I got up the other morning (trying to hide a serious hangover) at 6am after trying to return to the peace of sleep, I'd been awake for an hour, woken by the morning prayer at 5am. I walked out of my room and was handed a piece of paper containing a list of questions by Slemat, the son of the kos owner. I rubbed my red eyes, pushed back the need to vomit and asked him what was going on. He told me that one of the local kids from the village who had seen me playing hacky sack on the village soccer field (I think I'm introducing Indonesia to hacky sack) had a project for school and i would make the perfect interviewee. I looked at the questions, many generic, but several asking about the culture of Australia, the culture i was into, and the differences between Indonesian and Australian culture.

I sat there for some time trying to work out what the fuck Australian culture was, and was left a little lost for answers. It's a weird feeling when your a native of a country, have spent your whole life there, and yet cant explain to someone what the culture is. In Indonesia it's really easy; there's wayang kulit (leather puppet shows which go all night), there's gamelan, there's local traditions a plenty and there's food which goes with every region (can you imagine if from Melbourne to Sydney the language, food and ethnicity changed completely) in the country plus much more.

I spoke to Kiki about it and explained that Australia is a country of immigrants so it varies but he totally didn't seem satisfied, he said that surely there was some specifically Australian culture. I thought a bit more and it occurred to me that going to have a drink was certainly a cultural pastime in Australia, whether you were at the pub or anywhere else. I told him this and he didn't look impressed and said that using such a statement as an answer for the young student would paint a bad image of Australia. I thought about it and i wasn't really all that impressed either. What a fucking conundrum, a country without culture.

I'm sure I'll cop slack for this from the patriotic of my friends, but have a really good think about it, what else do Australians really get into. Oh, of course, i forgot, we love sport (i say "we" but i am right here removing myself from "we", I despise Australian sporting culture, the macho bullshit it entails, and the intellect it robs from a population who are more interested in fools like Shane Warne and Ben Cousins than reading books to enlighten themselves). However, I was meant to be answering for Australian culture in general, so i did list sport as a cultural pastime (yet even that is debatable). But even then, sporting culture in Australia is so closely linked with drinking. It is by no means exclusive to Australians, but I am constantly reminded of the irony of really unhealthy drunk people watching elite sports stars who they adore yet make little effort to mimic. Then i remembered the great tradition of the Aussie BBQ, having a few snags, meeting your friends, and thats right, having a drink. The only cultural pastime i could really think of which didn't involve drinking was going to the beach, and i smiled to myself because i can put myself strongly and confidently (in the eyes of the Indonesians) into that category.

I'm not by any means saying i don't love to have a drink, or that i wholly despise the Australian drinking culture, but i must admit that i was stumped when trying to think of what Australians are into as a "people".

This point became very pertinent last night when the option of a wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) show was on offer and I, along with alot of the other Australians in the group opted to go for a drink instead. I know i sound like I'm playing both sides here, and i am, but it was interesting because it felt like the social thing to do (also, drinking in Ramadan period, which started this morning at 3am is really poor form, worse than usual when its already looked down upon firmly, so we wont be drinking for a month and needed to give it a nudge). Going for a drink in Yogya is a bit of a task anyway. Jalan Malioboro, the street of tourism and consequently vice is quite far from my kos.

Our groups local drinking hole is creatively called Cafe Bintang (Bintang meaning star but also being the national Indonesian brew) and sadly our group have now got a bit of a reputation there; know the staff, some of the regulars, and all the young Indos who chill out the front drinking local coffee liqueur mixed with beer. I hate the place (because i feel like a filthy tourist in there) but i do feel at home, and unlike many things in Indonesia, having a few beers is not foreign. In the short time we've been here one of the girls has managed to miss her curfew (not hard in an islamic kos which enforces front gates locked by 9.30) and had to sleep beside the stage with the staff who do the same. I got kissed on the mouth by a filthy drunken Dutch-Arabic man of 50 years old who was not gay but just way way way too friendly, and many a drunken bowl of nasi goreng has been consumed in a vain attempt to stave of aweful hangovers in the face of 7am lectures. Sounds like a bad place doesn't it? Its redeeming feature however is the cover bands that play most nights. Yeah, i never thought i'd say that I'd go to a place for the cover band but they are amazing. They play all the rolling stones tunes from the mid-sixties which never get a spin due to the overwhelming success and notoriety of later tracks like "brown sugar" (see video of "time is on my side" recorded the other night). Last night we were privy to some amazing Doors renditions as well as a little Dylan.

In what turned out to be a drunken mistake i left Cafe Bintang to go to an Indonesian reggae gig with my friend Bara (one of the drunk local teens who chills out the front of Cafe Bintang). We took his ancient vespa slowly through the backstreets to the gig. I presume that his backstreet genius was intended to avoid police but it also involved numerous unmarked speed humps (hilariously named "polisi tidur", translated as sleeping policemen) which continuously surprised us and left me a little rattled after nearly bouncing off the back seat a few times.

The reggae party was pretty weird, and as with so many gigs in Indonesia and the continuing legality of cigarette advertising, the cover charge was about the price of a pack of cigarettes, and as one might guess, each patron received a pack of cigarettes upon entry from the company sponsoring the event, healthy huh? In terms of the gig itself, I guess i should have thought about the concept of reggae in a country where you can get many years in jail for a very small quantity of grass. Some may say I'm missing the point of reggae, but if reggae is all about a state of mind, and all the people who create and created the most famous reggae music are and were really stoned, its easy to see how the Indonesians might miss the point (they don't forget the cheesy rasta clothes though, if i see another marijuana leaf on something i'll die). Just a footnote here on the confusion of foreign cultural meaning which often occurs here, I have now seen numerous photos, tattoos and posters of Hitler and the Swastika. I quizzed one of my very normal and quiet friends about why he had such a symbol on his wall and he really didn't seem sure, just that it was famous and that Hitler was a prominent figure in western history. I tried to explain to him the level of bad taste such a display involved but he didn't understand. We've even seen an Indonesian skinhead, which would be hilarious if it weren't so misguided (consider the irony though, can you imagine if this kid ever met a real skinhead and they made him aware that he was exactly what they despised, and that if Hitler had had his way, he would have knocked off the Asians as well). Enough deviation, back to the reggae gig. As i said, the party did indeed miss the point, i heard plenty of Ska mixed in, and the only real reggae was very generic Bob Marley tracks, predictable but boring. Because really, how many floppy Rasta (red, green, yellow) can one party endure.

Either way, I'm off the booze for a little while as I'm fasting for Ramadan. No food, water (although I'm not adhering to that, i wont survive, the bule is condemned to constant sweatiness) or cigarettes between sunrise and sunset, should be interesting...

From Yogya With Love

Lindsay