the fourth most populated country in the world, and we were this close to its president! He had some security, but I couldn't believe how close people were getting to him! I was not trying to get involved in the crazy scrum around the president, and was relieved to see a few of my fellow teachers moving in to try to take pictures. I decided I could steal theirs and be satisfied, so I wandered off. When we came back together, instead of having a picture of the president inside the crowd, they showed me pictures they were able to take with the president! With. The. President. They managed to fight the claustrophobia, get through the entire crowd, mention they were teachers from the United States, and the security team pulled them in and put them next to the president for a picture. I have decided that since I know these people, it's pretty much like I met the president too. It's a pretty cool story, so I am going to claim it for myself. Check out the picture!