After my first night sleeping in the boarding house with my new Indonesian roommates, I realized something strange: They sleep with the lights on. This seemed so odd to me. Why would you leave the lights on all night long? Several things ran through my mind: its wasting electricity, the lightbulbs will burn out faster, its harder to go to sleep – it just didn’t make logical sense to me. After several weeks of pondering and asking my new friends, the light came on (figuratively that is). There is a perfectly good reason the lights are kept on at night: kecoa and tikus. Cockroaches (2-2.5 inches long) and mice/rats (I saw a dead one the street that seemed to be about the size of a football) inhabit many of the houses here, and they don’t like the light. So now I sleep more peacefully with the lights on, hoping that doing so will prevent me waking up with a cockroach on my nose.
Just another example that differences in culture are not necessarily right or wrong, they are merely the different ways that people have developed to cope and thrive in the environment where they live.
