Archipelago of Naturalness
Wet snow in November and everyday problems will make the idea of a sunlit island a welcome sight, even if only in a dream. If you are looking for such small paradise on earth, you might find it amidst the azure Indian and Pacific waters, one of the nearly 13,700 islands constituting Indonesia. Not very long ago, the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia, jointly with the Pan Ukraine travel agency, offered an opportunity to take a closer look at this tourist Mecca, an archipelago with an original culture. The display at the Dnipro Hotel included enough exquisite national dishes and other exotica to brighten one’s mood for the rest of the day.
Small envelopes of green dough stuffed with coconut turned out to be the best remedy for autumnal depression. They disappeared as soon as the visitors were let in. One has no time to feel sad when you have to remember and tell your relatives and colleagues names of dishes like onde-onde, ku mangkok, dadar gulung, and gado-gado. Dedicated housewives could now experiment in the kitchen to find Ukrainian equivalents of, say, bobi mung, peanuts or bamboo sprouts.
No one need envy the men whose wives and daughters visited the Indonesian cultural soiree. From now on their better halves and offspring will insist plaintively that their own beauty is fading without the feather-light hand- dyed tropic fabrics called batik. There were plenty at the soiree. The collection was arranged by the Indonesian ambassador’s wife Mrs. Rotua Siahaan. Batik blouses and dresses are worn by Indonesians on all formal occasions except state receptions. Perhaps the naturalness of the colors and intellectually restrained imagination embodied in the patterns also added to the overall atmosphere of unpretentious ease, something of which Indonesians can be truly proud.
The only thing the Ukrainian ladies are not likely to borrow from their Indonesian counterparts is dancing. It is more like acrobatics, with plates twirling, special rhythm and expressiveness. Ceremony and performance combine in Indonesian choreography. “Traditional Indonesian dances require good physique and long years of training. These dances are not as simple as yours,” Devi Ratih Kamiliah of the embassy in Moscow told The Day. She also danced at the soiree. She further said that there are several dance schools in Indonesia. For girls they are all equally interesting and attractive, as are the cultural traditions of that country’s different ethnic groups representing the schools. How can people belonging to a variety of ethnic groups and religions peacefully coexist? Ms. Kamiliah replied, “We are simply accustomed to living that way. This is perhaps what you call tolerance.”
His Excellency Remi R. Siahaan, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Indonesia to Ukraine, said that his country wanted to share with Ukraine part of that very trait: “We not only wish to advertise our country as a tourist paradise. It is also important for people in different countries to understand and know, at least partially, each other’s cultures. We also say that seeing is believing.”
