Year of the Tiger

It turns out I suck at blogging when nobody's paying me to do it. Here's a post I wrote in February just after Chinese New Year. Thought I might as well publish it since it's been sitting here all this time.

When you're just a few hundred miles from China, that whole New Year's in February thing seems a lot less of a novelty. Everybody's been going crazy here the last few weeks the way they go crazy for Christmas in the states. Red bunting everywhere, paper tigers in shop windows, enormous candles.

Finally it happened last weekend and it was a lot different than New Years Eves I'm used to. Well, I was in a smokey room with a lot of fire hazards, but the similarities stopped there.

For one, it's not a big drunken party. We went up to Chinatown on the north side of Jakarta expecting to get pushed about in a boozed-up sidewalk throng of revelers, but that's not what happened. Well, they don't really have sidewalks here so it wouldn't. There was still a crowd, but it was pretty sober.

It's a very religious holiday, and the way a lot of people show their devotion is by burning incense and gigantic candles, some of them enormous. This temple we were in had hundreds of them about a meter high. You could barely get through, and where there was space to walk, people huddled in front of altars, praying with sticks of incense between their palms. There was even a big fire in a gigantic iron fireplace, which didn't help the sweat stains under my arms.

The whole thing has to do with starting over, and not in the sort of lip-servicey, New Year's resolution way we do it. These guys actually get a clean slate. They burn up last year's gods and spirits in effigy and get new ones, sending the old guys off with bribes of fruit and stuff to report to the big boss. It's all very cleansing, as are the two or three showers you have to take to get all the smoke out of your hair after.
Later we went to a house party that was also sweaty and hazy with smoke. Just like on New Year's Eve.