My Walk to Work

Most days I walk to work. I try to be in my office every morning during weekdays and occasionally in the afternoon. I dislike walking to work in the afternoon since it is either too hot or raining. Walking to school takes me about 20 minutes, which is reasonable earlier in the morning but by noon can be a bit much. We have a car so I could drive but I enjoy the exercise as well as getting to know our neighbourhood.

My walk takes me through a small alley past Chorus, our local Mini-mart store. Apparently it also has a recording studio but I am not sure what that means. Following the alley, I come out on to Jalan Gejayan, one of the main North/South roads in Jogja. Crossing this, I walk down a small street that has a nice hotel, Pura Artha, on it. Occasionally we go to this hotel to swim in their pool.

At the end of the street, I turn down a smaller alley. I don't know the name of this street but I call it Jalan Kunci, or Key street. Half the street is taken up with small stalls where you can have keys cut. As far as I can tell, all the stalls offer identical services. This isn't unusual here in Indonesia. For example, it isn't unusual to find, grouped together, a dozen or so Nokia stores all selling the same Nokia products. My guess is that someone owns the land and, instead of having one big store, divided the property up into small units. Labour is very cheap so the owner employs a large number of young people who hopefully will lure in friends and acquaintances. If I didn't know someone, I am not sure how I would choose one store over another.

On Jalan Kunci, I also pass our local video store that sells pirated DVDs. It is very difficult to find legal DVDs in Indonesia, and in fact I am not sure whether any DVDs here are legal. When I am talking about legal, I am not talking about legal under Indonesian law, which is extremely generous when it comes to copying material, but legal in the sense of being a copy that was made according to the conditions originally fixed to the DVD. For example, some DVDs sold here are labeled as 'Original', but what this means is that someone copied it from a legal DVD. This would be opposed to those DVDs which come from digital recordings made by someone sitting in a movie theatre. We have a few of these and it is not uncommon to see people blocking the camera as they move about the theatre. The movies that I am reasonably certain are legal come in a VCD format. The disadvantage of this is that the format requires multiple discs for a single movie and there are no extra features. Also, the choice of movies available on VCD seems to be rather idiosyncratic so we rarely find movies we want on VCD. It used to bother me that we had pirated DVDs, but then I found that the store has a number X-Files seasons for sale, so now it doesn't bother me so much.

Following this alley to its end, I come out on Jalan Solo. It isn't actually called Jalan Solo but Indonesians have a very annoying habit of changing the name of a road every few blocks. Within a span of a few kilometers, this street has a half dozen names and I can't remember the names nor which parts of the road they name. It seems that a significant number of Indonesians have the same problem so roads will often have a name that won't show up on an official map but is the commonly known name. This street, for example, is the main highway between Yogyakarta and Solo so people will refer to it as Jalan Solo.

At first, crossing Jalan Solo was a bit intimidating. Jogja has a tremendous number of motorcycles. I am not sure if 'motorcycle' is quite right since they are more like scooters having no clutch. Here, these vehicles are called 'bebeks,' which is Indonesian for 'duck'. It seems that many vehicles here are referred to by animal names, so we drive a Zebra, friends of ours drive a Kijang (deer), and one can drive a Panther as well. However, a real motorcycle, that is one with a clutch, is a man's bike. What makes bebeks so popular is that they are relatively cheap so families will often have one or two around for quick trips or for kids in school. Since Jogja is a university town, the place is flooded with these bikes. And flood is an appropriate term. Motorcycles don't obey traffic laws so when one drives a car in Jogja one first watches for other cars, and then for bikes. The bikes move around cars like a wave moves around your legs at the beach. As long as one doesn't do anything sudden, the bikes will move around your vehicle without problem, adjusting to your movement. Driving in Jogja was quite intimidating at first because there are just so many bikes and they fill up any empty space on the road. But now I have gotten used to driving here, using the rule that if I have an accident with a bike, at least I won't be hurt. This isn't true if I am walking, so crossing was a bit of an adventure. However, now I have raised my risk tolerance and am relatively comfortable dodging bikes.

Universitas Islam Negeri is on Jalan Solo. The campus is made up almost entirely of new buildings. The campus itself is almost 50 years old but there was an earthquake recently that destroyed or severely damaged most of the buildings. The building my office is in is not quite finished but in use. The main construction project on campus is a new mosque. The old mosque was very well-known and a tremendous amount of effort was put into trying to save it, but the damage was too extensive and it was demolished. The new buildings are nice and many of the rooms, including my office, have air conditioning. However, the building where I teach my undergraduate course only has one classroom with air conditioning. Needless to say I will be trying to avoid teaching anymore undergraduate courses.

I try to walk as much as possible but I am not sure how long I will keep this up. With all the vehicles on the road, and people's apparent interest in contributing as much exhaust fumes as possible into the atmosphere, air quality is very poor. I have noticed that my lungs and throat are not as healthy as I would prefer. However, I usually enjoy the walk and the interesting bits of Indonesian life that I see.

Phil