Hari Natal

For Hari Natal (Christmas) and Morgan's memorial, all of the Americans on Java were flown to Bandung (known as Paris van Java).  Which is a beautiful, mountainous city that is much less hot than Surabaya and is renowned for its beautiful people.
Because Indonesia is 88% Muslim, the Christmas spirit is not exactly strong here, especially in Surabaya where there are not very many tourists; so on Christmas Eve, we had to make our own Christmas.  Idaho decided we should do a Secret Santa, so on Christmas Eve we all went out on the back of a fleet of motorbikes driven by Hamza's horde of friends to buy our presents for each other.

On Christmas morning we made our way to Hamza's house to spend the day with his host family.  We walked to the nearest Angkot stop and rode Angkot (which is like a small, hollowed out van that has no schedule or researchable route and costs 10 cents) to a big grocery store.  There we bought pancake mix and all the makanan bule ("white person"/Western food) and hailed Ojek (motorcycle taxis) to bring us up the hill to Hamza's.
It began to rain, and that was an amazing moment, riding three people on a motorbike with Idaho and our christmas gifts (Juj was carrying a giant stuffed panda) up a steep hill, behind a leather jacketed Indonesian stranger (a professional public transportation provider-don't worry), part of a fleet of bule with the hot rain running down our faces and soaking us through the skin.
At Hamza's Sabs cooked a bule breakfast as Juj and I made a tree out of styrofoam from the local Indomaret.  Darles and the others made paper chains and stockings to hang from the ceiling and balcony.  David sang a surprising variety of Christmas songs, until we finally forced him to make a Christmas song medley which he performed with Sabs dressed as Rudolph as a back-up singer/dancer as we video-taped.  Then the street-singers came to our door, singing Indonesian pop songs, so Juj and I went outside to request Christmas music.  They didn't know any and asked us to demonstrate, so we ended up singing to them and paying them for it.

After opening our presents for each other we watched a horribly dubbed (and made) Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas movie on Indonesian TV.  Hamza and I went out with his little brother to play futsal in the yard.  We ended up at the local mosque where little children just appeared out of the bushes to join us.  It ended up being a swarm of maybe twenty little children against us three.  Eventually teenage boys showed up to watch and join.  When they asked me my name I told them "Hamza" and Hamza of course said his real name, so they were really confused but we explained "That's why we're friends," they were also amazed that Hamza was a Muslim and yelled "We LOVE Allah!" which was really adorable.
It started to pour so Hamza's big brother came to pick us up in his pickup truck, so we rode around the countryside scream-singing Christmas songs at the top of our lungs in the pouring rain.


 It was definitely an unforgettable Christmas.  I don't know how next year can possibly stack up.