Errand Epics

Okay folks, I’m going to post a few entries before I head to Maine with one goal in mind: to head off any whinging about my lack of posts.

So I’d like to start with a short language misadventure story from last week. As luck would have it, my Indonesian visa ran out just five days before our flight to the US. So I had to schedule a quick round-trip to Singapore to extend my stay through next week. We have a favorite travel agency at Plaza Semanggi (or “Planggi” if you’re trying to conserve syllables) one of the more Indonesian-style malls. They’re pretty good, but they don’t speak English. Herein sets the stage for my language adventure.

After some clumsy negotiating, I find a flight for Friday, the last day of my valid visa. The young agent asks in slang-y Indonesian when I would like to return: “blah mau blah kembali blah kepan?” Oh, I say, return the same day; “Hari sama.” Ok, says she, blah blah blah blah Friday? Um, says I, yes. Hari sama. I want to come back in the evening of the same day if possible.

Well, it turns out that I had confirmed a return flight for the next Friday. Apparently “same day” only refers to a day with the same name, not necessarily the same place in time.

That itinerary would put me in Singapore for more than a week. In fact, it would mean that I’d have to miss my flight to Boston.

How does it end? Well I’m back in Jakarta and getting ready to leave on Wednesday. The travel agent changed my flight while I was on my way to Singapore for no extra charge. I had a nice Indian vegetarian lunch at my favorite Changi airport restaurant, and got back to Jakarta in the evening.

There have been so many little errand-gone bad adventures over the last year. It’s a funny class of travel story, because they’re sort of hard to tell. The best travel stories have some kind of real disaster or unintended hardship, but they’ve got to be big enough to bother mentioning. In Jakarta among other expat friends, the errand-gone-bad story has a big market. We swap them all the time. Scary motorcycle taxi rides, accidentally ordering food you don’t want, getting stuck in a traffic jam for four hours in the rain.

“Today I tried to go see a movie but there were no English subtitles. You should have seen the drama that ensued when we walked out and asked to see another movie instead.”

That’s a true story. Happened to our friends. The manager called a meeting and blamed the poor couple for failing to realize their error before the movie started. It ends as well as many such stories do. Instead of a French art film , they saw Spiderman III.

It’s not a Joseph Conrad narrative, but those moments can feel just as alienating and desperate and even exotic. They’re hard. Little punctuated moments in the story arc of our adjustment.

Sometime, I’ll tell you the one about my trip to the post office where I had to check in at seven different desks to mail a letter.