Sunday Morning I Took a Two-Hour Walk around Town in the Area Around the Hotel…..

…..and enjoyed myself except that my clothing was literally saturated when I got back. This is humidity that makes Houston look like Arizona.

Kind of strange, but I didn’t see any other Westerners the whole time. The Australian trainer and I basically walked the main streets in a large square route and saw nobody else who looked American or Australian. Everybody was friendly, however. I’ve found that the Indonesians will look directly at you (in Africa they often won’t on the streets) but will say nothing. If you smile or say hello, however, they break into a big smile and respond. In that sense I think Indonesians are more outgoing than in many other developing countries.

We walked down to the Grand Mosque which is a huge complex and a magnificently beautiful blue and white building. The largest mosque in Indonesia is in Jakarta and I think it may be the largest in the world. This one, however, is considered to the most beautiful in the country. We didn’t try to go inside—I had a good introduction to mosques while I was in Egypt—but walked around the perimeter.

Indonesia is the most-populated country in Southeast Asia with over 230 million people and nearly 90% of them are Muslim (which means no pork chops on the hotel menu) but there seems to be a high degree of religious tolerance here—there is a large Christian church directly across one of the streets from the Grand Mosque. There are some extremist problems to the south and near the coasts of Thailand and Philippines but here in Pekanbaru it seems to be an outgoing, friendly form of religious belief. We do break each day for prayers at the Chevron compound and Friday has an extended prayer break at mid-day but it doesn’t cause any disruptions—everything is planned around it.

I have only seen two burkas (the full face-covering head cloth) here but the hajibs (head scarves with open faces) are very common—in fact they are basically the standard. I find it amusing that the young girls over here will wear the conservative hajibs with skinny jeans. There doesn’t seem to be any negative extreme connotation to them—there was a rock music program here at the hotel over the weekend and most of the people were teen-aged girls wearing the hajibs and having a good time laughing and clapping. It was strange, however, to see a woman in a body suit and head scarf in the swimming pool.

The mosques here are of a design I’ve never seen anywhere else. When I was in Cairo they told me there are four main architectural styles for mosques but these are really different—I would call them “onion dome” kind of like the architecture of the Kremlin in Russia. There are minaret towers on some of them (like the Grand Mosque), but most here are of the dome design. Because of the weather, they are mostly open-air and it seems there is a small mosque on nearly every corner of the city. The calls to prayer over the loud speakers seem to occur on the quarter-hour and last about fifteen minutes—I can hear one right now from my hotel room.

Not far from the hotel is a large, Chinese-style building that is a hospital—at least I think it looks Chinese.

We came across a traffic circle (they call them round-a-bouts and they are very common over here) that had an old 1950s early jet plane displayed. If you look at the photo carefully, however, you will also see two palm trees. Only they aren’t really palm trees—they’re cell phone towers disguised as trees. The coconuts are actually electronic gear. I can’t imagine the range being too great on them but it’s not the first time I’ve seen these—they are quite common in Africa as well.

The Sumatra regional library is a massive, modernistic building—the photo only shows half of it. Literacy seems to be very high over here and children are selling newspapers at every street corner and there seems to be a wide selection of papers. The building with a hole in the top over a dome is a government building. Indonesia is not a wealthy nation but you find buildings like the library and government buildings in various places so the government does provide basic services pretty well it seems.

Like I wrote earlier, the walk was only about two hours but it was an energy-sapping exercise…..