Thursday, February 21, 2013

Cool cats and learning to "becara seperti a Texan"


I am not sure if I have explored the subject of the cats here in Jakarta.  If not, I will enlighten you.  If so, maaf for repeating myself.

One extremely obvious thing we noticed when we first arrived here is that the vast majority of cats have very odd tails.  Instead of being long and sleek or long and fluffy,  they are shorter and mis-shapened.  Sometimes they look like the number 7 or they look like a tail with a bulbous, knotty end.  It sounds weird I am sure for those of you reading this and I can attest, it looks weird.

We have asked about it and people have speculated that the tails are broken by wayward motorcycles or scooters running over them.  The mother cats are malnourished and it causes a deformity.  There is a chromosome that causes them to be shaped that way.  However, my favorite is when my sweetie pie asked our driver why the cats had tails like that and after a side-long look of the "What are you talking about pak?" persuasion, the answer was "Tidak apa-apa." Tidak apa-apa is one of those great phrases that we use a lot here.  It's kind of like a "whatever" a "just the way it is" or "no worries, don't concern yourself."

We have gotten used to seeing the cats in this condition and adopted the tidak apa-apa stance until recently.  At work one day, honey lamb and one of the young Indonesians he works with got to talking about cats.  After sweetie asked him if he knew why the cats tails looked that way, this young man looked at him like he was out of his mind.  This then spawned the question to sugar lips concerning what our cats look like.  How could they be different?  Aren't all cats' tails shaped like the ones here?

After a quick query on the Internet, our young friend was totally stunned that cats had tails that looked like what we are used to seeing in the US.  He was practically speechless.  He never imagined that the tail on a cat might look different.  And with that said, I guess neither had I.  So maybe the "What are you talking about pak?" look made much more sense.  Never having been off the island of Java, our driver had never seen other cats.  So to ask him why the tails are shaped that way was kind of like asking why the sky is blue.  When that is all you see, that is all you know.

Along the line of expanding ones horizons and knowledge base, my main squeeze has been feeding new phrases to the woman who we use as a fitness trainer at the gym we belong to.  What started it all was the word "calf."  Not in reference to a baby bovine, but as in the large muscle on your lower leg.  Just as we have a difficult time pronouncing certain letter combinations or rolling the letter r as they like to do here, the converse is true for Indonesians.  The word calf would be pronounced totally different if we adhered to their alphabet.  The "c" would have a ch sound.  The "a" would most likely be an ah sound.  The "lf" combo would probably sound like "lif" like lift.  So our trainer tries to make it sound more American but it took a little bit to figure out what the word was she was saying to us.  So sweet thing tried to teach her how to put flatter, harder sounds to it.  She got close.  He then began to teach her words like ya'll.  While ya'll is actually a southern word and not a Texan word per say, it was just the kind of word she could really get a lot of mileage out of.  Of course he had to explain that ya'll can be singular and plural as in "all ya'll.  I am not so sure he has not taught her "yee haw" and "dang-it."  So by the time we leave, our dear trainer will "becara seperti a Texan." (speak like a Texan).  I do have a feeling that since he has started these impromptu lessons that she has up the abuse level on our training sessions.  Maybe he should go back to trying to speak only Indonesian to her and she will not be making me do so many abdominal exercises that I cramp up into a little ball.


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