Today is Friday November 29th, which is also the last day in Kuala Lumpur before my flight to Jakarta. I’m mostly ready to go. I still have to fill out the online forms for the health declaration and customs declaration for Indonesia. I also have to resubmit my tax forms for YouTube. I’m dreading that, and I’m not sure if I’m able to do it on a phone. I’d also like to do laundry, And I have a couple of simple videos to edit for Planet Doug. In fact, that will certainly take most of the time today.
I still need to book my train ticket leaving from the Kualanamu International airport in Medan, but it doesn’t seem like I can do that here in Malaysia. I will have to wait until I arrive in Jakarta. Hopefully while I’m at the airport, I can top up my OVO eWallet. Or maybe I can do that at the hotel if there is some kind of convenience store nearby. And once I have credit on my OVO eWallet, I will be able to reserve seats on the airport train and on the train from Medan to Tanjung Balai. But before I can do any of that, I will have to register my new Indonesian phone number with the OVO eWallet. And that is something else I won’t be able to do until I arrive in Indonesia.
I’m also thinking about getting a brand new SIM card at the airport. And that’s because my current phone is going to be blocked by customs after one month. And then I will be stuck again with no working phone. But I have one more smartphone that possibly I can use. I don’t think I ever used it in Indonesia before. So if it’s convenient, I will get a SIM card at the airport and put it in this third phone, and then it will be ready to go when my main phone gets blocked by customs. It will also be an interesting experience to see how simple or complicated it is to get a SIM card at the airport.
I spent a lot of time this week reuploading and reorganizing all of the BTS podcast videos for Patreon. I’m not sure if it’s the best thing to do, but I decided to keep those BTS videos on the Planet Doug Behind-the-Scenes YouTube channel. But I had already uploaded all of those videos to my main Planet Doug channel. So to keep things neat and tidy, I decided to re-upload them to the other channel and delete them from Planet Doug. And that means also changing the video link on Patreon for each one individually. That ended up being a larger job than expected and took a lot of time. But I finished it last night.
And now I’m wondering if I should delete the audio versions of those journals from Patreon. Right now I have two copies of each one. I have one audio version hosted on Patreon itself and one video version hosted on YouTube. That could be very confusing for people. And all I really need is the main video version on YouTube.
I ended up in this confusing situation because I started with the idea of simply keeping a written journal and uploading the text files directly to Patreon. But then I realized Patreon had the capability to host audio files. So I switched to the idea of keeping an audio journal and uploading those audio files directly to Patreon. I did that for a while, but then I realized it would be better to convert the audio files to a simple video file and upload them to YouTube. I figured out a way to do that such that the video files would be small and quick to upload.
I’m happy with where I ended up, but changing my strategy each time involved going back and redoing all of the previous podcast episodes or journal entries. But I think I am finally done.
I think am going to keep the written journal collection even though I will normally record my journal as a podcast. That will allow me to upload simple journal updates like this one, which I am typing on my phone. These short written journal entries can serve as a kind of Planet Doug update. And it’s nice to be able to write something when I’m not in the mood to go to all the trouble of recording audio or video.
I find that I’m quite excited about returning to Indonesia, and to Sumatra in particular. I miss the hustle and bustle of the place. I miss the sense of having an adventure.
And I finally got around to refreshing my brain when it comes to simple Indonesian. On my first bit of time in Sumatra, I was so busy with editing video and creating the Patreon, that I didn’t try to relearn any Indonesian at all. I just didn’t have the bandwidth in my brain to handle it.
But now that the bulk of the work for Patreon is finished, I had the energy to start listening to my Indonesian language podcast again. And I’ve slowly been relearning simple phrases and numbers. At the very least, those are essential to know. I remember on previous trips it was always a lot of fun and very useful to at least be able to say things like “I don’t understand Indonesian” and “I don’t speak Indonesian.” I can say those things in the Indonesian language, and that feels more polite than just standing there like a dummy unable to communicate. And it always made people laugh. I’m saying that I can’t speak Indonesian but I’m actually saying that in Indonesian. So they all laugh and point at me and say, “Hey you CAN speak Indonesian. You are speaking Indonesian right now.” But what they don’t understand is that that is the only complete sentence in Indonesian that I know.
Listening to this Indonesian language podcast makes me think about interesting aspects of language itself. For one thing, I’ve pointed out in the past that English lacks certain pronouns that would be very useful. And I always wonder how a language evolves such that a useful word is completely missing. And it occurs to me that it would be helpful if there was some kind of a language organization that can decide to create a new word and introduce it to the language rather than have the language just evolve sporadically. Indonesian has certain pronouns that English lacks. For example, English has the pronoun we. But it is often unclear who is included in that group that we refers to. Indonesian fixes that problem because they have two pronouns for we. One pronoun includes the person you are talking to. And the other pronoun excludes that person. English is unable to make that distinction.
However, English has two different pronouns for men and women or boys and girls. English has both he and she. but Indonesian only has one gender-neutral pronoun. And I find that is a big problem. I noticed that when Indonesians speak English they get confused about that and they often refer to a man as she and a woman as he. They’ll end up using one and then realizing their mistake and switching to the other. Or they never get it right and that is because Indonesian doesn’t make the distinction. It only has the one pronoun whereas English has two.
Indonesian is also much simpler in that it only has one word for I, me, and mine or he, him, and his, and all the other pronouns. One can argue that Indonesian is better because the language is simpler. However, I like the complexity of English from that point of view. It’s the same thing for verb tenses. Indonesian doesn’t really have tenses in the way English does. The verb itself never changes and you simply specify past present and future using additional context words. Learners of English often comment that English is difficult because they have to learn so many different forms of the verb. But I prefer the English approach. It feels like there are many subtle distinctions in meaning and I don’t see how a language without a verb tenses can match that subtlety. I’m sure they can, but I don’t really understand how.
For example, there is the distinction in English between the simple past and the present perfect. I don’t understand how a language can make that distinction without verb tenses. And there are all the continuous tenses, such as something like, “I have been studying English for 5 years.” How do you convey that meaning without separate verb tenses? And what about more complex meanings in a sentence like, “By 2030, I will have been living in Indonesia for 56 years.” How do you say “I will have been living” in a language that has no tenses? I don’t understand how that is possible.
I also noticed that the Indonesian numbers from 1 to 10 are far more complicated than the English numbers. English numbers from 1 to 10 have generally just one syllable. Only the number seven has two syllables. And the pronunciation of the English numbers are very simple. But all the Indonesian numbers from 1 to 10 consist of two or three syllables and have relatively difficult pronunciations.
So, my last day in Malaysia has begun. I have some online forms to fill out, some video editing to do, some Patreon restructuring to accomplish, some laundry to do, and some packing. It’s time to get started.