PREPARATION

In preparation for our forthcoming overnight bus experience, L. and I decided to stock up on essential vitamins by buying some fruit from the market, and after some hard bargaining we were the proud owners of a water melon and a handful of sumptuous mangoes. So we sat down on the sidewalk to eat them.

The first observers turned up after about ten seconds, mainly people from the shop just down the road from where we'd sat. Then some more drifted in from the sides, some kids stood around watching, and before we'd got halfway through our melons, there must have been about 30 people just standing round, staring, and giggling to each other. Some brave souls attempted to talk to us, and one woman was so intent on practising her English with us that she got a chair and sat in front of us, as if we were a television. She screeched at us in pidgin, we smiled politely and ate our fruit, and marveled at the total lack of privacy in a culture such as this. For some reason, the sight of two foreign Asians eating a water melon was the most exciting thing happening in Ujung Pandang that evening, and we drew a huge crowd, especially when we started eating our mangoes in the Polynesian manner, slicing off half of the mango, crisscross cutting it and turning the skin inside out to give a pleasing, cubist design, perfect for guzzling and amazing to the Indonesians, who had never seen it before.

It was here that I began to get an inkling of what it must be like to be a rock star...