Indonesia Banget 18: Floor Sitter

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Here we are in another edition of Indonesia Banget, where I shared about life in Indonesia.

I have noticed, from movies, that European had sat on chair since loooong time ago…but most Asian remained sitting on the floor even until this very moment. I am here not to talk about Asia, I will focus it on Indonesia.

I am going to exclude the really rich people here because most of them think that floor is too dirty to be sat on. The commoners (the one who aren’t too rich and, of course, the poor) are still sitting on the floor even though they already have chairs in their house. Chairs are clean and comfortable but floor gives freedom to sit in whatever position we like.

People sit on the floor in many ways, they can use nothing because they believe their floor is clean or they use carpet or tikar. Tikar is kind of like carpet but made of either bamboo or plastic. You can see the photo of my niece and nephew sitting on a plastic tikar >>
Most Indonesian used this kind of tikar. I once saw a VOA channel about a shop which sale tikar in USA, and that tikar is bloody expensive…here it is very cheap.

When we have special occasion, like family gathering, instead of preparing a lot of chairs we prefer to provide carpet and tikar for the guess to sit on.

In this photo below, these people had just finished working together. They helped the house owner to tidy up things after my brother’s weeding. The owner of that place is my sister in law’s father. As you can see, they were all sitting on the floor while eating their lunch. No one felt disgust with the state on the soil underneath them, a tikar is all they need to sit on. Imagine how many chairs to prepare to this large number of crowd? (this photo only showed 1/3 of all the people who were coming to help).