A Bandung Christmas

Bandung is a large city on the western end of the island of Java, in Indonesia. It is up in the mountains northeast of Jakarta, about three hours' train ride away from the national capital. Bandung is a university city. In 1979, when we went there to study Bahasa Indonesia (the Indonesian language) there were five universities in Bandung.

We lived in Bandung for ten months. Our main responsibility was to become fluent in Indonesian, which we did. At the time we had two children, aged four and two. In fact, they had their fourth and second birthdays within weeks after we arrived in Bandung. When we left Los Angeles in July, we were allotted six suitcases for the four of us because the little one wasn't yet two and didn't get luggage allowance. We had to take our own bedding, clothes and personal items for our ten month stay because all the rest of our possessions were being shipped (literally) to Irian Jaya (now Papua). Christmas decorations weren't high on the list of items to pack in the suitcases.

I wanted our first Christmas in our new country to be remembered. So I went to the fabric bazaar (the one where foreign women got pinched walking through the aisles, but that's another story) and found some aida cloth and embroidery floss. You may know that Indonesia was for four hundred years a colony of The Netherlands, so the concept of cross stitch was not unfamiliar. I bought red fabric and some ribbons, and I cross stitched and sewed Christmas stockings for our pre schoolers.

I also stitched four little tree decorations. We didn't have a tree, but I hung them on a string in the living room. The tree was The Professor's, the nutcracker, Chaplain Dan's, and the candles were mine. Kiti's angel has gone to Phoenix to live on her tree.

One little known fact about living in the tropics that we learned early on is that metal WILL rust in the damp and humid climate. Evidently I left a metal hanger in the Christmas box one year.

Every year when I pull out the Christmas decorations and see 'Bandung Christmas 1979', I am transported back to that land of bananas, coconuts, terraced rice fields, active volcanoes, and rambutan fruit. The first time we ate rambutan in Bandung was that Christmas because rambutan season lasts only three weeks in December. We bought a stalk of the red spidery looking round balls, split open the peel with our thumb nails and tasted the sweetest sweetest fruit in the world. A Bandung Christmas!