Holiday in Ciamis and Pangandaran

8/22/2012

I just got home from a one week vacation for Idul Fitri. Idul Fitri is the huge celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. It is one of the largest holidays on the Muslim calendar, much like Christmas in Christianity. Every year people flock home to where their oldest family member lives, or where their family lives. For my family, that meant driving to Ciamis, a small town about two hours away from Bandung. But because most people in Indonesia leave the big cities and migrate to the small towns, all of the roads are full of dead stop traffic. Now when I say traffic, I don't mean "wow there are a few more cars on the road than normal", I mean that if we are lucky we will travel three kilometers in an hour. The short two hour drive took almost ten hours to complete. (When I get back to America I am sure that I will never complain about traffic again). When we finally got to Ciamis, my family stayed at a hotel for the night. At one point, the power went out for no apparent reason. When I asked my host sister why the power went out she said it could be any number of reasons, including a government  forced power outage to save power all over Indonesia, the hotel  might not have enough money to pay for power so they turned it off to save money, or there could be too many people in the city using too much power and the city could not handle it. Coming from a wealthy part of Florida, I am not used to losing power in anything less than hurricane like storms and all of these reasons made little sense to me. In the morning we woke up early, and the family all got in the car. I had no idea what was going on so, I did not have my camera with me. As we rode in the car, there were hundreds of people walking in the same direction. I was now very confused I did not have any idea what was going on. After a couple of minutes we arrived at the "Alun-alun" or the town square. We got out of the car and my host dad and brother went somewhere else while my host mother and sister walked together. My host mom bought newspaper which they laid all over the ground. On top of the newspaper they laid their prayer rugs and we sat down on the ground. We were soon joined by my host grandma and great-grandma. We all sat in the same area while we listened to the Mosque sounds (I don't really know how to describe then kind of a megaphone sound with a man singing or chanting in Arabic).  While we were waiting everyone started putting on elastic skirts and head-dresses that covered every inch of them (except their face). Even the youngest little girls were wearing their own. I suddenly felt naked in my short sleeved shirt and jeans. My host sister told me that the outfits are special and are for praying. After a little while, everyone stood up at once (there must have been a signal that I missed) and my host sister told me to stay sitting with her great-grandma (she must have been at least 90 and she could not stand up by herself very easily). Then with more of the chanting the congregation broke into prayer. They brought their hands to their mouths folded them, put them by their sides again, then they put their hands on their knees, stood up, then knelt down. They did this a couple of times all perfectly timed so that everyone did the same thing at the same time. The entire process took less than five minutes as I sat on the ground watching in wonder. I have never seen anything like that in my entire life, and I am sure that I would have never seen that if I had stayed in America. When the praying had ended my host sister walked me up to see another area so I could see how many people had been there. Thousands of people were all around a mosque that was at the front of the town square. I have never seen that much devotion in one place before, all of these people had traveled endless hours so that they could get here to pray for five minutes. My family took their prayer clothes off and we got back into the car. We went to the great-grandma's house. My family got to the small house first. My host sister warned me that some of her family would be coming to ask the great-grandma for forgiveness. Apparently for Idul Fitri it is tradition to ask everyone in the family older than you for forgiveness. To do this, we all stood in a line oldest to youngest. One at a time a person would ask forgiveness of everyone older than them until no one was older than them, at that point they would take a seat in the line and people would ask them for forgiveness. I participated hugging and kissing my great-grandma, my grandma, my dad, my mom, my uncle, my aunt, my brother and my sister. After this ceremony we ate a little and as we relaxed more and more people started showing up. I cannot remember  who I met, or how many people I met. All I know is that the small house was full to the point of bursting. After tons of people had arrived we repeated the 'forgiveness' ceremony with even more family members. After talking and hanging out for about an hour everyone started disappearing. Our family was one of the last people to leave. We finally made it out to the car and drove down the road a little until we ended up at a little graveyard. Everyone that had been at the house had relocated to the graveyard where we would remember those who had already passed away. The older members broke into a sad sort of song that I think was meant to morn and praise those that were already dead. We sat in the grave yard for half an hour listening to the singing.  We then drove to a different set of relative's house where we had another light snack and more social time before we went back to the hotel. I was then told that we would rest for an hour before we would leave for Pangandaran (a small beach town that my host family often vacations in). Apparently we had finished what we needed to do in Ciamis. This drive was much better, with much less traffic. It still took almost three hours to reach our destination, the Sophia hotel.  My host family is full of surprises, one of which might be that they own the Sophia hotel (named after my host mom). Diandra (my host sister) and I unpacked in our room and then we walked down to the beach. As I stood at the edge of the Indian Ocean and watched the sun set I could only think of the wonderful people that I know on the other side of the world, standing on different beach, with a different ocean watching the same sun rise. We played some games on the beach as a family, eat some local food and then went to sleep. Fanny is one of my cousins and she lives very close to my family in Bandung, so I had met her before. She also stayed in Diandra and my room. We woke up early in the morning and ran straight to the beach. There was already tons of people on the beach. We played in the ocean for a while, jumping in the waves then we ate some local vendor's food for breakfast. After breakfast the water was too cold for us to want to get in it again (a little colder than the ocean in Ponte Vedra) so we went to the hotel pool. When we were done we went back to our room to take a shower. The bathroom was set up so that the shower had no boundaries and the water sprayed all over the bathroom. Which meant that the floor in the bathroom was always wet. My cousins, my sister and I played cards for hours. I learned how to play lots of their games most of which were fun, some of which were confusing. After playing their games they begged me to teach them an American card game. Well, I love card games but most of the ones I play have complicated rules or need special cards so I taught them the only thing that I could think of "BS". It took several minutes of explaining and example giving but my Indonesian family picked it up quickly and it is now one of their favorites. They get so excited and are always asking me to play BS with them. They laugh every time someone gets called out on a lie and is forced to take tons of cards. Diandra turns out to be very good at BS and after a couple of rounds she was the reigning champion.  It was so much fun messing around and playing with my cousins. Eventually we were all tired, so we decided to take a nap. The power was out so the lights were off and we all tried to get some sleep. After a few minutes the power came back on, with several groans as all the lights turned back on. I quickly got out of bed and turned the lights back off then laid back down. The youngest cousin in the room was a little boy who had been randomly flipping cards over while we were playing (making lying even harder), so I already was not very happy with him. He thought it would be very funny to go turn the lights on again so he flipped the switch on again while we were all trying to sleep. I calmly got out of bed again turned off the lights then, I grabbed the little bay opened the door and carried him out to the cheers of my other cousins. This girl does not like people messing with her nap time! We then we able to get a couple of hours of sleep before one of my uncles called us to lunch. (Lunch is served at 2 or 3 and dinner is served at 8 or 9) We slowly got up and went to go eat. After lunch we were told to get ready to go to the national park. I grabbed my camera and we started walking. We must have walked one mile so that we could get to a different area of the beach with even more boats than our beach had. After our long walk we got on a boat and took a short ride to the "white sand beach".  (The sand in Pangandaran is all black). We landed on the beach and went to explore the ocean life. The place was so sad, there was trash everywhere and I cannot believe that it is a national protected park. Tons of people were walking on rocks in a shallow part of the ocean and searching for wildlife in the rocks. I was surprised to see a man carrying a plastic bag with an eel in it. I have no idea what his is going to do with it. Most likely leave it in the bag until it dies and he has to throw it away. It was too small to eat, only 7ish inches long. The amount of destruction was disturbing. I have never been an environmentalist but, this was sad. Trash was everywhere (like most places in Indonesia). When we were done