betty loves blogging

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.

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.

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....

New view

View from my window at my new home.  Perfect example of how the kampung butt right up against the glitzy skyscrapers everywhere in the city.

Moved this week into a swish kost (kinda like a boarding house... or a hotel haha.  Something in between the two).

I like it, but am still getting used to all the new noises. Ding dings of noodle carts, brrrrrketukketuk of cheap motorcycles and the thud thuds of the washing machine that the maids start early in the morning.  But mostly, the three mosques within the vicinity which are quite a lot louder than at my last place.

But I'm sure it's just a matter of conditioning.

Free MSG

In Australia, when something is marked "MSG Free", it means it doesn't contain Monosodium glutamate.

In Indonesia, if I ever saw a sign that said "MSG Free".... I would know it would just mean they weren't going to charge me extra money for the MSG already in the dish.

Seriously, today I had some noodles and I was pretty sure the only topping was MSG, with a dash of kecap manis.

I was pondering today the potential damage all the MSG might be doing to me.  In Australia, I remember there being a huge panic about MSG and then all the Chinese restaurants started having "MSG Free" signs up.

Dreamy stormsky...

This storm started rolling in just as I was getting ready to go to work yesterday.  The stormsky and the voile curtains and the light and the mirrors in my flat all intrigued me... so I took lots of pictures.  When I was shooting them, I thought they would look better toy/old film camera style, but I couldn't be bothered to shoot film and wait forever to get it developed (see what being part of the computer generation does to you?), so I just tried to make it look like film later in Lightroom.

Today, there was no stormsky though, only sun.

I find it hard to pick out of all these pics of the same thing which one I like best though...  I'm not much good at "editing" down my pictures yet.  If this was Project Runway, I would have just been told off by Tim Gunn because my "collection" is too repetitive.