In the Starbucks where Miss Jiwaku and I hang out in Depok — she studies, I work on stuff — demographics have finally hit, like shit on a fan. The demographics I’m talking about are micropopulation dynamics: the national demographics of enrollment in her Bahasa Indonesian language program at University of Jakarta have shifted, such that there’s a lot more Koreans at the university, in the neighborhood, and… at our Starbucks. (Which prompted this advice from Miss Jiwaku to a new Korean student who enrolled this semester, a friend of a friend already enrolled last semester: “DON’T hang out with …
Tag: Indonesia
Fever, What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Trip to the Local Immigration Office, and a Final Positive Turn
I’ve been quite ill this week — not quite just food poisoning, but something a little more vindictive and involved, though not in a sentient sense. The same intestinal upset as last time, but with an added element: a burning fever on Thursday night, and fever (slightly less severe, but much sweatier) again on Friday evening. It was the kind of fever where you say things you don’t recall saying the next day, and dream of Japanese Solutionatronic devices shaped like giant wok lids except that they aren’t physical objects but rather abstract mathematical structures which, given any question, can …
Random Observations
While I really would prefer to be blogging something a touch more substantial, I’m overloaded with The Freelance Project That Refused to F*cking Die. So, while I’m a little tied up with that — and unable to dive into the fiction-writing project I thought I’d be well into by now — all I have time to post for today are a couple of random observations about stuff in Indonesia, in the vein of my earlier mention of rock star styles here.
Metal Softies
Indonesian rock bands have a seriously weird aesthetic for self-representation, from the point of view of a Westerner, that is. You see these guys who look for all the world like a death-metal band — weird hair-tattoos (like, where they shave intricate patterns into their hair), leather and spikes, braids in their beards, and tough-guy expressions — but then you hear the music and they’re singing soft-rock, ballads, lovesong-sounding stuff. By the way, I’m not ignoring the comments that are being made here… but after half an hour at the Starbucks, discovering that everything (including Gmail) except my website was …
When ATMs Attack, or, How Things are Going in Depok/Jakarta
I’ll be going back to Jakarta tomorrow because a certain ATM has decided to swallow my Samsung Card (a credit card) and not spit it out again. Put the card in the machine, watch it crash, watching Windows reboot (with the Diebold brand name proudly displayed, of course!)… quite a sad sight. The first time it happened was a week ago, and I thought it was a freak accident. Turns out, no, not at all. Samsung Cards crash BNC ATM machines in Jakarta, it seems. Or at least, at the mall I was at. Other than that, things are going …