I was waiting for the plane to take off. I had just finished spending 2 weeks in Bali. Why Bali? Because I’d already been in Indonesia for nearly 5 months. I was just finishing my exchange semester in that country and my visa would last a few more weeks. So the best thing anyone could do with that time in their early 20s was to just wander around that part of the planet and enjoy some more sightseeing. No pressure, really.
So there I was in the plane, with memories of a gorgeous island freshly tattooed in my head. I was excited for the new destination I was about to check somewhere in central Java. My mind was drunk with visions of ravishing architecture of ancient temples surrounded by life giving jungles overflowing with vitality.
Everyone seemed to smile in that plane. I saw a beautiful Indonesian flight attendant with quite a lavish make-up. I looked at her as she was passing through the isle. I smiled at her. She smiled back. Aleksa didn’t smile. Aleksa was my Serbian girlfriend sitting next to me. She joined me in Bali from Australia. Me and Aleksa had been together for half a year. We were studying at the same university in the Netherlands. What I was about to witness in that plane a few seconds later was something I had never seen in Aleksa before.
“Why are you doing this?” She asked me.
“Do what?” I said confused.
“You know exactly what. Stop checking out that lady.”
She wasn’t too happy about me looking at that flight attendant I mentioned earlier. She acted as if my looking at her was me running with her into the wild, get a life with her, have a house together, kids and a convertible. But all I ever did was just look for a few seconds. As humans, we are visual creatures. And believe me, if you were there to see the make-up that cutie flight attendant had, you would’ve looked for a little bit too. Aleksa forgot about the fact that she looked at so many tall surfers in Bali with long blond hair, tanned skin and blue eyes. And I didn’t give a shit. As a matter a fact, I looked at them too. That was how cool they were. But anyway, back to the flight attendant.
“What’s wrong, dear? I’m only looking.” I said.
“I don’t like you doing that, ok??” She really looked irritated.
“You’re being silly now.”
“Just do me a favor and stop looking. It’s all I’m asking.”
And about 3 seconds later that very same flight attendant walked again through the isle. I couldn’t resist. I looked at her and even smiled. She smiled back in a warmer and friendlier way than before. Right after that I turned back to Aleksa. That was a sight to behold. She was crying. She wasn’t sobbing or anything. Everything was silent. Tears were running on both her pink cheeks and her big hazel eyes were red. It was anger. Silent, devastating anger. An emotional storm was about to come all over me and there was nothing I could do about it.
“I hate you. You are one disgusting son of a bitch.” She said with tears all over her face. She wanted to scream but she also didn’t want to make a show right there on the spot. She probably would’ve done that if we would’ve been all alone.
“Come on, baby. Is it such a big deal?” I said.
“YES IT FUCKING IS. I TOLD YOU TO STOP AND YOU DIDN’T IT. YOU DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT HOW I FELT.”
“Baby…”
“I’m gonna cheat on you for what you just did. You know that? That’s what I’m gonna do! Fucking bastard!”
“You’re acting as if I asked for her number or something. I just looked at her for a few seconds and gave her a smile. What’s the matter with you? Isn’t one allowed to smile at people?”
“No, because I didn’t like it. And you didn’t give a shit and made me feel bad! And now you don’t even try to make me feel better. I hate you.”
“Aleksa. You’re exaggerating. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. Come on, we had such good times and we’re still here enjoying this. Don’t let this ruin our stay in this country. I spent a whole semester here without you and I didn’t do anything with any girl. Some Indonesian chicks actually flirted with me and I could’ve gone for it but I didn’t. I didn’t do it because I thought about you. Because I like you. I want you, not them. You see?”
“A yeah? Well, that’s too bad because I can’t say the same thing about myself in Australia!”
At that point I didn’t want to say anything anymore. I didn’t want to investigate whether or not she was telling the truth about having any affair in Australia. Maybe she said that stuff just to make me feel bad. Or maybe not. To be honest, I didn’t care at that particular point. What I cared about was calming her down. That conversation was like walking on a minefield and Aleksa was really heated up. I could’ve gone all serious and ask her more about what she’d just mentioned but I risked creating a whole scene in that airplane for all those people who just wanted to enjoy some holiday. I just said nothing. It was the best one could do in the situation.
After a 2 hour flight we arrived in a new city and the tantrum, the tears, the arguing, the tense emotions were all water under the bridge. Aleksa was once again the way I preferred her to be. Warm, relaxed and with a dark sense of humor. We arrived at this accommodation where these people were just chilling most of the time. They had guitars and they were jamming as often as they could. I joined them from the first day and we played Creedence and Nirvana songs. We also jammed on some blues. We vibed right away and we had a nice thing going on. Playing guitar would almost always help one meet new people.
The next days me and Aleksa explored the city. That place was all about temples. A water temple, a Sultan temple, a Buddhist temple, a few Hindu temples. It was temple city, I swear. We also bought some local shirts made with their local traditional patterns. Every night we ate mango pancakes made by the guys from the homestay we were at and jammed a little more. The place also offered organized tours for this huge temple complex that was an hour drive from the city. We had to choose either an afternoon tour for that temple complex or an early morning one which included a sunrise viewpoint. Me and Aleksa both agreed that the sunrise one would be the right thing to choose. We would enjoy an epic sunrise and go at the temple complex right before it opened. Few people would make the effort to come so early and we would have that whole place more or less empty before the wild flocks of tourists would take over. It was all settled.
We woke up after a not so long sleep. A van picked us up and other 4 people were there going for the same tour. We stopped for the viewpoint at this jungle hill area. We climbed some wooden stairs through a dreamy forest to reach this point where we could see in the distance the main temple rising on top of the jungle. The sun joined the scene pretty quickly. It was beautiful.
After pondering on that expressive dawn for a while we went down and hit the road again. After some short time we arrived at the temple place. I swore we were about to find the place just with a few people there. But sweet Lord, I was wrong. Oh, how wrong I was. I could see some crowds right from the entrance. There were groups of people everywhere. Big groups. Not like 20-30 people. More like 200-300 souls congested into a small frame. And almost everywhere you stepped you would’ve stumbled upon such a dense group. These groups were mostly students of various age groups that came there through school trips. It was bloody 6am and all these people were already there marching through the complex.
The fact of the matter was that most people in Indonesia were Muslim. And these guys woke up every single day before the crack of dawn to be part of the first prayer of the day. And that’s how they started their day. So all these kids woke up to pray and then went straight to this temple complex for sightseeing. Me and Aleksa couldn’t do anything but come to terms with this crowded reality.
It was fun anyway. We explored pretty much every corner of the place, took some nice pictures and then I got called to come back to the van so we could come back to our homestay. I took a quick nap while in the van. Aleksa was sitting next to me by the window, observing everything her big round hazel eyes could discern. My nap wasn’t meant to last. Aleksa woke me up alarmed. She looked perplexed, like she saw some tragedy she couldn’t fathom.
“Do you know what I just saw???” She asked staring into my whole being with those big perplexed eyes.
“I don’t know. What did you see?” I said.
“So I was looking at this road through this village and all of a sudden I see this little boy naked taking a shit right next to the road. He was all alone there. He must’ve been 4 or 5 years old. And he was just standing there naked taking a shit right next to the damn road! That’s shocking!”
“Well, some people do that from time to time.”
That kind of thing didn’t come as so shocking to me. I’d been in Indonesia 5 months already. I’d seen such things before. But Aleksa was in Australia just 2 weeks before. She was still getting shocks from such things. She also didn’t grow up in a rough area like I did. Her family had a big house with a jacuzzi in one of the fanciest neighborhoods in Belgrade. My family had an apartment in a 1970 commie block in an area full of smugglers, low lives, pimps, and dysfunctional families with daughters who had abortions at 13 and sons who started smoking at 9 and drinking at 12. So Aleksa didn’t see too much roughness or any hood style vicissitudes throughout her life. At the end of the day she was just laughing. She wouldn’t forget that little naked village boy for a long time.
A few days later we were on our way back to our home continent. We had to get back to our lives as students. What a trip we had.