Bandung Ice Skating Ring

Back in 2008, I posted a story about ice skating in Bandung. The ice-skating ring that was located in Istana Plaza featured in the story was unfortunately closed in 2009 and so for a while Bandung did not have an ice-skating ring.

However, that did not last long. In September 2010, a new and bigger ice-skating ring was opened. Located at the roof top of Paris van Java or PVJ on Jalan Sukajadi, this new ice-skating ring occupies a floor space of 40 x 20 meters. This facility is bigger than the previous one. It is also better equipped. Called "Garden Ice", the premise is home of Bandung Skating Academy - a training facility for those who are interested in doing ice sports. Two kinds of ice sport are are taught here: Figure skating and ice hockey.

PERSIB Lovers

A mother is trying to fit a Persib merchandise hat to her son in front of Jalak Harupat Stadium prior to a football match between Persib and Persija sometime ago.

Persib is Bandung, and Bandung is Persib. I think that much can be said about the relationship of Persib and Bandung.

Persib the acronym of 'Persatuan Sepakbola Bandung' or Bandung Football Union is the apple of the heart of Bandung's football lovers or the people of Bandung for that matter. It was established on 14 March 1933 as a result of a merger of three previously existing football clubs, namely Bandoeng Inlandsche Voetbal Bond (BIVB), Persatuan Sepak bola Indonesia Bandung (PSIB) and National Voetball Bond (NVB). These clubs were formed partly because the Dutch (the Indonesian colonial ruler at that time) would not allow the 'inlander' (the Indonesian indigenous people) to play football with them and because football played by the Indonesian indigenous people were considered as second class games. Considering its history, Persib is considered to be an important means of struggle for a national identity and independence.

Photo by Aries Rachmandy, a Bandung Daily Photo contributor, a journalism student and freelance photographer. More of his photo stream can be found here.

A Post Note:
As soon as I published this post, I was alerted by some friends that today was the 18th anniversary of Viking Persip Fans Club. What a coincidence.

Persib's fan club is called Viking. I don't know why they call themselves by that name. Perhaps the name can explain to you why the merchandise hat that the mother is trying to fit on her son's head has some sort of horns and spikes like the head gear worn by the Scandinavian Viking.

HAPPY 18th ANNIVERSARY, VIKING!

Bandung Go Skateboarding Day 2011

This belated report of "Bandung Go Skateboarding Day 2011" is made possible by the generous contribution of Aries Rachmandy, a freelance photographer and a journalism student at STIKOM Bandung.

"Bandung Go Skateboarding Day 2011" was held on June 21, 2011 at Gelora Saparua (Saparua Sports Arena). The event was attended by hundreds of skateboarders from all over the city and showcased different skateboarding attractions as you can see in these photos. It was also used by the skateboarders to demand that the municipal government provide them with more decent skateboarding facilities (see the banner they displayed in the last photo).

Skateboarding is increasingly becoming a very popular sport among the city's youths. But the lack of decent facilities for skateboarding have forced some of them to practice and do their actions in unlikely places like the sidewalks, which of course are not a safe place to do it. Quite a few times, I've seen them practice and do their actions along the Asia Afrika street and the sidewalk of Perintis Kemerdekaan Street, some of the city's more popular locations among the city's skateboarders because they are wide enough.

Rollerblading in Bandung

Rollerblading is quite a popular sport among youths in Bandung. They have a number of places to hone their rollerblading skills. One of them is the track at Gelora Saparua (Saparua Sports Arena) where these youngsters were practicing one Sunday morning a few weeks ago.

The above photo was taken by Agus Wahyudi, a freelance photographer and regular contributor of Bandung Daily Photo.

The World Cup Fever

Children playing football at the parking lot of Stasiun Bandung.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup currently being held in South Africa seems to have got everybody infected with the football fever. A lot of people would watch the live broadcast matches on television even late into the night.

Football aside, playing on a busy parking lot like this is of course dangerous. Unfortunately, Bandung doesn't have enough open spaces and parks even for children to play, and the goverment doesn't seem to really care about it. All they care is about building malls, hotels, and shops. Sighs.

Football Monument

Bandung people love football (American: soccer) and they are proud of PERSIB, their football team. To show this, the city goverment commissioned this monument called Monumen Sepak Bola (Football Monument). It is located on the junction of Tamblong and Sumatra streets and was dedicated on May 8, 1990. There is no information on the ground about who designed and created the sculpture.

Blame it on the referee!

The fans of a football or soccer team (or any sport teams for that matter) sometimes can't bear the fact that their team loses a game to its opponent every now and then. Whenever that happens, they need to find somebody or something they can blame so that they don't have to lose their collective ego or pride. It's almost always a convenient excuse to blame it on the wheather, the stadium, the coach, the management, a lousy player, or whatever, but never the team itself as a body, even if they believe teamwork is of utmost importance in a team sport.

For this PERSIB (Bandung Indonesian Football Association) fanatic and many others like him who call themselves "bobotoh" (a Sundanese word meaning keen supporter or fan), it's the referee. Hence the writing on the back of this helmet "Wasit Goblog!" (stupid referee!). Not very sportsman/woman-like, but hey ... that takes the burn away from their beloved team when it loses a game.

Bare-footed Rock Climber

I spotted this bare-footed rock climber in an exhibition recently held by a local rock climbing club on Jalan Braga.

Being ignorant about this kind of sport, I sought to find out if bare-footedness was a common practice among rock climbers. It turns out that it is not. A rock climber has to wear a special pair of shoes that is especially designed for that.

Rock climbing has become a more and more popular sport here. Many high school and university campuses have a rock climbing club and climbing board like this.

Before assuming the status of a sport, rock-climbing had been a practice of necessity for different peoples in many parts of the world. Some Chinese paintings dated as far back as 400 BC, for example, depicted men climbing rocks. The Anasazis Indians of North America who built dwellings on steep cliffs in the 1300 CE must have done it with quite a sophisticated skill of rock-climbing. In Indonesia, such a skill has been practiced by bird nest collectors who often have to climb steep cliffs and rocks in the mountains or seaside rock formations. As a kind of sport, however, it has generally been agreed that it began in England in the last decades of the 19th century. More historical details of this sport can be found here.

As with any other estabalished sports, rock climbing has also developed its own set of terminology and techniques. If you are interested to learn about them, this wikipedia article might be quite useful to start with.

The Si Jalak Harupat Stadium

For a city of more than two million people, Bandung actually has a limited number of sizeable sport stadiums. Therefore, the completion of the Si Jalak Harupat Stadium in April 2005 was very much welomed. Located at the southern outskirt of the city of Bandung at Soreang (the capital of Bandung Regency), this IDR 67.5 billion (about 65 million 650,000 USD at the current rate) is currently claimed to be the second largest stadium in Indonesia after the Gelora Bung Karno (Soekarno Sports Complex) in Jakarta. It has 40,000 seats and 1000 lux lighting system that can be used for night sports competitions.

The stadium is named Si Jalak Harupat after the nick name of Otto Iskandardinata, an Indonesian national hero from Bandung.

The Si Jalak Harupat Stadium is currently the home base of two Bandung's prominent football clubs, PERSIB Bandung and Persikab.

Ice Skating in Bandung

My appology for not being able to keep the promise I made yesterday about posting pictures and stories about how we celebrate Iedul Fitr. I had a memory card crash with one of my cameras and lost all the photos that I intended to post today. A valuable lesson learned: Don't put all your photos in one memory card. Always have a spare card, just in case.

That being mentioned, I am forced to post a photograph that I took earlier in the week of this ice-skating ring.

As a city in the tropic, Bandung does not naturally have ice or snow. (It does have hails sometimes as it is located on a high altitude.) But this does not mean that we can't enjoy ice sports (sports on ice?). Thanks to technology, those of us who are curious about ice sports can now try and enjoy them without having to travel far to the Northern or Southern hemispheres where snow and ice are naturally availble.

This ice-skating ring is located on the top floor of Istana Plaza Shopping Mall on Jalan (street) Pasirkaliki, Bandung.

According to Wikipedia, ice skating is "traveling on ice with skates, narrow (and sometimes parabolic) blade-like devices moulded into special boots." The earliest ice skating, according to the same source, took place in Southern Findland about 4000 years ago.

Note:
Just in case you wonder why this photo has an odd frame-size proportion: I cropped the bottom part of the photo because it contained too much empty space. Other things remained as shot.

City of People: Bandung Skateboarders

Text and pictures by Eki Qushay Akhwan

Did you know that during its earliest development skateboarding used to be called "sidewalk surfing"?

It did. And that nick name had to do with its origin. It is said that the idea of skateboarding was born when some Californian surfers could not go surfing because the wind was flat and there were no waves; hence was the idea to "surf" on land. That was in the late 1940's.

Now skateboarding has become a worldwide phenomenon, a kind of sport and recreational activity loved by young people from nearly every corner of the world. I have to underline the word "young" because survey statistics shows that 85 percent of its fans are young people under the age of 18. It is also characteristically a male sport (or recreational activity) as nearly three quarters of its practitioners are male.



Skateboarders used to be described as a rebellious subculture group whose image was associated with punk and a reckless lifestyle. This image, however, has changed now as its fans have become more diverse.

I took the above photos at a recent skateboarding exhibition on Braga Steet where this group of Bandung skateboarders - experienced as well as novice - demonstrated their ability to make different acrobatic tricks. Skateboarders have different terms for the different tricks they perform, such as "Ollie" (or no hand aerial) where the skateboarder "flies" in the air without holding on to the board; "kickflip" (or "heelflip"?) where the skateboarder kicks the board so that it flips 380 degrees along the board's long axis; and "pop-shove it" where the skateboarder plays with the skateboard while skateboarding. I'm sure they have a few other tricks, but that's all I can remember.

I have to admit here that it was quite difficult to take photos of their actions because the street was packed with spectators and there were no lines that separated them from the action. Street and action photography do have their own challenges. However, it is from events like this that I learn to hone my street and action photography skills.

City of People: Futsal Players

Text and picture by Eki Qushay Akhwan

Back to my City of People series.

While Bandung and the Province of West Java in general are well-known for their world class badminton players, e.g. Susi Susanti (1992 Barcelona Olympic Games Gold Medalist), Rexy Mainaky & Ricky Subagja (1996 Atlanta Olympic Games Gold Medalists), Taufik Hidayat (2004 Athens Olympic Games Gold Medalist), it doesn't mean that Bandung people are not as passionate about other kinds sports as they are with badminton. In addition to Badminton, football (US: soccer), and basketball; futsal is a kind of sport that is increasingly becoming more popular in the city. A lot of young people play this sport nowadays. New fields and clubs are significantly growing in numbers as are competitions and championships.

Not being an aficionado of soccer, I did not know much about fulsal. All I know is that it is an indoor version of football/soccer. Unlike football/soccer, however, each team only has five players, one of whom is the goal keeper, and it is played with smaller ball than the ordinary football/soccer. The name fultsal itself comes from Portuguese word futebol de salao or Spanish word fulbol de salon (indoor football).

The young people in the photo above were playing fultsal at an exhebition competition recently held at Jalan Braga (Braga Street), Bandung.

City of People: Night Basketballers

Text and picture by Eki Qushay Akhwan

Above all else, a city, I think, is about people. Buildings, streets, cars, and trains are just the accessories. Without people, all the material things only make a dead city. The essence of a city is POEPLE: their happiness and sorrow, their work and trades, their walks and games are the things that make a city beats.

In the past fourty days or so, you have been walking Bandung with me, looking at some of its notable material existence; but then, without knowing its people, I don't think you have yet felt the heartbeat of the city they way I and its many others residents do. So, in the next few posts, I'm going to introduce them to you, in candid, unedited, and unobstructed snapshots that will, hopefully, get you in touch with the very thing that makes the city so lovable to many despite its many shortcomings.

Allow me to begin with these night basketballers on Braga Street.

Muscle Build Up

Text and picture by Eki Qushay Akhwan

Here is, I think, another worldwide symptom of globalization: Our idea of a desirable or beautiful body image. Instead of being determined by the local wisdoms or values, it is now being constructed by the media (the press, movies, etc.). Muscle, fitness, and beauty related industries are thriving because we want to remake ourselves in the image the media has created. It is one of our shared and universalized "experience". Whether you are in Rome or Kuala Lumpur, Sydney or Bandung, images like this have become the standard with which we measure how beautiful our bodies are.

I took this picture at Braga Walk Mall, Bandung, where this fitness center parlor chain is located. I am sure, it's not difficult to find one like this at one of the malls where you usually shop at your city. Shopping, being fashionable, and having a desired body shape are one of our shared, universalized experiences in this globalized world.

Bandung Daily Photo