Our family owns a little red Hyundai.
For a while it was mine. I had it up in Sydney, zipping around to interviews and to take photographs, with my straightened newsreader cut hair in a snappy little outfit.
After a couple of years in an office job where I never had to leave the office, my snappy dressing toned down dramatically… but the car is the one that really let itself go while I was in the tropics. It was not entirely Mr Hyundai’s fault though I have to say.
When I went to Indonesia, the red Hyundai became my brother’s vehicle of choice. In fact, “when I moved to Indonesia” was the last time the car had been cleaned until I came back from Indonesia. It was filled with crap, and still jetlagged, I took it and cleaned it out so I could drive it up to Sydney. Hard yakka.
Five weeks later, my bro has filled it with so much rubbish and crap again that I would be ashamed to take any non-relative passengers in it again.
But tonight, when I was driving up to work, a new level of disgusting was reached.
A chip packet STARTED MOVING. Something was thrashing around inside it. THERE WAS A MOUSE IN THE DAMN CAR!!!
I squealed so much, thank god I was only a block or so from work. It was also fortunate I was at traffic lights when it started moving around, otherwise I may have crashed the car out of shock.
Regular readers may remember how much I hate being in enclosed spaces with rodents. I was not impressed.
I have no idea how it got in there. But at least my bro is cleaning the car now.
My nanna has dementia. It’s getting worse. Some days she is OK, some days she is terrible, driving my poor uncle, who is selflessly caring for her full time, understandably crazy.
It’s a sad disease, especially when it impacts younger people. But it can also be oddly hysterically funny. It feels wrong to laugh at, but until there is some sort of cure, those caring for someone with the disease deserve to be able to see the lighter side of it, I feel, if only to keep their own sanity. Answering the same questions over again every five minutes is frustrating even for just a few hours, let alone every day.
My grandmother’s sister suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I remember as a child thinking it quite hilarious when she would take dirty dishes, “dry” them with a tea towel and then put them away in the cupboard as if they had been washed, forgetting the crucial step of actually washing them. That being said, I wasn’t the one that had to go through the cupboards to find the dirty plates, often with chunks of food still on them, and clean up the mess. I also wasn’t tasked with having to try and tactfully dissuade her from helping out with the dishes anymore.
But my grandmother takes the hilarity to a whole new level. Nanna’s latest annoyance is the failure of my mother to return her bicycle, which my mother borrowed when she grew out of her child bike and needed a new ride up to the high school when she was aged 12, circa 1972. The bike got many years of use. When we were young kids, mum and dad took us out on rides on the bike, which by then had a child seat fastened on the back. But it is now 2010, some 38 years after the original loan, and Nanna wants the bike back. So she can go riding. Even though she is very elderly and has troubles hobbling around the house.
[keep reading…]
Contrary to popular belief, I am doing some freelancing on the road. It’s the type of freelancing I would class as “hardly investigative”, but it’s been keeping me occupied and badly paid, just like if I had a real journalism job.
So here’s a few links to some recent writings.
1. Remember, ages ago, I alluded to actually telling you all about how much I enjoyed attending the Casa Luna cooking school in Ubud, Bali? Well, I ended up writing about it for the Jakarta Globe, so you can read about it all over there. The picture on the left shows some of the dishes that we made in class… so yummy!
2. I wrote a (according to some commentators) rather humorous piece for the Jakarta Globe called “I love you Indonesia, but please stop trying to kill me.” It’s written in the style of a monologue to a slightly abusive lover. You can read it here.
3. During my stint at language school in Yogyakarta, I wrote a piece of mind article about the rewards of studying Bahasa Indonesia. You can also read that one over here at the Jakarta Globe.
The main project I’ve been working on over the last fortnight isn’t live yet, but when it is… I’ll let you all know. All five of you that read the blog.
On an entirely different note, does anyone have any pointers for boosting my blog traffic? Because this is not a niche blog and is more of a “whatever” blog, it’s hard to promote… and I love writing posts and taking photos for it, but the traffic numbers and comments are so few 
Spotted on Lebuh Chulia, Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia.
Need some fun in your day? Need some joy? Need to develop a new hobby without the expense of purchasing a football? Or maybe you just need a good beverage inspired by the world’s most biodegradable sporting equipment.
KICK A POO JOY JUICE IS FOR YOU!!!
Spotted today in a coffee shop here in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia… a huge banner for Kickapoo Joy Juice. What a name.
I also have no idea what they are doing on that illustration on the can. Barbequeing themselves? The levitating elephant might be pooping and the other guy kicking? I dunno.
Immature I know, but I’m the same girl that laughed for days after discovering Poo brand tofu in Jakarta.
Their Website doesn’t seem to be working though, so I can’t find out more. How sad.
And on the sabbath day, the Sexy Dancers rest.
Spotted this outside a sports bar in the relatively upscale area of Seminyak in Bali.
A few points:
1. Do you think I can get a research grant from a major university to conduct a study of which bar actually has the coldest Bintang in Bali? It’s clearly an untested claim with many rival theories… in other words, every bar is claiming the title.
2. The fact that you can advertise on a huge banner that you have sexy dancers in Bali, yet in Bandung, West Java, you can be arrested for sexy dancing just goes to show the huge gaps in law enforcement and justice in this country. Firstly, sexy dancing should not be illegal, because, seriously, where do you draw the line? I get pretty steamy on the dancefloor if someone drops JT’s ‘sexyback,’ but whether its criminal is a matter of taste. But secondly, Bali clearly doesn’t face the same restrictions as many other parts of the country, largely due to its Hinduism and tourist industry. But in a secular country, shouldn’t the standards on this stuff be universal?
Five simple questions to determine your ability to qualify as a Jakarta taxi driver.
1) You are driving along a narrow street. A car is coming in the opposite direction and there is not enough room for both of you to pass because a car is parked on the side of the road. Do you:
a) Pull over behind the parked car and allow the other vehicle to pass.
b) Flash your lights onto high beam frequently in an obnoxious manner to indicate that you are going to press on and the other car better do something to stay out of your way.
c) Continue to drive, get to a position where both you and the other car are stuck, beep your horn continually for a few minutes hoping that it will provide some kind of solution, then have some random dude come out of the kampung from somewhere and start to direct the traffic screaming “kiri, kiri, kanan, kiri” etc to get you out of your bind. After a series of complicated maneuvers and much beeping you will be free and the meter will have jacked up considerably. You then try and convince your angry passenger to pay the guy who volunteered to direct the traffic. [keep reading…]
I went to see the Michael Jackson flick last night “This Is It”. I was bored!
It was ok. I had already heard it was just a bunch of rehearsal footage strung together, so I wasn’t expecting anything more really. I mean, he was an amazingly talented man, and the footage showed he was talented right up until the day he died.
But the most entertaining part were the other cinemagoers.
When you go to the cinema in Jakarta, your seats are allocated like if you go to the actual theatre in Australia. Somehow, my seat was in the middle of a big family who all arrived together, really hyped up, with bags full of Burger King and spent a good ten minutes trying to work out who was going to sit where. It was a rather illogical seat allocation, but what ya gonna do?
During the film the wonder family somehow managed the miraculous task of consuming Burger King while singing all the lyrics to the songs, waving their arms in the air and every now and then just randomly screaming out “Love you Michael!”. They only flicked one french fry on me during this process, so it was a strong showing.
Four of the adult family members also managed to film about 80 percent of the movie on their respective BlackBerry phones. And they gave every song a STANDING OVATION. I kid you not. A STANDING OVATION. IN A MOVIE THEATRE. WHILE EATING BURGER KING AND FILMING THE MOVIE ON THEIR PHONES. And talking loudly about how amazing it was, as well, obviously. And texting people through the whole film.
It was truly an amazing feat. It actually made me question Michael’s talents. What, you can only sing and dance brilliantly at the age of 50 and be a creative genius and talk quietly and throw the word “love” into any of your requests to the stage crew? THIS WHOLE FAMILY COULD DO THAT WHILE EATING BURGER KING AT THE SAME TIME AND TEXT MESSAGING OTHER PEOPLE TO TELL THEM ABOUT THE MOVIE AND CLAPPING.
Suck on that, MJ.
My mother likes to buy a lot of strange things from those Homewares catalogues that get delivered to your door in Oz. Whenever I go home, I am constantly finding strange implements around the house designed to perform random menial tasks that I never realised were hard or needed special devices to undertake. Basically, take some sort of obscure problem that society at large isn’t really impacted by, then imagine some sort of cheap plastic device invented to work around it.
This is her newest purchase: a banana protector.
Helpfully modeled by my little sister, my partner in cynicism (she was at a dance comp, she doesn’t normally wear that crazy makeup)! Basically, you put your banana inside it. It’s a plastic tube that is supposed to stop your banana from getting bruised and mushy. According to my mum, it works wonders for putting bananas inside handbags, schoolbags…. her list stopped there. “It helps them stay nice, Ashlee,” she said, exasperated at my fits of giggles. “Anyway, it was only cheap.”
My questions about an exact price remained unanswered, though I believe through reading her eyebrow raises, and her telling off my sister for eye rolling and raising her eyebrows in an “up up” gesture during our little game of Price is Right, that it probably came in somewhere between $7.99 and $11.99.
I asked if all bananas fitted in it… mum said some needed to be bent. I asked if bending it to fit it in the protector sometimes bruised the banana, hence rendering the initial purpose of the product to be null and void. She declined to comment, and proceeded to rant about how I am too cynical. :p
