Year of the Tiger

It turns out I suck at blogging when nobody's paying me to do it. Here's a post I wrote in February just after Chinese New Year. Thought I might as well publish it since it's been sitting here all this time.

When you're just a few hundred miles from China, that whole New Year's in February thing seems a lot less of a novelty. Everybody's been going crazy here the last few weeks the way they go crazy for Christmas in the states. Red bunting everywhere, paper tigers in shop windows, enormous candles.

Finally it happened last weekend and it was a lot different than New Years Eves I'm used to. Well, I was in a smokey room with a lot of fire hazards, but the similarities stopped there.

For one, it's not a big drunken party. We went up to Chinatown on the north side of Jakarta expecting to get pushed about in a boozed-up sidewalk throng of revelers, but that's not what happened. Well, they don't really have sidewalks here so it wouldn't. There was still a crowd, but it was pretty sober.

It's a very religious holiday, and the way a lot of people show their devotion is by burning incense and gigantic candles, some of them enormous. This temple we were in had hundreds of them about a meter high. You could barely get through, and where there was space to walk, people huddled in front of altars, praying with sticks of incense between their palms. There was even a big fire in a gigantic iron fireplace, which didn't help the sweat stains under my arms.

The whole thing has to do with starting over, and not in the sort of lip-servicey, New Year's resolution way we do it. These guys actually get a clean slate. They burn up last year's gods and spirits in effigy and get new ones, sending the old guys off with bribes of fruit and stuff to report to the big boss. It's all very cleansing, as are the two or three showers you have to take to get all the smoke out of your hair after.
Later we went to a house party that was also sweaty and hazy with smoke. Just like on New Year's Eve.

I Got an Apartment

Hey, did you know this blog was a monthly? Well, so far. Let's try to fix that, though.
First of all, I got a place. This will help with updates because said place has internet access, unlike my friend's apartment where I was staying before. It's a lot like a nice-ish hotel room. Got a bathroom en suite and a shared kitchen. It's called a kost, which sort of means boarding house, but at least in this case there's no live-in landlord getting up in my junk like in "Thoroughly Modern Millie." At least I fucking hope not. It's right about here, if you want to keep track on the map.

But it's fine, and it's close to work, and I commute by motorcycle taxi (ojek!) which is even more fun than it sounds. We're always weaving around traffic and I'm giving the long finger to everybody we pass. Awesome. Then there's this little back road (they call them "mouse tracks" in Indonesian but I don't know how to actually say that) that we take to get to my office, and every single day I get at least one little flash where we're bearing down on a head-on delivery truck and I'm like, "welp, that's it, I'm dead. Wish I'd blogged today." But then we pass and everything's cool. Which is why you don't ever hear anything from me.

Also, in an unrelated story, I went out with some guys from work last week and we played some hilarious colonies vs. colonists pool. Mick the Australian and I were on a team against two Brits. We each won two games, but the colonists pulled off the money match. Because that's how we do. Danged Brits still owe us a round of beers, come to think of it.

Be Gentle, it's my First Day

The first couple days in Jakarta have been way less weird than I would have thought. I knew it would be hot, and it is, and I knew it would be kind of smelly, which it also is. People are super nice, and there are all these American chains to make a bule (westerner) feel at home. A lot of life goes on in malls here. I'm staying in a huge pink hotel tower with a mall next door, and honestly most of my time has been spent in one or the other of those hideous buildings. The office of the Jakarta Globe is in the same mall, so I'm going to have to get used to escalators and muzak.

The first night I got here (after god knows how long without sleep) my friend Jim who got me the job and is also my boss took me out with some of the other editors. We drank a thousand Bintang beers and did a small tour of ex-pat bars, starting with some place that was super nice and had food and a fountain inside, then on to some place with simple wood paneling and a pool table that might have been one of my regular spots in SF or New York, and finally to a place called Top Gun, which was full of thumping music, gross dudes, and prostitutes.

I did get up to Jakarta harbor the next day (Sunday). Took a tour with a nice guy named Bram, who wants to be a travel agent but right now has to settle for walking gormy westerners around the neighborhood. He got me on board one of the big cargo ships, then we took a boat taxi to this little fishing neighborhood/village, where he walked me around to take pictures of people who live in apartments way less nice than mine. Open sewers line the sidewalks and the joint smells like a thousand toilets filled with rotting puke. But it's cool looking all the same, with little shacks built out over the water, and tiny streets that go through buildings and over rivers.

We took an orange "tuk tuk" cab (a Vespa with a bench built onto it) to this famous old Dutch colonial place called Cafe Batavia, where you may as well sport the white suit and pith helmet. It's all teak and big, slow-moving fans, with cowhides under the bar and white people at most of the tables. Super nice, though. And the bathroom has a urinal that takes up a whole wall and is made out of mirrors. I've never had such a refreshing view of myself.