Writing this on my Blackberry so excuse the typos.
I decided I wanted, nay, needed to go swimming last night and it was rainy all day, so I stubbornly decided I needed to go to the only Fitness First pool that’s indoors… Far away in Taman Anggrek.
I impulsively jumped in a dodgy non-bluebird cab and off we went. The roads were so jammed up that we had to go the long way through back streets of dodgy West Jakarta kampungs.
I spent most of the ride staring out the windows in silence. When I’m not in a rush sometimes I don’t mind the traffic. There’s always something to look at in this town.
But I was getting bored. The driver took the chance to spark up a conversation while I watched a cockroach traverse the dirty car window.
“Don’t worry, nona, I’m only not taking the tollroad because of the traffic.”
“That’s ok, I know Pak. Always traffic.”
“Some people feel scared not to take a bluebird. Some foreigners only ride bluebird.”
“Ah, I’m not scared, pak, it’s ok.”
“You know what you should do is always remember the number on the door of the taxi, non. Even though the drivers have identity cards (on the dashboard) sometimes they are not theirs. If you have trouble, you can call for help and it makes it easier for the police to know what taxi you are on.”
“Thank you Pak.”
On the way home, it was my turn to give advice.
At first I was confused about what the driver was saying. I thought he wanted me to pay a toll but we hadn’t passed a tollroad. Then I realised he wanted me to teach him how to ask for a toll in English. He said he often had trouble if he picked foreigners up because they thought he was trying to rip them off on the toll.
So we went over and over the phrase ‘ you need to pay the toll now please.’
He said he was studying english. I asked him where he was learning and he said he just studied tv shows and love songs. We then discussed the differences between highways, tollroads and normal streets. I tried to teach him how to say ‘ the tollroad has a traffic jam’ but by then I was home.
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by Ashlee on February 13, 2010
in life
On the Hume Highway, near Wangaratta, June 2009
Just because I’m single (like usual) on Valentine’s Day doesn’t mean I don’t have people out there who I adore.
Happy Valentine’s Day to:
- The family who lend moral support to my madcap lust for adventure and being in far-flung places, even though sometimes I know they’d prefer if I just came home.
-The friends who have made me feel at home, no matter what city I’ve lived in.
-The friends who are also supportive of my crazy, tolerant of my crazy and sympathetic of my crazy (a lot of you cross over with the previous category)
-Everyone else. You’re lovely too.
xxxx
OK, enough mush, now let’s get this Hallmark holiday OVER with so I can stop seeing fluff stories in the news about it.
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I’ve been to lots of cities, many of them with reputations for romance. Paris, Rome, Florence… yadda yadda. I mostly just ate gelato or crepes there. But they definitely had the romantic vibe.
But after more than a year in Jakarta, I have to say that I have never met a city so publicly wrapped up in the idea of romantic love… even if it doesn’t have footpaths for lovers to wander along holding hands.
[keep reading…]
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It’s January 20. I haven’t written any resolutions yet or mused on 2009 or written about my hopes and dreams for the year ahead.
Probably cos this year got off to such a crazy start. New Years Eve was lovely and fun and spent with friends during the day and night, but since then I’ve had friends going though really bad times, shake ups in my office, dramas with meeting deadlines for important stuff that were completely out of my control, me going through some rather bad health that I’m still on the path to repairing and, as is the norm in Jakarta, pending farewells. As well as trying to figure out what I want to do in the future, that eternal question.
But, despite the new decade still having some trouble finding its feet, I’m excited about the year ahead. I’ve got raffle tickets in all over the place… grad school apps, job apps… and how this year turns out, and where I will be living by the end of it, will largely depend on them.
But I’m also planning to strike out as a ‘real’ freelancer for a while this year too, traveling and having the time to do some of the stories that I’m really interested in and seeing more of Indonesia and SE Asia. It will be the first time in forever for me that I’ve thrown aside the structure of school, university or a full time job (or a hellish combination of some of the above). Well it seems like forever… probably the four month university holiday I had in Europe was the other time. 2006 seems like a long time ago. I’m also planning to organize a volunteer placement somewhere along the way as I feel it is remiss that Indonesia has given me so much and I haven’t really taken the time yet to give something back in that way as well. There’s not just an indulgent purpose behind this so-called plan though… I do want to improve my journalism portfolio and I do want to increase coverage of some of the issues facing Indonesia. Though there will definitely be bumming on a beach time in there somewhere.
I have no idea where I am heading and I probably won’t have any idea until April or May what is in store for the second half of the year, so that’s kinda scary-cool.
As for wrap up of 2009? Well I think it was a year I will never forget, thanks to Indonesia. I mean that in a good way. I learned so much about news, life and people, some of it good and other things not so good. Saw some great places and had some fantastic times with good people. There were some dramas, but they are always fleeting and likely to be forgotten as quickly as all of the GRE vocab I tried to cram in during September. And as for work experience, well, earthquakes, terrorist bombings, terror raids and everything else teach you a lot very quickly.
So, may 2010 be as educative, interesting and enjoyable (I could live without the bombs and quakes though, thanks). Bring it on.
Photo: This post needed a photo but I haven’t been out shooting yet this year. This is an old one I hadn’t blogged of somewhere outside of Bukittinggi in West Sumatra, March 2009.
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Wow, I’m going to write something serious on my blog for once. About the media. WOAH.
This week in Jakarta there have been three cases of suicide in shopping malls. Read here and here.
One of the Jakarta Globe reporters wrote an opinion piece about the dangers of Twitter journalism, which you can read here. It sparked a bit of debate on the Globe site and on the Unspun blog.
It’s raised a few questions about citizen journalism, especially on Twitter.
[keep reading…]
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by Ashlee on November 28, 2009
in life
So, the reason you haven’t heard from me for a few weeks is that I have been neck high in application essay writing, as well as moping and procrastinating. I still have some more stuff to do, but the worst of it is over. I don’t think I did a very good job, but I’ve hit the submit button on them none the less. The schools I’m applying for are probably way out of my league, but I’m thinking of this whole process as being kinda like buying a really goddamn expensive educational Lotto (lottery) ticket, except instead of queuing up at the newsagent to buy it, you have to churn out at least 2000 words of arsekissy crap about your hopes and dreams per application. And instead of winning money, you win a place in a good school that’s going to cost you lots of money. So I’m not expecting to win the jackpot, but it would be nice… except for the potential debt?
That’s not to say that I wasn’t honest about my goals in my essays. And I do really, really, really wanna go study. It’s just, ya know, not me, to gush on about my hopes and dreams and how the world can be changed if we all work together etc, as anyone who knows me face to face knows 
I keep my optimism buried deep under piles of cynicism to keep it safe.
[keep reading…]
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It seems like I had quite an influx of visitors today from The Punch, where I had a piece up about fat hate in the weight debate. Read it here, if you like.
So, if you’re newly visiting my blog, thanks for dropping by! I write about all sorts of things… travel, food, Indonesian life, random silly stuff, etc. I also love photography… and comments!
Keeping with the theme of ‘random’… here’s a shot I took of Bundaran HI in Jakarta last night at Social House, where we were having a celebration for a friend’s birthday.
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Don’t get paratyphoid fever. It really, really sucks.
You will feel absolutely horrible.
You will lose a week of your life or more to it. For me, NINE DAYS OF ILLNESS, STILL NOT FULLY RECOVERED.
You will have to go on nasty antibiotics that have terrible side effects such as “tendon pain” and “emotional instability” to get rid of the paratyphoid bacteria, causing you to limp like a grandma around your one room kos-kosan prison cell while bawling about how you want to go home to your mum. You won’t feel like eating anything, yet due to aforementioned emotional instability, will then possibly burst into tears because you are “still fat even though you haven’t eaten anything for a week” so hence berate yourself as some sort of failure.
And when the counterfeit DVDs of teenage drama TV series run out and you have nothing left to watch except Star World (which translates to “nothing left to watch except Friends reruns”), things get even worse.
Oh, and you might have strange fever-and-PTSD-induced dreams where you wake up scared in the middle of the night because you are imagining earthquakes and/or that the ceiling is falling down.
This is all obviously an illustrative example only, not necessarily a true story :p. Obviously, I’m stronger than that. In public at least.
But yeah, try not to get it. It sucks.
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