Roxy kids

Saturday we went for a walk along the canal north of us, in Roxy Mas. Canal-front property is not desirable in Jakarta; it means garbagey smells, and garbage, and regular floods.

Still, all the local kids were having a good time flying kites. Drew caused a pint-sized riot when he stopped to photograph them.

Pile of kitties

These guys were sleeping on a couch next to a six-lane highway, but they didn't seem bothered at all by the traffic. I guess Jakarta cats get used to it.

When will the crisis be over?

I don't remember hearing about the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 before coming to Jakarta. I'm sure I read a newspaper story or two at the time, but they clearly failed to make an impression.

Once you're in Jakarta, though, you can't get away from the crisis. I've never known a decade-old event to be so alive in people's minds. It's as if everyone in the US were still talking about the Clinton impeachment or Hurricane Mitch. The reason, of course, is that the country is still recovering. You often hear cab drivers and other people say, "I had a good job ... before the crisis."

"When will the crisis be over?"

The weary guy on this button is from Benny and Mice, a great comic strip about Jakarta street life from the Kompas newspaper. The title Lagak Jakarta means "Jakarta-style." I'm not sure why he has what looks like a colander on his head; maybe it's scavenged from somebody's castoffs?

We got the button free with our Benny and Mice books. I photographed it on one of Chad's batik sarongs so you wouldn't have to look at a picture of my hand, for once.

Cultural relativism and pig guts

It's funny how childhood food habits become law. I didn't eat horses as a child, so I don't eat them now, even though I eat cows. Ducks, which are almost as normal as chickens here, still strike me as a luxury item appropriate to cruise ships and weddings. The small roasted birds -- quail? -- sold on certain street corners seem tragic and make me a little queasy.

Thus it is with pig. I am a big fan of certain sausages, even knowing that the casing is made of pig gut. But show me a pile of pig innards - what is known as "sekba" in Glodok - and I turn pale.

We didn't try sekba. We ate turtle, and that seemed like a sufficient challenge. (That's another cultural equation, come to think of it: yes to lobster and fish, no to turtles and frogs.)

So I said no to sekba -- or to quote the great Philip Levine, "No. Not this pig."

Pirate booty

Back to Glodok, aka Chinatown ... which, besides offering fascinating Chinese food, is a major center for black-market DVD sales.


The stuff turns up here almost as soon as it's released in the US. That speed comes at a cost -- sometimes they just send someone to sit in a movie theatre in the States and tape the movie off the screen with a handycam, so the picture is lousy and the sound is lousy and you can hear other audience members talking and crinkling their candy bags. If someone in front of the videotaper decides to go get popcorn, their head will suddenly pop up on your screen.


All the big American TV shows get copied and sent over pretty speedily as well. They release them a couple of episodes at a time, and then at the end of the season they round the whole thing up into one package. Hence the 3A+3B+3C, etc., on this copy of Lost, Season 3.


Usually they design their own covers for the discs, and sometimes they choose the wrong blurbs. They'll put something like "A stellar cast ultimately disappoints!!! -- Gene Siskel" on the front in big letters. Or here: "A significant war -- NY Daily News." And something tells me the movie isn't supposed to be called Cold War in Russian, either.

Junk food of the week: Everyburger!

The fun thing about buying Japanese junk food is you never know what you're going to get, because the packaging is all in Japanese. Sometimes this pans out and sometimes it doesn't. A few weeks ago I got some allegedly chocolate things that turned out to have all the personality of sawdust. They reminded me of the old Peanuts comic where Linus brings Lucy a cup of cocoa. Lucy takes a sip but spits it out with a look of disgust.

"What is THIS?" she demands.

"Oh," Linus answers, "we were out of cocoa mix so I just dipped a brown crayon in hot water."


Everyburger, however -- here we are talking about quality junk food. These are tiny cheeseburger-shaped cookies with chocolate in the middle.


Note the attention to detail, "sesame seeds" and all. And the chocolate filling is actually of good quality. It's clear that no brown crayons were harmed in the making of the Everyburger.

Another crazy Jakarta New Year's

So the thing about New Year's Eve in Jakarta is, it's expensive. We didn't bestir ourselves to organize a party, and we didn't know anyone who was having a party, and we didn't want to go down to the total mob scene to watch the fireworks at Monas, the National Monument. This left us to the tender mercies of Jakarta's nightclubs and hotels, which were charging from $35 to somewhere upwards of $100 per person for the evening.

The perfect emptiness of their bar

Chad and I and Drew and Melanie, who live downstairs, figured we would be clever and get around the whole thing by going to a row of Japanese and Korean places behind Blok M where you can sing karaoke, drink sake, have a bit of sushi and even ride a mechanical bull. But the joke was on us, because practically the whole block was closed. Bars! Closed on New Year's Eve! So we took refuge in an Authentic English Pub (on tap: Indonesian beer and Heineken ... hmmm). The moment we violated the perfect emptiness of their bar, the staff informed us sternly that the place was closing at midnight. Closing at midnight! On New Year's Eve! So we ordered some beers and toasted the New Year and, as our first official act of 2008, got tossed out promptly at 12:01.


Luckily there wasn't much traffic so we zipped right home and saw the tail end of everybody's fireworks from the roof. We snapped a picture, and that was that -- another crazy Jakarta New Year's Eve.