from the horizon

For those of you who are interested, here’s a quick video tour of my house in Banda Aceh. This is actually my old house, as I have now moved into a (much) bigger house with some friends.

One of the perks of keeping a blog is the people I meet along the way. I’ve established a number of contacts through my rambling on here, some of whom I’ve actually had the chance to meeting in real life. I had one such opportunity on Monday night when I finally met up with Jakob, who’d contacted me through my blog to get some more information before coming to do some work here. The interesting thing is that his housemate, who came along too, turned out to be Asri, someone I’d already actually caught up having met through our mutual Banda Aceh Blogs.

I’m wondering if there’s actually a bigger community of Bloggers out there in Banda Aceh – maybe it’s time to organize a bit of a bigger meeting…

This Wednesday was the day before the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. This makes a huge difference in an Islamic area such as Banda Aceh. From the hours of sunrise to sunset, Muslims must abstain from food, drink, smoking and sex. Typically people will wake up around 4am, before the morning prayers, and take a large meal together as a family before sunrise, and then go back to bed. When the sunsets around 6.40pm, people will immediately have a drink (usually a cigarette too), take some small sweets, or sometimes dates, and then perform their evening prayers before having their Puasa Buka (Open Fast) meal with the family.

The atmosphere has totally changed around town during Ramadan.

The pace at work slows down, as people are having to go through the whole day without eating or drinking, plus they are getting less sleep (the mosque will often broadcast readings from their speakers all night, which also effects the amount of sleep I get).

Also, there are no food shops open during the day, which means that I sadly miss my breakfast of rice and coffee Aceh, and my lunch of Gado Gado. I need to be conscious about not eating or drinking in front of people during the day, and even when I do in private, it makes me feel like more of an “infidel” as usual (Which is silly of me, because the locals are actually really tolerant).

Toward the end of the day the streets come alive, with an assortment of stall selling sweets and drinks for people to break their fast with. The traffic is crazy until about 6.30pm, at which point the streets are empty, as everyone has gone indoors, awaiting the siren which indicates that they can end their fast.

I do admire the discipline, faith and tradition which is displayed during Ramadan. I can’t imagine it being the easiest thing to go all day without eating, and especially drinking. I have aspired to experiment with trying to fast myself, but unfortunately with everything else going on (especially work), I just haven’t had the spare energy.

Being the day before Ramadan, the office closed at midday, however being a consultant I only get paid for the days I work, so I was still stuck working in the deserted office (queue tumble weeds). At about 6pm my boss came into my office asking, “Did you feel that?”. I looked up puzzled, and then realized that I probably just missed another earthquake.

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Finally here’s the last of the photos from Beijing. I’m glad that I’ve managed to finish this off before my next trip to Geneva!

I posted a note mentioning that I was going to China, ages ago on Facebook, and Tim, a friend of mine read it who turned out to be working there. It was good to catch up with him, and interesting to see a practical application of Facebook!

Forbidden City at night

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Beijing is the perfect city for biking – practically flat with bike lanes everywhere, so I decided to hire a bike and go for a ride. Once again, putting my viewer’s needs in front of my personal safety, I made a video, so you guys don’t feel like you’re missing out.

It’s worth noting that the original video was longer, but in efforts to fight copyright infringement, YouTube has limited videos to 10 minutes – which apparently is apparently enough, given the quantization of our generation. I tell you, YouTube totally cramps my artistic vision! I still have the “uncut” version, with extended scenes and bonus footage – maybe it will be on the DVD release.