betty loves blogging

The End.

This is my last post on this blog!!!

But fear not, dear handful of readers, this blog will continue, albeit with a slightly different layout and name, over at www.mostcuriousblog.com.  But don't worry, it's still the same old random mix of junk, and all the archives are over there too.

The design still isn't quite finished.  The content still isn't quite finished.  But hey, it's like when you move into a new house and have to sleep on newspapers on the floor for a few months while you get organized enough to buy furniture.

It's still kinda hard to move, but exciting too.  Lots of new possibilities.  (And... less money cos I don't have to pay for Typepad subscription every year...)  But this has been a nice little house for my blogging for the past couple of years.  *sniff*

It's just, ya know, I turned 24 today and need a blog with more growing room. 

Ok, I'll try and keep it together.  This is emotional.

PLEASE UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS!  I know I still have to move over the blogroll, but I am on to it, I swear!

And please don't comment here, come on over to the new house and warm it with comments.  If this were the real world, I'd pour you a glass of nasty champagne! ;)

Inacraft

Went to the Inacraft Expo at the Jakarta Convention Center today. It was a brilliant collection of handicrafts (including, of course, truckloads and truckloads of batik) from all over the archipelago... unfortunately, it seemed to draw pretty much half the population of the country to come and look at it as well, so I was trying to peek, purchase and photograph while keeping track of my friend Ella (thank God she has blonde hair or we seriously would have gotten separated and may never have seen each other again), being rammed into the back of my knees by super strollers and pushy ibu and just generally being elbowed, poked and jammed in between the hundreds (possibly thousands) of stands in the exhibition halls.

They had bracelets...

Batik....

Performance artists clad in silver sparkly body paint with a bank logo printed across their chests and bloodshot eyes from the glitter...

And a sparkly portrait of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono!  Yay!  (Why no Kalla though?)

They also had heaps of wood carvings, furniture, plastic flowers, handbags, jewelry and lost children being sold cheap secondhand because they accidentally let go of their parents' hand somewhere near the Central Java batik stands and now were unlikely to ever find their family again.  Seriously.  It was that busy and crowded.

The show is over for this year now, but it's an annual event.  If you decide to go in 2010, try and go on a weekday if possible, or maybe really early in the morning!!!  There's some great prices on the stuff there, it's just hard to look because of the crowds.

But... I can't tell you what stuff I bought because its a surprise. ;)

Potatohead

Potatohead is now one of my favourite restaurant/bars in Jakarta.  The food is fab.  The drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) are fab.  The decor is fun, quirky and cute.  And they have sofas OUTSIDE that you can sit on!  That's right!  Outside!  That place where there isn't airconditioning!!

I've been there at night twice before, and today went for lunch as was pleased by the offerings on the brunch/lunch menu as well.  Plus, the service is amazing when compared to Social House at Harvey Nichols... Social House has good food but SERIOUS problems with service.

Today I had the wagyu beef burger with salad on the side and sweet potato fries.  It was really yummy, and the portion size is good.  It wasn't a huge burger, just the right size.  I also had a strawberry muesli lassi, and my friend had some sort of juice.  It was all very tasty, well prepared and fresh.

During the day, the atmosphere is really different.  While at night the place is full of trendsters, at day time it's more laid back and there's even some kids running around, with slightly older kids dressed in white uniforms (usually known as nannies... seriously, there was one nanny there that looked barely older than the kid she was looking after) running after them while mum and dad enjoy the swanky sofas.

Potato Head
Pacific Place Mall (outside)
Kuningan, JakSel
(021) 5797-3322

Fireworks

In the typical Jakarta way, there was an unplanned and unexpected amateur fireworks show outside my window tonight.  It was pretty cool.  My photos aren't great cos I didn't have time to check the settings and no tripod/place to lean camera on.  Here's one.

Body rant.

I'm not normally one to whinge about being fat and obsess about it, at least not publicly. But I've been going to the gym a fair bit the last few months.  Also, going on adventures out of town where walking consumes a lot of my time.  But I haven't seen much physical result from this.  Normally, eating same amount of food paired with increase in physical activity should equal weight loss.  It's basic math. But it hasn't really.

That's frustrating.  And its the same frustration that has led me to throw away going to the gym a number of other times.

Stupid shoes!

In Singapore, I bought a cute pair of canvas ballet flats for $10 from Cotton On. Being an Australian chain store, I assumed it would reliably sell me a dodgy product made in China that would only last a few wears.  How wrong I was!

This time, it sold me a product that only lasted 10 minutes!!! One of the shoes just split open at the front when I was standing on the escalator at Plaza Semanggi! And they fitted pretty well, I wasn't trying to stretch them or anything.

 My (male and hence not knowledgeable about cute shoes) colleague said "that's what you get for buying shoes made of picnic rugs or tablecloths".

But it was canvas!!! You can make tents and eco shopping bags out of canvas!!!!

Annoyed. But how sharp is that lens??? Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

PPS. I'm seriously considering the move to a wordpress platform due to the limitations and expense of Typepad. Anyone got any amazing theme/layout suggestions for me? I'm looking for a clean theme that prioritizes both images and text... at the moment, most only seem to focus on one or the other. I want the happy medium!  But I have decide soon cos my Typepad subscription is up for renewal in May.  Hard decision to make though!

My new baby

Me with my new baby that I bought while in Singapore on the weekend.  A Canon 50D with a 50mm f1.4 USM lens.  It's beautiful. 

I'm still getting used to the prime lens.  It makes you have to concentrate more on composition because you don't have the flexibility of zoom.  Also, working with it at 1.4 is hard because the DOF is so shallow that the slightest movement can put thing out of focus.  But I'm trying to get some practise and am sure I will have it mastered soon.  And I still have my trusty Sigma 17-70 for when I want more flexibility (albeit with less sharpness)

The sharpness of the lens at around f4 is amazing, and it picks up colours so well at all apetures.  Also works smashingly in low light:

A story

I have blown the dust off my notebook, sneezed profusely, found a pen suitable for my psychotically fussy shorthand tastes passed on from my fanatical Teeline teacher and then gone out and done a story for the first time in a while.

You can read it online here.

It deals with an issue which is obviously somewhat close to home for me, and that is size discrimination and body confidence.

Thinking about moving...

I'm thinking about moving my blog over on to a Wordpress platform... then I can put it on my server space, have more flexibility with widgets and design, and not pay $70 US a year just for a blog.  I pay for webspace anyway for my CV site.

I could also rename it if I moved it.  I'm sick of this name.

I was thinking of calling it "Trashed" (because, as those who know me in real life are aware, I am Trashlee).  But there is a porn site with that name...

Dunno.  What should I do?  And more importantly, can I be stuffed?

Rat attack

On Monday night, I was sitting at my desk, getting ready to go to bed, when all of a sudden a dart of blackness scrabbled across the floor.  It could only mean one thing — rodent.

I hate rodents.  Especially knowing that here, the rodent is probably a dirty sewer rat carrying the plague or something.  All I could do was tweet.  There was nobody to help and nothing I could do!

I was going to share some of my tweets from the attack, but Twitter is being temperamental and I can't see them right now, but they were basically me screeching with horror at it scurrying up my curtains, running across my bedside table and darting in and out from under my bed, followed by a bout of homesickness, tears, trauma, extreme tiredness and eventual sleep in the foetal position wrapped up under a sheet to protect from the rat.

The following morning, dark circles under eyes, I asked in my horrific Indonesian if the security guard at my kost would set a trap.  He looked relatively excited at the prospect of actually having something to do...  he spends most of his day sitting and saying hello to us when we walk in and protecting us from non-existant threats, and when he is on the night shift he gives us jokingly judgemental mental looks when we come back late looking tipsy.  The pursuit of the tikus besar in the bule's room should have been the highlight of his week.

Tuesday night, I get home from work, and I thought, maybe, the room was now rat free.  But then... it darted out from under the armchair.  Sigh.

Once again slept in a cocoon.

The next morning, I asked the security guard whether he was going to catch the rat.

"I looked for it and couldn't see it.  I looked inside the wardrobe and it wasn't there."

Sigh.  I told him it runs behind the wardrobe, and could he please look again.

When I returned home tonight, security guard had clearly been at work.  In an attempt to thwart the rat, the guard had now pushed the wardrobe firmly against the wall.  The floor-to-ceiling window was also half open, maybe in an attempt to get it to go outside.  An interesting strategy, but one which means my room is now full of mosquitoes.

But luckily, tonight I returned prepared with the best (only) rat trapping device Giant Supermarket could provide.

Let's take a look at that illustration a little more closely, shall we?

This trap not only catches large mice.  It also catches small elephants.  I would love to have a small elephant running around my room!  How cute!

So while I can't vouch for its elephant catching properties, it did the trick for Mr Ratty.  It let out squeaks when it got stuck on the glue.  I almost felt bad.  But not really.

So tonight I shall sleep so well.  I hope there was only one of them in here....

Heading to the polls...

As Indonesia prepares to head to the polls Thursday for its general elections, to be followed by presidential elections in July, perhaps one of my ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers sums up rather well the situation of your everyday voter.

He wears a free black vest that he got from the PKS, an Islamic party, that he dons despite the sweltering heat, and a free cap that he got from Hanura, the People's Conscience Party.  The roof of the ojek stand was for some time made more water-and-sun-proof courtesy of a PDI-P (former president Megawati Sukarnoputri's party) flag. All the political parties hand out free stuff — caps, shirts, flags, balloons and worst of all, cash — to try and win votes.  Of course, the poor are happy to take the handouts, even if it turns them into a walking talking political paradox.

When I asked him if he liked the PKS, he grunted and shrugged his shoulders.  When I asked him if he liked Hanura, he grunted and shrugged his shoulders while stomping out the butt of his clove cigarette on the ground.  When I asked him if he liked Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, he ummed and said "maybe".

My limited Indonesian and his ambivalence meant that we were never going to have a serious political conversation.

But he said one thing I understood clearly.

"' 'Bu, partai polik semua sama.  Nggak apa-apa."

Political parties are all the same.  It doesn't matter.

It seems that a lot of the excitement around tomorrow's election is about Indonesia showing once more it has a peaceful democracy... even if many feel there aren't any candidates offering policy that is smarter than handing out free polar fleece vests in a tropical climate.  There's no Obama in this race.

But I really hope tomorrow goes well, and peacefully, because this country has done pretty well to get from a mess in 1998 to the democratic nation it is today.  And hey, there may not be any super exciting fresh new candidates... but gosh, remember those elections on Oz where we were picking between Beasley and Howard :p ?  Or in NSW, between Debnam and Iemma?  You can always have a dud year.  Maybe next time there will be more fresh candidates to choose from...

Recreational elevator riders

At the mall in which my office is located, there is a dire shortage of elevators during peak hours.  You wait, wait, wait and they are full when they arrive.  It's very frustrating, but at least it is acknowledged as an acceptable excuse for being late for work, as well as macet (traffic jams), because everyone in the office knows the perils of elevator availability, especially on Friday nights.

But, the problem is compounded by a group of people I like to call "recreational elevator riders".  These are people, often groups of teenagers or families with young children, who ride the elevator as if it is an attraction at Disneyland.  They go all the way up to the top.  Then ride all the way to the bottom.  Then all the way to the top again.  Cheap thrills for the whole family, especially if it's a glass elevator.

For those of us who actually want to use the elevator, you know, to get some place on a floor not accessible by escalators (people who take the lift one floor when it is next to the escalator... another pet peeve of mine) it is rather irritating.

But maybe that's an untapped market- "LiftLand".  The amusement park filled with all sorts of elevators!!!

I only started to notice the phenomenon when I saw that people who were on a full lift going down were still in the same lift going up.  Multiple times.  I also observed the same phenomenon in other malls.  It's rather strange.  At first I thought it might have been people who had come to Jakarta from smaller towns where they don't have elevators... but now I'm not so sure....

West Sumatra photos

Because I took just soooooo many photographs during my five days in West Sumatra, I have made up a slideshow of some of the better ones, which you can look at by clicking...

HERE.

It will open in a new window.

I will write more about the trip later, but it's an amazing place. The landscape is stunning and the people are so friendly. And I only got the chance to see a small part of it.

Dear Padang. I think I kind of love you in a weird way.

Pantai Padang

People told me Padang isn’t amazing.  That it’s just a place to go to so you can get to Bukittinggi or the Mentawai islands.  Well, I’ve been in Padang for six or seven hours so far and I have to respectfully disagree.

The locals are so friendly, especially the kids.  When I was down at the rather pleasant but choppy-looking beach, and walking around, I had an obscene amount of “hello missus, hello mister” like everywhere else because there aren’t that many foreigners visiting here these days apparently. But here the kids were so curious and interested and made the time to have a bit of a conversation with me, either in Indonesian or English.  They all wanted their photos taken down the beach at sunset, and they were asking me questions about Australia that I really didn’t have the language ability to answer very well! 

Kid: What things are in Australia?
Me: Umm.  Many beaches and many animals.  It is hot, like Indonesia.

What a compelling description by me!  The kids weren’t hitting me up for cash either, which is always refreshing.

Preparing for Nyepi

A family in Ubud working on a penjor, a decorated pole put outside Balinese homes and businesses for celebrations, in the lead up to Nyepi, the Balinese Hindu New Year.

Because of Nyepi, which falls on Thursday, there's a public holiday, so I'm out of the office for a few days (!!!) and I am heading around Padang and Bukittinggi in West Sumatra to do God-knows-what, so catch you later non-existent readers. xx

Ubud afternoon

I wish I could carry stuff on my head skillfully like the Balinese.  How sweet would that be?

Oh babi, oh babi.

THIS IS THE BEST PORK EVER.  (Sorry Mum, your Christmas roasts are pretty good too.  But not quite in this league.)

Babi guling, or Balinese suckling pig, from Ibu Oka's warung just behind Ubud Palace.

AMAZING.

For Rp 30,000 you can get the special with a drink.

It's a mix of crackling, the most tender pork, greens, Balinese sausage, other bits of pig that tasted good but I'm not sure what they were, all coated in Balinese spices served on white rice.  It has a bit of a chili kick to it, but not too much.

Apparently they cook up about four of these babis (babi is the Indonesian word for pig) a day and when they have run out, that's it.  No pig for you.  So don't leave it too late, there's never any pig left by dinnertime. The place is buzzing.  Some regular tables out the front, and out the back, low tables with mats to sit on the floor.  You kick your shoes off in to the bulging pile before plonking down on a mat to share tables with locals and tourists from all over.  The topic of conversation primarily revolves around just HOW AWESOME the babi guling is.  There were a few other Jakarta expats there as well, who, like me, were just relishing being able to eat pork, which is not that readily available in the more Muslim parts of Indonesia.

If you go to Ubud, you have to eat this.  As long as you are not Muslim or vegetarian or vegan.  (Sorry... but there's other good stuff to eat in Bali too for you guys...)

Did I mention that it is absolutely delicious?