Lombok day-by-day

January 14th

Buddhist wedding Sunday we had the day off and some of us chose to spend the day in Mataram. First, we visited a local marked. Here we actually felt quite famous... People recognized us from an article in Lombok Post, taken during our visit to IAIN a few days before.

The happy couple

After a sweaty taxi trip, our next stop was at Vihara Selegalas temple, where we were invited to a Buddhist wedding.

Ignorant Norwegian students as we were, we of course forgot to pray when we entered the temple. Luckily, a nice guy came to our rescue. Believe us, next time we enter a Buddhist temple we will not forget to pray... We were also invited to the party after the ceremony, where we were served dinner, cakes and fruits.

Beach
A day off. Finally, after a long week with a hard schedule we got a day at “individual disposal”. The lazy people figured that the day should not be wasted, and spent it at the beach and by the garden pool. We had parts of Lombok’s most beautiful beach at our disposal for a week and we found it was time to use it.

For once we slept longer than till 7 o’clock and got up at about 11. The breakfast was smoothly skipped and girls in bikini were finally strolling around and taking over for the full-dressed girls we had been used to. Mona took it all out and scared our sweet host Mr. Hassan by lying nearly naked on the beach. Also the local boys were clearly excited by the sight of white-skinned-almost-naked girls from “Norwegia”. Maren was harassed because of her sun lotion, and we were all shocked by the way these apparently innocent children behaved.

Hassan explained rather upset that this was not at all normal behavior for local people, and not at all for kids. But we had had enough of the beach, the naughty and bald children and the very, very annoying and tactless salesmen, and spent the rest of the day by the pool, where a Dutch woman laid topless in front of the already scared-off Hassan. In spite of our own business, we found this very vulgar and a lack of respect for “private property” in this utterly Muslim area. That was mainly our day, except for a couple of meals and beers.

Del/Tips: