MOVING – to the new apartment

Finally. After repeated promises by the contractor that tomorrow everything will be ready, we have finally made it to the new apartment. No great distance involved. Just from tower one to tower two, same floor and same unit number. The new apartment is the mirror image of the old one, which leads to quite a lot of confusion. The fridge is no longer to the left when entering the kitchen, and the dining table is now to the right when entering the apartment.

But what joy to see the books on the shelves rather than boxed, and the paintings and maps on the walls. Bought myself a new drill, a Bosch  GSB 16 RE Professional, and spent the whole of yesterday drilling holes and hanging the pictures. And the books, tiring to put them up, but finally they are accessible again.

The best part of the apartment is the bathroom. Rather than stepping into a bathtub and drawing a plastic curtain to take a shower, now it is a real shower one steps into for a real rain-shower experience—a large shower head to soak you, and if you want to hold the shower head in your hand you turn the knob for this second option. The tiles in the cubicle are anti-slip… so simply enjoy.

And the view is old and new Jakarta combined: the red-tile roofs of old, and high rise apartments of the past decade.

FRANCOIS VALENTIJN – preacher, plagiarist, encyclopaedist

For someone generally referred to as the Preacher of Ambon, the epitaph of plagiarist with a tendency for self-aggrandisement does not seem to be fitting. Or am I naïve… Anyway, according to my sources[1] he was both.

Born in Dordrecht where his father was deputy principal of the Latin school he read theology, philosophy and related subjects in Utrecht and Leiden. In 1684 he finished his studies and was called as a minister to the Netherlands Indies where he arrived in Batavia end-December 1685, and in April 1686 Amboina. Under the guidance of among others Rumphius he quickly mastered the Malay language and in slightly more than three months he was able to conduct his first service in early-August of that year. Against his bitter objections he was subsequently posted on Banda—he was forced to take the position as his superiors told him that it was Banda or nothing, with repayment of the travelling expenses Amsterdam-Batavia-Amboina. After 11 months on Banda he returned to Amboina (1688) where he started the translation of the Bible into Ambon Malay, and the search for a wealthy wife. This latter task was accomplished in 1692 when he married Cornelia Snaats, widow of his friend and patron Hendrik Leydekker, who had left Cornelia four children and a significant fortune. May 1694 he returned to Holland accompanied by wife and five children—four Leydekkers and one Valentijn. He returned to Dordrecht and was ready to settle down. At the request of the Compagnie and persuaded by many friends he, however,  agreed to return to the East.

Although the VOC Board had agreed to his condition that he would be posted in Amboina—and only Amboina, without any obligation to visit the outlying islands—upon arrival in Batavia he was assigned the post of army chaplain for a campaign in East Java.

Quite obviously the masters in Batavia and Amsterdam had different sets of priorities, a situation that also nowadays is not uncommon in globally operating organisations.

Message Regional Office to HQ:  we need an additional marketing unit, our geographic region superimposed on Europe would stretch from Ireland to Moscow, you have representatives in nearly all countries in that area, we have to service that area by ourselves.

No doubt Valentijn complained bitterly, but in the same way as during his first tour, he had to comply. Worn out he returned to Batavia after four months in the field. Finally, early-1707 he could continue his journey to Ambon. A further reason for complaint concerned his translation of the Bible. The VOC principles in Batavia did not approve his translation into Ambon Malay, They insisted on the use of High Malay. This fight dragged on and the Compagnie even threatened to disallow his return—at their expense.

Permission to return home was finally given in 1713 and after a difficult return voyage he settled again in Dordrecht. There he devoted himself fully to his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën—more than 5,000 pages of text and over a thousand maps and illustrations which took Valentijn 15 years to complete; and in an astonishing burst of speed was printed within four years, with the last volume published some eight months before his death in 1727.

Old and New East Indies, consisting of five parts published in eight volumes, was the first encyclopaedia of the Indonesian archipelago and surrounding regions and contained sections on Amboina and the Moluccas, North and East Celebes, New Guinea, Makassar, Batavia, Java, Sumatra, China, Formosa, Japan, Persia, Coromandel, Bengal, Ceylon, Malacca, the Cape of Good Hope, and Mauritius. Plus, the lives of the Great Moguls, the Governor Generals of the Netherlands East Indies, flora and fauna of Amboina, Amboina church affairs, and accounts of his two (return) voyages to the Indies.

The systematic arrangement of this magnum opus is a bit chaotic: Sumatra, for instance, is given a place between Malacca and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), while Celebes (Sulawesi) is partially covered in Part 1 and also in Part 3. And yes, he used material of others and did not always specify original sources. And yes, it is an opinionated hotchpotch of information. Valentijn displays a lack of interest and knowledge—typical for his epoch—about the native peoples of the different islands. Of the Javanese he for instance writes that the men are typically murderous, perfidious and cruel… but also ready to cowardly knife someone for a few copper coins. And in respect of the Sumatrans (all ethnic groups of the island combined into one) he maintains that it is not necessary to describe them in detail as they do not much differ from the Javanese. But still, it is the first encyclopaedia of the region and until now retains information of great value—his maps, for instance, are exceptionally accurate, and his description of Ambon and Batavia shed light on conditions of these two places that have not been recorded anywhere else.

The amount and detail of information is moreover staggering, from the number of craftsmen by skill in a certain year in Sri Lanka, and the names and years of assignment of the heads of the Dutch trading post on Deshima Island in Nagasaki harbour, to a lion hunt in the Cape.

The whole eight volumes have been reprinted in facsimile and some parts are available from Amazon. For those interested to see more I recommend the following URL which will take you to Part 5.


http://archive.org/stream/oudennieuwoostin05vale#page/n384/mode/thumb

Enjoy!

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[1]   Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, Martinus Nijhoff, 1919

        ARCENGEL History of Netherlands East Indies

        Wikipedia

BALI – before the tourists invaded... (2)

During the centuries, all nine Balinese kings—Klungkung, Karangasem, Mengwi, Badung, Bangli, Tabanan, Gianjar, Buleleng, and Jembrana—remained an unruly and obstinate lot, fiercely independent and not in the least interested in following the rules and regulations that the Dutch wanted to impose on them. They strongly objected to the curtailment of their power. Those pesky Dutch wanted to stop the nearly incessant fighting among the kingdoms, while not giving thought to how their demand for slaves would then be met. The rajas would also no longer be allowed to attack and plunder ships flying the red-white-and-blue, and not even have the right to cargo salvaged from ships stranded on their coasts.

Only in 1839 did all kings agree to recognise Dutch sovereignty. But whatever treaty was signed, its actual enactment was poor. The kings (all nine) remained stroppy and showed in no uncertain way that they did not agree to colonial power being superimposed on them. Unsurprisingly the colonial government did not stop complaining that its representatives were not received in a friendly and courteous manner, Dutch ships were plundered, and that letters from the Governor General were not responded to. This lead to a series of expeditions to punish the—some of them successful, quite a number not.

One wonders, however, what priority Bali was given in the colonial policy of the Dutch. The VOC's, and later the colonial government's, main interest was trade, and in that respect Bali had little to offer. Slaves were no longer a traded commodity after the British handed the Netherlands East Indies back to the Dutch, and Bali lacked the spices of Banda and Ambon, or the large foreign owned estates (coffee, tea, rubber) of Java and Sumatra.

Supremacy of the Dutch was not fully established till the twentieth century when in 1906, the raja of Badung, together with members of the nobility, some of his wives and children, and members of the royal household, marched into the gunfire of the Dutch troops, preferring death over a curtailment of his royal power and having to bend his knee to the Dutch. This puputan was repeated two years later in Klungkung. And after the remaining unruly elements were deported to Lombok, law and order was established. Dutch law and order, that is. Dutch sources of the day report that the common people were not sorry to see the kings go, as they had had enough of the lack of legal certainty (for the non-privileged) and the continual state of war that had been part of the old system.

That the population felt relieved might even be true and not wishful thinking on the part of the Dutch. According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz[1] it is the Balinese who have the entrepreneurial drive to look for opportunities and to benefit from changing conditions. Whether made possible by the imposition of the new law and order, or because improved transport facilities opened Bali to the world, tourism started to become a profitable service activity.

Although negligible by present day standards, the number of tourists in 1930 was large enough to warrant the first tourist guide to Bali[2]. As an illustration of the Balinese entrepreneurial nous, the writer of the tourist guide, G.H. von Faber, remarks that woodcarvings of quality were becoming difficult to find, as carvers and traders, having noted that the tourists were undiscerning in their appreciation of the products, would prefer to produce virtually mass produced low-quality work and thereby improve their cash flow.

The 136 lorries, 264 busses and 787 rental cars, part of which were serving the tourist industry in 1930, have grown and grown and are still growing. Kuta, which in those days was a quaint fishing village with a beach and a government cabana to change into bathing costumes, has outgrown itself. Hotels, restaurants, bars, cafés, shops and market stands cater to the tourists' needs—cold beer, continental and American breakfasts at all hours, beach wear, souvenirs, it's all available at reasonable prices. What's more, thousands of foreigners have started a business, or taken up residence on the island, finding the official paperwork to get permits and licenses fairly easy, definitely when compared to other places in Indonesia.

If only the VOC, and later the colonial government, had let the kings keep their beachcombing rights, and sent tourists and cruise ships rather than Navy flotillas and marines, would not the Balinese, the common people, have brought about a smooth, silent and bloodless power change from the inside.

Sources:       Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië, Martinus Nijhoff, 's Gravenhage, 1917
                  BALI, Het Land Der Duizend Tempels, G.H. von Faber, H. van Ingen, Soerabaia

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[1] Peddlers and Princes, Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns, Clifford Geertz, The University of Chicago Press, 1963. A comparative study of two Indonesian towns—Modjokuto, a market town in East Java, and Tabanan, a court town in southwest Bali.

[2] BALI, het land der duizend tempels, G.H. von Faber

BALI – before the tourists invaded…

Trader-colonisers from the coast of Coromandel brought Hinduism to Java. The religion was adopted by the Majapahit kingdom in the eastern part of the island. Bali was a vassal state of Majapahit and became a safe haven for refugees from the kingdom when Islam became the prevailing religion.

The original inhabitants of Bali are the Bali Aga. Though a few Bali Aga villages remain today, it must be assumed that the two groups socialised and mixed greatly. From then Bali and the Balinese were largely left to their own device. The Dutch, who first appeared in 1597, were not really colonisers, a colonial power, yes, but even that was a slow and cumbersome process. It went like this. After the brothers De Houtman laid a first contact with the island, it took the Compagnie (Dutch East India Company, VOC), and after 1800 when the company went bankrupt and was dissolved, the government of the Dutch East Indies, more than 300 years to become the administrative and governing power on Bali. See map of regions held by VOC/Colonial Government.

evolution of the Dutch East Indies

During the centuries, the Balinese kings remained an unruly and obstinate lot, all nine of them: Klungkung as the most powerful, together with Karangasem, Mengwi, Badung, Bangli, Tabanan, Gianjar, Buleleng, and Jembrana.

Numerous expeditions had to be sent to ensure that trade agreement were adhered to, Dutch ships not plundered, the payment of fines—in one case 75,000 Dutch guilders, that would be millions of euros when converted to the present—and in general to enforce the power of the colonial government. Interestingly, until the British reign (1811-1815) the main commodity traded from Bali was… slaves. The importance of this can be seen from the fact that in 1778 the number of Balinese living in and around Batavia was 13,000. Raffles put a stop to the trade and it was never revived.

Many of the expeditions ended in failure and supremacy of the Dutch was not fully established till the twentieth century. In 1906, the king of Badung together with members of the nobility, some of his wives and children, and the royal household marched into the gunfire of the Dutch troops, preferring death over a curtailment of his power and bending the knee to the Dutch. This puputan was repeated two years later in Klungkung. Unruly elements were deported to Lombok, and law and order was established. This would of course depend on from where this is observed, but Dutch sources of the day report that the local population was not sorry to see the kings, with the accompanying lack of legal certainty for the common people, and the continual state of war, go.

This might, however, be true as only 20 years later a first tourist guide[1] was published, with the writer complaining that woodcarvings of quality were difficult to find, as carvers and traders, having noted that the tourists would be undiscerning in their appreciation of the products, would offer virtually mass produced low-quality work to improve their cash flow.

Tourist flows in those days were negligible according to present day standards. Total length of paved roads was some 800 km, which in 1930 was used by 136 lorries, 264 busses and 787 rental cars, part of these serving the tourist industry. Two hotels in Denpasar offered a total of 56 rooms—Bali Hotel 38 rooms and Hotel Satriya 18. Singaraja had a total of 9 hotel rooms and Kintamani 14 in two pasanggrahan (guesthouse)—one operated by the Royal Packet Navigation Company (KPM) and one by the government. 

pasanggrahan at Kintamani



The KPM maintained shipping routes between the islands and Batavia, and with Singapore, Penang and Hong Kong. The KPM port on Bali was Buleleng.

The full tourist invasion started when the western countries had recovered from WW-II and economic growth and development kicked in. And in the 80s it really took off.

To be continued.



Sources:  Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie;  Martinus Nijhyoff, 1917
Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam

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[1] BALI, het land der duizend tempels, G.H. von Faber

GERMAN BRATWURST – highly recommended…

Yesterday I went exploring. The word has a bit of an exotic whiff to it, don't you agree: seafarers explore an unknown coast, and an adventure ventures into the interior… Hardly appropriate for the car journey on 4-lane toll roads to the nearby satellite town of BSD. But I did prepare a map and a written text on what directions to follow and where to get off the toll road. Pounding rain limited the view and on a clear day I might have seen the second exit sign to BSD CITY—the instructions read exit BSD City, take the second exit on the right! That was confusing: highways in a left-hand traffic system would normally not have an exit on the right. So, when taking the BSD CITY exit I realised that it was the first when I spotted another BSD CITY exit some 100 metres down the toll road I had just left…

the German Centre

And the rain was a real non-stop tropical downpour. The roads got flooded in the lower parts, traffic was down to a crawl and I hoped that the floodwater did not hide a major hole in the road surface. It took me a good 40 minutes to get to the road where the second exit would have taken me, and after a few more wrong turns I finally reached my target: the German Centre for Industry and Trade, or more specifically, the Metro Sky Garden restaurant operated by Food Evolution Indonesia.

This company is the producer of what I think is the best bread in Indonesia—I wrote about their bread in a previous post some weeks ago. My present purpose for coming here was no the bread, but the German sausages, the display of which on their website is so mouth-watering. Not only the sausages, by the way, but as I'm particularly partial to sausages, this was my main reason for going there.

After a long talk with Andreas Stokowy, the director of Food Evolution Indonesia, and studying their home-delivery menu, I decided to buy the German bratwurst, mainly because I could compare these sausages to ones produced by other companies in Indonesia.

At home I immediately started to prepare dinner and decided to have the sausages with potato salad and a tossed green salad. In case you are interested, I make the potato salad with extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of red wine vinegar, mayonnaise (Korean), chopped onions and garlic, tomatoes diced, dried crushed red pepper, chives (dried), and salt. For the quantities—tablespoons, teaspoons, cloves, etc—just follow your own taste. I am, for instance, always a bit heavy on the garlic… not everybody likes that.

Back to the bratwurst. They are good!!! Andreas told me that they are made in Bali according to his special recipe. Well done, Andreas! They are excellent! And the best part is that their skin does not pop during frying—the juices and taste thus stay inside rather than being dumped in the pan.

For those who want to enjoy the taste of Germany too, the sausages and other meat can be bought at the Metro Sky Garden, of course, but also at Giant supermarket in BSD and Bintaro. And the bread is available in HERO Kemang.

Enjoy.

JAKARTA – the only change is…

Back in Jakarta, good to be back, Nias is nice but definitely rural, even the main town, Gunungsitoli, is apart from the racing motorcycles, distinctly rural. And something that this urbanite has not seen for a long time is the total blackness at night; if there weren't that many clouds one would be able to see the full magnificence of the Milky Way.

On my last Sunday there I was treated to this double rainbow… as seen from my room in Hotel National.

I have been back in Jakarta for only a few days but have spent several hours already in gridlock. And in unexpected locations and unusual times.

This is of course, long after the protest actions against the announced increase in the price of petrol and the torrential rains that had a devastating effect on traffic flow!

The worst case was on Sudirman. I was stuck in the slow lane and speeds were measured in mph, meters per hour, not miles. The fast lane was moving along nicely, OK, not racing, but driving in second or third gear. Openings from the slow to the fast lane are few and far between, but all except the last one before Semanggi were blocked by concrete blocks and a few policemen. Such a waste of road space, if half of the cars in the slow lane would have been allowed onto the main lanes all lanes could have been moving.

So I think I'll try one more time. In a previous post I called it "Let's advise the traffic controllers…" The response to this call for cases of regulations that actually strangle the flow, not improve it, was zero-nil-zilch-nothing-nix-nada as readers in Jakarta, and outside, remained mum.

But let's give it another try. This  time I'll call it "Let's start an association of concerned car users in jakarta (accu)" and with the right backing we will be able to have a say in the way traffic is regulated in Jakarta. We might even promise the authorities that we will accept an increase in the price of petrol of 1000 or even 4500 Rupiah (a doubling of the current price) if those in charge of traffic control were instructed to listen to accu and use a participatory approach to improve the traffic system.

The first thing to do will, of course, be designing a catching bumper sticker, or in line with common practice, a rear-window stickers. Anyone…? For a small fee of 30% of revenue accu will grant you sole sticker-rights, a sure way to mint money.

NIAS – the only constant is change

Back again after an absence of nearly a year. Back to monitor the progress and performance of the final post tsunami and earthquake project, that is, the Multi Donor Finance / World Bank project to improve the livelihoods of the island's poorer communities through strengthening their organisational base by creating Farmers Groups, and helping them to increase the income generating potential of their rubber, cocoa and rice crops. Wow, what length (of the sentence). It could have been divided into more comprehensible sections. But I'll leave it as is.

Coming in from the airport—first Jakarta to Medan on Garuda, and then Medan to Gunungsitoli on a narrow-bodied prop plane operated by Wings—nothing seemed to have changed. Even the bad patches of road were still there, as were the churches every kilometre or so, the doorsmeer/doorsmer places to have your car washed (the meaning of the original Dutch word is 'oil change'), the sea on the right and the many mopeds overtaking cars on an outside bend. The office, however, had grown. There was a proper nameplate on the outside and many new faces inside.

And the next day life took up its normal routine of the short term project worker.

For lunch I went to my usual place, the BPK eatery, a mere three-minute walk from the office. The owner smiled broadly when we shook hands, and enquired whether I had come back. Yes, obviously, but that is of course not the proper way to respond to a friendly but meaningless remark. I placed my order and the staff even remembered that I took my terong belanda juice without sugar… The place was crowded, even at this fairly late lunch hour. The baby that a year ago was learning to walk on the cemented floor was now running, and a smaller version was carried around. The owner, a Karo Batak, was sitting in his customary place counting the customers' payments and dropping it into the drawer of his little des. Day in day out… supervising his staff, counting the money, greeting a customer, counting the money, supervising his staff… the only change from last year was a third item on the menu: instead of only roast pork and pork soup, there now was gold carp. No idea how it is prepared, grilled or in a curry or pan fried as I don't like the muddy taste of gold carp.

I wonder whether he is a first generation immigrant from the Karo lands on Sumatra just across the sea. That would have been the most important change in his life because till his now toddler son takes over he will be sitting behind his little desk supervising his staff, counting the money, greeting a customer, counting the money, supervising his staff. The restaurant has ten or so long tables with some 50 to 60 chairs. My guess is that each chair is occupied between four and six times a day. At an average of say 20,000 Rupiah per serving, the daily take would provide him with a pretty middle-class income.

But how does one spend that, how does one enjoy the fruits of one's work when for the next 20 or 30 years one is tethered to a daily routine and a desk. He is such a cheerful fellow so I suspect that he has found the answer.

Maybe I should ask him to start a blog to share his secret with all those unhappy rutinistas out there.

QUANTA – the vibrating energy we turn into particles, or, quantum physics translated for the common folk

Ever wondered where we come from, or what we are supposed to do here on this planet of ours?

Look no further…!

Remember what you learned in school: all things physical are composed of molecules, and these are in turn broken down into atoms—a water molecule consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom: H2O. And it does not stop at atoms, as the atoms are built up of protons, neutrons and electrons, while protons and neutrons themselves are built up of quarks. It is a bit more complicated than that, but as it is not my intention to dive into particle physics, let's stop here.

I'll go off on slightly different tangent as the subatomic pieces have some very intriguing properties: these subatomic particles do not behave like objects or pieces. For example, an object cannot be in two places at the same time. The laptop I'm using to write this post cannot at the same time be in my carry bag. Subatomic particles, however, can. Take for example an electron. We think of it as a small sphere circling around the core of an atom. And when an electron is shot at a television screen, a tiny point of light appears at the place of impact. Here the electron thus appears to be an object. However, when an electron is fired at a barrier with two slits in it, it can go through the two slits simultaneously. That means the 'object' is in two places at the same time.

No object can do that. But a wave can. Unlike an object, a wave has no exact location. It is spread around over space. It is a frequency, a vibration.

Subatomic particles can thus behave like an object and like a wave/frequency/vibration. They are not either a particle or a wave, they are both. Basically they are entities of energy, which scientists have called quanta. And quantum physicists believe that the universe is entirely made up of these energy units, these quanta.

Think about it. What we hear is frequencies picked up by our ears and decoded by our brain into sounds. Our eyes pick up optical frequencies that are decoded by our brain into images. The Hungarian biophysicist Georg von Békésy demonstrated that the skin, too, responds to the frequencies of touch. The brain thus appears to be a frequency decoder and we hear, see and feel the frequencies that quantum physicists maintain are the building blocks of the whole universe.

Fine, let's assume that that is true. But the question then pops up: when do these quanta behave like objects and when do they act like a wave? Or put differently, when do waves become solid? And this is the answer:

the only time that a quantum manifests as a particle, and thus becomes solid,
is when one consciously tries to observe it!

So only when we look at the quanta do they becomes an object, for all the rest of the time they behave like a wave. We thus see the quanta into solid existence! The action of looking at them makes them solid. That is quite something.

What you see is what you get. Does that also mean: what you don't see is what you don't get? Not really. When, for instance, seating yourself on a chair with your eyes closed, you do not end up on the floor. Seeing would thus need to be interpreted as seeing the object with your mind's eye, or knowing the object is there.

In respect of the questions posed in the first sentence, the where do we come from is the least interesting as we are nothing but a set of quanta arranged in a certain pattern. And whether this is due to the Big Bang or a Creative Force is not of major importance. The second question, however, is. What are we supposed to do here, what is our role in the universe. I expand the scope of the geographic are to 'universe', not only 'planet', as quantum scientists and a whole lot of thinkers before them have stated that As Above So Below[1]. So the quest becomes: what is our role in the universe?

As we are a set of quanta that give form to other sets o quanta around us, it can be argued that we are Sparks of the Big Bang, or Children of the Creative Force, and thus can influence, have a say in, our evolutionary processes—and that, of course, in the widest context, ie, including our planet and the universe.

OK, let's for the moment assume that this is correct, remains the question how can this influence be executed. Well, by seeing with the mind's eye, or course, in other words, by manifesting your desires. Admittedly not as easy as it sounds, but it can be learned. There are many gurus out there willing to teach you how to get what you wish for, some at a price and others for free. The basics are:

1-strong desire, 2-request, 3-believe that your request has already been fulfilled, 4-relax.

And of course this is not restricted to the pot of gold left at your doorstep by a kind-hearted pixy. Personal happiness and health, love and harmony, can all be included in the wish list. But so can peace and international harmony, environmental sustainability and welfare for all…

Try! And remember, if you don't see it (with your mind's eye) it will remain a frequency!

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[1] The concept was first laid out in The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, in the words "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing".