Category: General

Here’s some random news items I (JM) saw while looking at the Jakarta Post today:
1. There was an earthquake in Bandung, about three hours from here.  I don’t know if this will even get reported in the States, but not to worry, we didn’t feel anything again and it wasn’t that big.

2. There was hail in East Jakarta yesterday for the first time.  Ever.  There are lots of thunderstorms here but I guess it never hails.

3.  Water rates are going up for people living in Jakarta.  Now this is no big deal… except that they only announced it 10 days after the hike went into effect.  I guess this company has lots of debts to pay off, so they’re going to raise rates every 6 months for the next 5 years or something.  Oh, and the rich people rate went up 7% while the poor people rate rose 10%.  Seems kind of backwards to me.

4. There’s an area of town that going to be converted into a "Betawi village".  The Betawi people are the native people of this area of Java, and this goes along with the original Dutch name for this area, Batavia.  Their numbers are decreasing, so this area will be set aside as a cultural heritage spot and will require that all the buildings use Betawi architecture.  Only problem– there’s already 3000 people living there who are frankly quite happy with their non-Betawi houses and businesses as they are.

5. The President of Indonesia makes about $5500 a month.  Salary of the Chairman of the gas and oil regulatory agency: $13,000 a month.

6. People are complaining that TV ads are terrible here.  Lots of companies decide to make one ad and then play it three times in a row instead of paying to create new ones.  We’ve noticed this frequently, especially on MTV, and especially by one of the cigarette companies.  I guess some people like to watch ads and are not happy with the quality.  We’ve noticed that some ads are kind of weird.  I think our favorite is the shampoo commercial which features cartoon-drawn, living, breathing "mother" and "child"  strands of hair.  They are having breakfast in someone’s head (they actually zoom in from a shot of a lady’s head-we didn’t make it up) and the mother is extolling the virtues of the shampoo product which will make her kid stronger as he "eats" it. No joke.

Oh, and one more random note.  The most expensive pack of cigarettes that you can buy here is about 80 cents, but you can get them for as cheap as 50 cents a pack.  I guess that’s one reason why everyone smokes.

This morning we saw a strange sight while looking for a cab.  Now we’ve seen some people getting around in strange ways here, from four people clinging to small motorcycles to kids on bikes holding onto the back of a horse drawn cart to get a free ride.  This took the cake, though.  There was a guy driving his motorcycle with a guy sitting backwards behind him.  He was sitting backwards in order to hold onto a shopping cart, in which was a comfortably seated guy with his gardening equipment.  So the guy was getting a ride to work from his shopping cart.  It was pretty funny.  They didn’t go very far which was good.  I wouldn’t have wanted to see them try that on the crazy big road near our apartment.

We went shopping this weekend and found some of the elusive banana leaves! Finally.  So we had fun with them last night.  It’s cool, you stick them in boiling water for about 5 seconds and they get really soft.  You can roll things up in them after cutting them to size, and it’s just like making eggrolls (except they are not as prone to tearing).  We tried our hand at an Indonesian dessert, sweet sticky rice and banana rolls which turned out not so bad.  The hardest part was getting rice.  We had some, but when we went to soak it a bunch of bugs floated out. That was gross, so we threw it all out and TP went downstairs to get some new stuff. They only had 5 kg giant bags, so he brought one back up and, you guessed it, that one had bugs too.  On the third try we got a good bag. Yuck.

We also ran out of gas again this weekend.  TP asked the guard downstairs what to do and received a phone number.  He called, told them where we live, and ten minutes later a guy showed up with a heavy cannister of gas and took away our empty one.  Still a strange concept that people run around and do this all day long for $6 a cannister.  Oh, and he was barefoot like the guy last time.

We posted a recipe for Sop Buntut, or Oxtail soup, last week, and those of you who read the comments may have noticed a response from our Malaysian commentator.  He said that it sounded very unappetizing.  Figuring that this might be because of a difference in definition between Malay and Indonesian, we looked up buntut in our dictionary and found that it means tail or rear.  So when we were shopping this weekend, TP tried on a pair of pants, then asked me (in Indonesian) how his buntut looked.  The sales women lost it, they giggled for a really long time.  It was quite amusing, and confirmed our theory that the word can be used like "butt".  Unappetizing indeed!