Chit Chat about This and That

Dudie's back in KL. Arrived back on Friday night, late. I have to admit, I've become one of those travelers who will often purposely bury my head in a book to avoid conversation with the person next to me. Mostly it's because once you start talking with someone, it can be awkward to find a way to end the conversation. I usually fly KLM back and forth to Jakarta because it's the last leg of an Amsterdam to Jakarta flight and you can get a pretty reasonable ticket. It's not the best airline in the world, but when you compare it with Air Asia it is about 300% better. Because it's a Dutch Airline, you can figure on about 80% of the non-Asians on board being Dutch, so much so that the stewardesses greet the westerners in Dutch, not english. My seatmate was Dutch, and this time, I actually started the conversation. I did this because I noticed he was reading a book on Javanese mysticism, which I've mentioned here on a few occasions. I figured he was a student as well. Actually he was a classical music composer, but his boyfriend, in the seat next to him was Indonesian, from far east Java and had given him the book.

He was fun to chat with. He told me about the four weeks he and his boyfriend had spent traveling around Indonesia. They spent quite a bit of time with his family, and I asked how they felt about their sons relationship with him. He said, they knew they were gay and that it wasn't a problem per se, only that if he ever moved back to Java he would still be expected to marry (a girl) and have children. My seatmate said he thought this was more about the expectations that you have children to take care of you when you get old as well as to carry on a family legacy than it was about sexuality or marrying someone you love. For a lot of people on this side of the world marriage is still more about pragmatism than anything else.

Then we got to talking about his work back in the Netherlands. As I said he was a classical music composer. He said he had worked with three American Fulbright scholars, all women. His opinion of these American women he worked with: willful, strong, pigheaded, and very bright. :-) I had to smile.

In other news, I finally got ahold of my legitimate copy of MS Office student and teacher edition. There was a tech fair yesterday morning at KL convention center, so we thought we'd pop over there and see if we could find it. What we found instead were rooms packed wall to wall with people, so full you literally couldn't move in places. We went into one of the four exhibition room and by the time we came out the other side I thought I was going to hyperventilate. So, we did NOT get the software there. Crowds are not my thing. So we went to the other side of town where people were not, found the one other store that our microsoft friend had found carrying the software and got it there. Expensive as hell, but legal.

So now what? What else? Write like crazy. ;-)