Selamat Idul Fitri (Happy Eid ul-Fitr)

The end of the Ramadan has come and the Muslim community is celebrating.

The celebrating started yesterday evening, after sunset: from the mosques, prayers where send into the air and people set off fireworks all over town. Occasionally a horde of people on motorbikes would pass by, making noisy ‘music’ with trumpets, drums, and tooting their horns. All these festivities lasted until well over midnight.

Lebaran (as it is called here) is also a holiday period, where most villagers ‘mudik’ (go back to their home town to celebrate with their family). Non Muslims flee Jakarta to take a quiet holiday in Bali or other parts of the country or world. Compared to normal days, Jakarta is very quiet now.

Those who stay in Jakarta will probably have to survive without a maid or driver during the holiday period. This turns out good for the restaurants, because their business will grow considerably during this time, as maidless families don’t want to cook for themselves. For these families, the holiday period is a thrilling experience, because it is never sure when and if the maid is coming back from her home town; in many places, you see different maids after Eid ul-Fitr.

For me, one of the nice things of working in a country that has many official religions is, that you get many days off.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 02:45. It is filed under Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.