From the post office we got another taxi to Laser Quest to meet our translator who I'll call Indra. He was a great choice. He's 24 and just graduated from a university as an engineer. Indra wore casual but nice and neat western style clothes; nicer than ours anyway. He's soft spoken but not overly quiet. His English was fine but he wasn't a professional translator or tour guide, which I thought sort of a bonus.

We all rode in a Taxi to the old part of Surabaya and China town. We passed a truck with a bunch of round, green helmeted soldiers standing in the back. You could just see their heads sticking up over the sides. It looked so comical we called it a bucket of soldiers. The truck parked inside a traffic circle in a quiet suburban area. Just as we passed the truck, Indra said that Java was on "Level One Alert." We heard that from an America in Bali but neither the American nor Indra knew what that meant. We took it to mean that they have buckets of soldiers sitting at intersections in the suburbs.

Most of the riots in Java have been aimed at Chinese businesses. Chinese Indonesians (many have been in Indonesia for generations) make up a small percentage of the population but own a large percentage of the businesses. We asked Indra how he felt about the Chinese. He had to admit that he felt jealous. He was not proud of that. He also believed a friend who works at a Chinese factory and says non-Chinese workers make half as much as the Chinese workers. "Just because of the color of the skin! Not because of ability. That is why we hate them."

According to Indra, many Chinese people are only nice to you when they have a business reason. He said you have to be careful when a Chinese man treats you nicely because it means he wants something from you.

Just outside of the old part of town, we got out of the cab near a tall round monument that looked a little like a rocket. Some of the most important battles for Indonesian independence from the Dutch took place here in 1945. The monument stands in the middle of a city block size park that commemorates independence. Typical of a Indonesia, lots of construction kept us from getting a close look.

We also took a look at the famous "Red Bridge" sort of like Lexington and Concord for Indonesia. It's only about 30 feet across and still much in use.

Old town Surabaya has narrow, somewhat windy streets. It's more walkable than other parts of the city we saw. We passed some places that apparently have notable "Dutch Colonial" style that Indra said the government plans to renovate. They looks like solid buildings, but uninteresting to a layman like me.

We walked around for a few hours and only saw one or two other tourists the whole time. We walked past a Buddhist temple and a couple young Javanese men invited us in. A puppet show was underway. They were not shadow puppets but regular 3-D style puppets, although they are operated the same way shadow puppets are: from underneath with sticks attached to the hands.

No one else was watching that show, which also had musical accompaniment. The invited us back stage and shortly the show ended. The back stage was a very small, smoky room with lots of instruments and ropes and cables hanging on the walls. Indra was really valuable here.

After some minutes we found out that the groups is called "Poo The Hie" and the members are all Javanese Muslims but perform this Chinese puppet shows and play these Chinese instruments in the Buddhist temple. Joan noticed that one guy had a little playboy bunny on his shirt and another had the words "Alien Workshop." (the out-of-place things you see on T-shirts is quite entertaining.)

The Chinese people in the area hire them to do various puppet shows for good luck, especially for important occasions like weddings. Sometimes they hire a show but don't watch it. They hire it for the gods.

They had a schedule that showed they can do three shows a day but this week they only had one morning show each day. Joan asked if the monetary crisis affected the number of shows they get hired to do. At first we thought they said it did. Then we figured out that the number of shows depends mostly on the Chinese calendar and January had been good, with Chinese New Year. What they were really saying was since Chinese New Year's had passed, things were slowing down.

They played a variety of instruments: One double reed that sounds very much like and oboe, a two-string instrument, they called an Oul, played with a bow that slides between the strings and sounds a little like a viola, gongs, bells, and drums. The leader and assistant leader could play all the instruments well. Every now and then the whole group just broke into a song. A slightly older guy with a thin face and thick glasses appeared to really enjoy playing his two-string. He played some beautiful melodies.

They enthusiastically let us try all the instruments. We didn't do too well. The two-string doesn't have a neck board that you press the strings against to change the pitch. The neck is just a stick and the strings run about three inches above the stick. You change the pitch by holding a finger against the string. Also, each string is a different pitch but they are right next to each other and you must press on both at the same time. The man who liked this instrument the most said you must learn by feel and some people in the group never learn it.

Everyone seemed to smoke in the little room and my eyes watered. I don't normally mind when people smoke. Indra handed out Marlboro's to the puppeteers. Indra, too, was enjoying himself.

The group calls itself "Pu The Hie" (Poo-Tay-Hee). They learned originally from another group that visited from China many years ago. They had several very old, beat up, black and white comic books in Indonesia (I think, though certainly not chinese) that served as the basis for the puppet show stories. They told us the stories were Chinese in origin.

The costumes of the puppets were very dirty. They told me that it is forbidden to wash them.

They had just one question for us. Indra translated it something like, "You're from America, the IMF is from America. What do you think of the IMF?" I told them I had no idea. "It's not like we vote for the IMF." Then I added that the IMF might have made mistakes, but they want a strong Indonesian economy as much as Indonesia does.

We took a lot of photos before we left. They loved pictures and posed willingly.

We toured the temple before we left. It had three "sanctuaries" (I'm not sure of the correct Buddhist term). They were all dim. Incense and candles burned at many places. At the entrance to one of the sanctuaries about 20 full-sized statues of soldiers with swords stood guard. One of the young puppeteers anxiously showed me this altar to the tiger that was hidden in a corner behind a large piece of furniture. I almost had to crawl in to see it. An offering of a full meal sat in front of a small glass enclosure containing 30 or more small but ornate sculptures of tigers.

While we were in the temple, worshippers occasionally walked in and lit a candle or something. They hardly seemed to notice our presence. They did not seem to mind.

The last room we saw was full of giant red candles. Some of the candles stood seven or eight feet high and 18-24 inches around at the base. The big ones burn for as much as two years. People buy candles on special occasions for good luck. I guess the bigger the candle, the more luck or the longer the luck lasts.

Underneath the fancy chinese figures, each of the largest candles had a company name on it. I thought at first it was the name of the company that made the candles but each candle had a different name. Companies too can buy candles for luck.

I noticed calendars in almost every room in the temple. Some rooms had as many as 15 calendars. They were the kind that businesses selling car parts, linoleum, etc. give out for free. Some were the pull off a day at a time type, others had one or two months below the advertisement. Almost every calendar was up to date except some of the pull-off kinds were a day behind. It seemed intentional. I asked, through Indra, why they had so many. "Charity" someone answered. These companies "donate" the calendars and get advertising in the temple. I wonder if the Rotarians in America have thought of advertising in churches yet?

Muslim prayer time came and Indra excused himself for a few minutes. A Chinese man came out and introduced himself. This somewhat rotund, round-faced, middle-aged guy told us he has a $700,000 house in San Jose California. He drew the number on his hand in big black marker. He has an export business and his business card is in Indonesian on one side and English on the other. However, his English very limited. Without Indra we had a hard time understanding him. He has a son going to Stanford graduate school next fall.

I kept thinking, if I had a house in California and a house in Surabaya, I would live in California. But I guess he makes his money in Surabaya. He told us that the economic crisis hasn't hurt business since he buys his materials in Rupiah and sells in dollars. Therefore, his products cost him the same but are now much cheaper for his customers.

The first Indonesia citizen we had met that had actually been to the United States, and he's a filthy rich Chinese man.

We had hoped to burst some of Indra's stereotypes about Chinese but instead we confirmed many of them.

Indra then took us to one of the most important mosques in east Java. The man who brought Islam to Surabaya, Sunan Ampel, is buried here. He's sort of the St. Patrick of Surabaya. We walked down a narrow alley that was suddenly much cleaner than most of the other alleys we walked down. The mosque has a few large new sections and an especially old part with the ancient cemetery. Men and women pray separately. We waited for Indra while he said his prayers.

The bucket of soldiers had made us curious. The next day we were talking in our bad Indonesian to a taxi driver who spoke a little English and asked him about the "Level One Alert," the riots, the soldiers and so on. He told us about a riot in Sidioarjo recently. Then we asked him if there were a lot of soldiers in Surabaya. "Yes, many!" he replied. We asked him to take us there.

He took us to an army base which happened to be next to the Hilton. We drove around the base and saw hardly any soldiers. He said they come back in the evening. We were disappointed. We had both read a P.J. O'Rourke book and therefore knew exactly what a foreign correspondent should do next: go to the bar. We had the driver drop us at the Hilton. We figured we could find business travelers there and they always had good gossip. Also we figured they'd have decent beer.

We did get some good beer, if a little pricey, and we did meet some business travelers. One came from Quebec and the other from America. The American said that his company's Surabaya office advised him to stay at the Hilton, "because it looks like an army building" not a hotel. This is true, especially since it's right next to the army base. The other guy told us that if there was trouble, he would run to the base and offer 50,000rp for protection. Despite their stories, neither seemed especially concerned.

Next: Ride to Malang

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