In Reply to: Jogja is a bad joke posted by Dr Bali on Tuesday, 20. July 2004 at 03:22 Bali Time:
Thanks Marcia for agreeing with some of my spite about Jogja. You were lucky to spend just a couple of weeks there. Like I said before, Jogja's fine for a few days or so, until the rot sets in.
The "tourist" oriented areas, like Prawirotoman, are astonishingly boring, even by Indonesian "standards". What I could never figure out, having tried to live there for 18 months, was if this "city" is full of universities, colleges, etc...how come there are so many idiots there? Doesn't make any sense to me.
I recall a moment I had in the Malioboro Mall. I didn't want to buy whatever product they had for sale on grounds of inferior quality. A pretty sales-girl started chatting me up with all the usual questions and some how or other, we got on to "The Boom-boom Bali" tragedy. I nearly did a double back-flip when she told me, in all seriousness, that that could never happen in Jogja. "Why?" Because they have The Sultan of Jogja. Well - excuse me, but I was gob-smacked by that. I tried to tell her, in as nice a way as possible, that "The Sultan" is just another powerful Indonesian jerk. He runs his 'castle' thing, or whatever you want to call it, and has a bunch of women doing highly detailed sarong work and pays them a pitence. Of course, they are probably proud to work/slave for this freak.
There are a lot of beggars in Jogja. Every traffic light you come to has heaps of them trying to sell you all kinds of rubbish (gorilla masks blew my mind away). Tinka-tinka-tinka with things that look like guitars but sound like --- My favourite was a very scary woman on the northern ring road: she had it all. Lousy make-up, a boom-chika-boom-choka boom box trying to scare the hell out of everybody who actually stopped at the lights. "Playing" popular dangdut tunes.
I lie. My real favourite was the really mad woman on the eastern road who directed traffic, right outside of a police station. Pull up at the lights and she wanted to charge you for parking, blowing her whistle all the time. Early in the piece, I told her I didn't have any small money (which was true), and she believed me, and I became a kind of "VIP" stopping at that particular traffic light. I bet she's still there. In a western country, she'd probably be put away, somewhere. Here - it's kind of "no problem". That's one of the fascinating (and galling) things about Asian countries in general, I guess.