Minggu Kedelapan

For the Islamic New Year we had the day off so my family decided to go to the beach and take a traditional boat to Madura.  We went to a cultural area where I saw Buddhist, Confucianist, and Hindu temples.  There I performed a ritual of freeing caged birds over the sea.  This ritual was slightly ironic because the local people know the nearest grove where the majority of the birds immediately fly to, so they recapture them and sell them to the bird-seller to be released once again.
Once we got on the boat, which was about twenty feet long and five across we motored out to a mountain in the middle of the ocean.  It was far from shore, but there was a circle of water about two feet deep at the summit of the underwater mountain where boats were gathered.  There were children playing in the warm, extremely salty water and there were lots of jellyfish which made me a little nervous.
We also passed friendly fishermen who stretched their nets across the parts of the channel with the strongest current.  They all had almost black skin from spending their lives in the reflection of the equatorial sun.  I got the first serious sunburn of my life that day and consequently convinced my host family to buy a potted aloe plant.
We passed under Suramadu, which is named in the Indonesian style of combining two words (Surabaya and Madura), and is (one of) the longest bridges in Southeast Asia.  Indonesians love to exaggerate, so here I've already been on the "longest escalator" in Asia/the world and the "longest bridge".  As a non-engineering oriented American Suramadu honestly doesn't impress me that much, but all of the Indonesians in Surabaya are very proud and interested in it.  There are many tourists who go to visit the bridge as a destination rather than use it for its utilitarian purpose of crossing to Madura.

In Madura the boatsman brought us to his village to see the traditional process of boat-making there.  There was a woman on the empty beach of Madura "trash-picking" and bringing the salvageable bottles, sandals, and other miscellaneous trash that the tides bring in to the market to sell.  At the boat-making house there was a small bug wriggling in the sand that all of the adults pounced on, much to my confusion.  Apparently it was a traditional medicinal bug that is very valuable.

After returning to the city I went with my neighbors to visit the Wali.  Ibu told me not to request anything from the Wali  because it's rude.  I was nervous about meeting a "religious leader" in Indonesia and even googled "What to wear when meeting a wali" to no result.  I ended up wearing jilbab (headscarf and modest clothing) for the first time.  I was surprised to learn, upon arriving at Masjid Ampel that the Wali are actually the holy Muslim men who spread Islam throughout the archipelago.  They have been dead for hundreds of years and we were going to pray at one of the Walis' tomb.  Near the Wali's tomb there was also a little graveyard with nine tombs, one for each of the nine lives of the fabled janitor who died, but was resurrected eight times in his passion to keep the mosque clean.

Fact:
If you say "Friday night" here it can mean both the night before Friday (Thursday night-like "Friday's Eve") and Friday night, which can get very confusing.