Interesting

When we were traveling in Indonesian Borneo, we found that they do not get many foreign tourists in that part of the country. As a traveler that means several things. Very few people speak English fluently and those that do all want to practice it on you. People yell out "hello mister" when they see us. Yes, they call me mister too. It can really startle me when someone yells hello mister as their motorbike whizzes past nearly brushing my arm. Because there were so few tourists we were unable to find an Indonesian phrasebook, so we brushed up our charade skills. Western food was unavailable. We only know how to say a few foods in Indonesian, so we ate a lot of those things. Finally, everyone stares at you. We took a two day boat trip to get from Borneo to Java. We bought second class tickets so we had a room with beds to sleep in. Just outside on the deck the locals traveling economy just lay down and sleep where ever they can find the space. We like the sunlight so we wanted to keep our curtains open. We saw several people walk past, do a double take, then come back to stare in at us. Most of the time this was just funny. Maybe some of them had never before seen people who look like us. At one point two men found us so intriguing that they stayed outside our window for a very long time watching us, laughing at us, and waving at us. They called people over so they could look too. They lifted up children so they could see better. A crowd grew outside the window. We felt like very awkward animals in the zoo. Eventually we could not handle it any longer so I waved good-bye to our audience and drew the curtain. Now that we are in Java, we are not the only tourists. Here it feels like we are only interesting when someone is trying to sell us something.