Mr Wawan

Introducing Mr Wawan, a travelling salesman. He travels around all the small shops trading the various small commodities that he carries around on his motorbike. An interesting and talkative character, keen to practice his English skills and learn all about me, in fact, while I was answering all of his questions, I forgot to ask my own.

He told me he was 42, but he looks a lot younger than that. This is a recurring observation in Indonesia, people seem to look a lot younger than they are. For example, when I took Tesa to England for the first time, I was buying the tickets to take Tesa and my two boys on the Merseyrail to Liverpool. The ticket officer said, "one and three halves"! Tesa was 23 at the time.

The Bandung story - part 9

After our return to Bandung, the entire team settled into the Papandayan hotel, about two miles from the factory. The quality hotel had a long term residents section for customers staying a month or more, offering much more competitive rates. On the ground floor were several excellent restaurants amongst water fountain displays, all very artistic. In the corner was a small bar with a snooker table, most unusual and one of the only two snooker tables in the entire city. Also a proper dart board too, so I was very comfortable here.

Mounted on the walls of the bar were mounted several objects of mild interest in the usual bar style. Amongst these were a couple of post horns (long, straight trumpet). It didn't take many beers before these were taken down and everyone attempted and failed to extract a tune.

Eventually it came to my turn. I had been paying attention and worked out that one of the horns was in full working order, no one knew about my brass banding history, so I took the horn and made a few rude noises, in the same manner as everyone else had managed. While everyone was having a good laugh at my expense, I ripped into the race course fanfare - ta ta ta ta taka ta, ta taka ta, ta ta ta taaa. You can imagine the roar of surprise, it was hilarious.

The next night it did not take long before the horn was thrust into my mitt for a repeat performance, so I did the post horn gallop and a few bugle calls. On the third night, the horns were nowhere to be found, what a surprise!

Every night a few of us would play darts. I had played a lot of darts in my past, playing for the local bar darts team. Unfortunately, I literally could not hit the board until a reasonable amount relaxing liquor had been consumed, so I found myself power drinking to get into the groove. Come 9pm, my mate Geoff called an end to the proceedings and returned home to his wife, leaving me in party mode. So it was off to Braga street with a few of the lads, just to wind down with a night cap of course, fully intending to be in bed by 11pm - yeah, right!

This hectic night life was taking its toll. I was still getting plenty of hours in, but I decided to abandon the early Saturday start, in favor of a good Friday night. Geoff was not impressed, accusing me of throwing money away, but it was well worth it to me.

To be continued.

Dave