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?
Tweet 
Delicious 
Digg 
Facebook 
Ping 
Stumble
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…]
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
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.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
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
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
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….
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
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….
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
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.
[keep reading…]
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
I took this pic at the airport in Denpasar, and forgot about it. I just found it when looking for something else. It’s not a particularly good photo, because it was sneakily taken in the airport toilets. But I remember, delirious with tiredness, chuckling away to myself about the phrase “don’t litter disposal into closet”.
Does it apply to all “disposal”? If so, where can you go to the toilet?
In Indonesian, to me at least, the sign actually says “don’t put stuff inside the toilet bowl”.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
Not a great pic. But in the deli at Carrefour, I spotted these heart shaped, pink doughed, take it home and bake it pizzas, obviously whipped up in celebration of that most icky of Hallmark holidays, Valentine's Day.
How wrong is that?
Is also looks pretty wrong besides the dough… it's got ground beef and very weird looking chunks of cheese on it.
I wanted to buy one to see what colour the dough would be after cooking the pizza, but I don't have an oven. So no taste test unfortunately.
Maybe this is what we should be selling at Sweethearts Pizza, dad? I think this almost outdoes the pizza doughnut I road tested a while back.
Tweet Delicious Digg Facebook Ping Stumble
