Reflection 2

Bu Indra also spoke about one of her ex-students who was going to marry an Indonesian lady but her parents sort of put him off because her parents wanted to do the full-set traditional Indonesian wedding. I think that if he really wanted to marry her he would have done it the Indonesian parents way. *shrugs* Sometimes you just have to go through 'pain' to get to the good stuff. But anyway, one of my Indonesian friends is getting married and I managed to go to her engagement party when I got back from the east coast the summer holidays. (Note: She had two engagement parties. This is the one her mother put on for a "small" crowd which turned out to be around 50 people! My friend's only guests were me and a girl from her class because we hd missed out on her real engagement party). Anyway, my friend was supposedly wearing a traditional engagement/wedding dress from her dad's part of Indonesia, which I think may be Padang. But I'm not entirely sure. It was really nice though but it didn't look like any of the dresses in the book. What a shame.

At that engagement party we had a buffet - but not a selamatan, which according to the book is a buffet style ceremonial meal for special occassions. However, we did have Nasi Tumpeng, which is this special cone-shaped rice. They ordered two nasi tumpengs from a er special nasi tumpeng maker. The nasi tumpeng was in the middle of the dish. Around the nasi tumpeng were about 5-6 different foods such as vegetables and prawns.

Apparently in Indonesia if you don't say you belong to a religion, it's a bit weird. Bu Indra suggested to us that we should say we're Christian if you don't belong to a religion. I'm not so sure about that one though. She says we should all know a little bit about it since we live here but some people really don't know anything about Christianity except that there's like Easter, Christmas, the Holy Book is the Bible and that there's this dude called Jesus. (Or people who fully believe The Da Vinci Code even though it's a fictional book). Imagine if you were probed by the Indonesian who was a Christian! o.o

I was actually having a conversation with someone called Jordan on saturday night. He wasn't baptised in any religion because his dad was Greek Orthodox and his mum was something else and the families didn't get along and didn't agree about where he should be baptised but he can imagine the Greek part of his family smuggling him into church and secretly baptising him. Anyway, his best friend who is a Roman Catholic asked him to become his baby's Godfather. So when they had the meeting with the priest, the priest asked Jordan whether he was a Catholic and he lied and said he was one. Jordan then said that he could imagine that when he reached the pearly gates that St Peter was going to open up the book and say, "I see you lied about being a Roman Catholic to a priest. You're going to hell!" I laughed at that. So for those of you who are considering turning Christian just for the sake of not being thought of as weird in Indonesia, consider before you really do say you belong to a certain religious group that you don't belong to. It might be marked against you on Judgement Day or you might be re-incarnated into something 'lowly'.