So then what do you do? If you're like me you sit there rubbing your eyes to hasten lucidity and clarify the paranoia as it sets in asking yourself if there is any possibility that she was someone you shouldn't have hung up on. And dreading the social awkwardness that will ensue if she happens to call back. But all I could think of was the highly unlikely scenario in which she was a member of the North American fledgeling XL Telecom company calling me up as an English speaking XL client to ask if I wanted a six-figure advertising contract as their spokesperson in Canada. Or something equally as absurd. So I'm pretty comfortable, not 100% but a solid 80% comfortable. that I didn't hang up on anyone important. But that 20% gnaws away at the brain as I sit at my much nicer desk in my much nicer desk chair drinking my first morning cup o' tea in my much nicer living quarters.
I think maybe I'm a bit more phone fearful today because of a call I received yesterday. You see I moved from the Kuningan area of Jakarta to an area called Cipete. I have two main, uh, friends who I meet regularly for non-commercial English conversation, ahem, in Kemang. Kemang is within walking distance of Cipete where I am now. The only conversation partner I have in Kuningan is Mr. Lee but we only talk two hours a week whereas the two in Kemang make up the bulk of my hours. 16 between the two. So I thought it was a wise decision to move closer to my main English conversation sources, so to, um, speak.
Several days back I started packing up a bag at a time and bringing them to appointments with the two guys close to my new kost. I'd tell the taxi driver to go first to the kost and wait while I ran up to my room, emptied the bag, brought it back down, empty, to the cab and proceeded to meet with whoever I was going to meet with. Yesterday, Monday the 11th, was my last bag of stuff. You know, fridge stuff and bathroom stuff that you save till the end of a move. It was 4 PM and I had a meeting with Herry, my colourful new language exchange partner. Heh heh heh. Herry's a hoot! You shall read about him in this blog I'm positive. Anyhoo, I was supposed to meet him at 7. It normally takes half an hour from Kuningan to Kemang, maybe an hour in heavy Jakarta traffic. As I got into the taxi I got a text from Herry postponing our meeting until 9 PM. Which was fine. I could unpack the bag of stuff and put it away before our meeting. The weather was a bit rainy so going was slow but nothing to make me suspect that the trip would take more than 40 minutes. Until we got close to Kemang. It started to rain harder. A lot harder. I started getting more worried. A lot more worried. Traffic started moving slower. A lo- it just stopped is what happened. I actually had packed a big, canvas bag, two plastic grocery bags with food in them and my backpack into the trunk of the taxi. I thought many times, completely without hyperbole, that even carrying all that I would have made better time if I'd walked. But then I would have been soaked and the plastic bags would have filled up with water and burst, my computer would have gotten soaked, etc. etc. I HAD to stay in the cab. I was trapped! SOOOO frustrating!!!
To make matters worse, because, remember, this is me here, the taxi driver had the flu, a cold, Malaria, Ebola, I don't know, some kind of ague that had him coughing violently and often enough for me to doubt he was going to be able to make it to our destination. What is the only thing worse than being stranded in traffic? Breaking down in traffic and giving that insufficient facial explanation and shrug to every jackass who punishes you for their lost time as they drive by with a horn honk and angry look. Maybe some angry words. It's happened to me before and it's about the worst feeling in the world. I was a bit panicky thinking that my driver was going to pass out forcing me to try out that look and shoulder shrug and see if it translates to Indonesian. Because, of course, it's all about ME! The tragedy was not my dying driver, it was the time and social comfort he could cost me. What a jerk I am, eh? ha ha ha.
My driver pulled out a tube, squeezed some salve onto the tips of two of his fingers and shoved them right up his notrils. The taxi started smelling like eucalyptus. Whatever was in the tube seemed to work. My driver's coughing downgraded from tubercular to manageable while I was in the back seat chanting mental mantras, "E pluribus unum, cogito ergo sum, ohm mani padme hum..." Traffic, however, remained unchanged. We spent easily 15 minutes negotiating our way through a major intersection snaking our way to one side and completely to the other in tiny cracks between cars and motorcycles that developed an inch at a time. Meanwhile the traffic lights above us changed dozens of times completely unheeded.
However, the journey was not a complete waste. I have already been in the taxi in traffic often enough to wonder how it happens. I mean there is not a single motorist who doesn't want to keep going yet the exact opposite is happening. Why? I saw a couple things that day that went a long way to explaining that to me. At least as far as Jakarta is concerned. One is this insanely optimistic piece of municipal mismanagement they have all over Jakarta that I can best describe as a traffic X. It's an intersection without lights and whereas a normal intersection is more of a + with vehicles crossing at angles more easily seen, these suicide traps have traffic crossing at oblique angles often in motorists' blind spots. You know, the kind of things designed by little boys with Hot Wheel tracks. Two streams of traffic going the same direction. Let's see what happens if we CROSS those streams. Hoo hoo haa haaah! It's worse than Ghostbusters.
But the traffic X could probably be workable if not for that old failing known as human nature. As I saw, (experienced first hand thanks to Mr. Consumption, my taxi driver), they are excellent character tests these traffic exes! When traffic is not moving or moving by the inch, as it was yesterday, and you come to the X, you have two choices: 1. you can leave the width of a car between you and the motionless car in front of you so that traffic can cut in front of you through the X letting many others reach their destinations more expediently, or 2. you can nose up to the car in front of you gaining yourself and others in the car with you exactly NO time but blocking many, MANY other motorists. Guess what my driver's choice was. If I had any language ability I would have called him on it between his bursts of coughing but instead I had to suffer the humiliation of being the plug in the traffic bottleneck and having a hundred horns blown at me. I knew the fogged up, raindrop covered window I was behind was opaque enough to maintain my anonymity, and I was well aware that I was not the selfish driver who had made this decision, but I still felt the burning of blocked drivers' glares across the X axis. I dunno, maybe I just FEEL too deeply. I'm just too nice. Har har!
Anyway, around 5 PM I text Herry something like, "It's a good thing we changed to 9 o'clock because I'll probably be stuck in traffic till 7. It's crazy out here!" This was an outrageous prediction, I was well aware, but just a little levity to hopefully ease my tension in the back seat of a stranded taxi. I reached my new kost at 7 PM. I was RIGHT! 3 hours it took me to make a half an hour trip. I'm so glad taxis are cheap here! In Canada that would have broken me. Here it was 14 bucks. Still, it's usually only 5 on a bad day. But these were extraordinary circumstances.
I'm not sure where the pic in that link was taken but that is exactly what Kemang looked like. Knee deep water and roads closed. That's why traffic was so slow. But I didn't know till I tried to go to the pub. You see, Herry had meetings at work all night so he ended up just cancelling our meeting. As it turned out I needed the extra time. You see I am fond of a pub here called E P. That's Eastern Promise. It's where I met all the guys from the Jakarta Gentlemen's Club, and still meet them regularly there. It's where I watch Aussie Rules Footy on Saturdays. It's where I've met the majority of my friends here in Jakarta. It's an easy place to spark up a conversation with a stranger.
Well it's their 25th anniversary and the owner, Lens, has a promo going in which a lucky card recipient, (I got one!), gets a stamp every day for 25 days just for going in to E P and having himself a free beer. I've already got 6 stamps. If you miss a day, you lose the challenge, but if you make it the 25 consecutive days you get a 25 million Rupiah bar tab. That's $2,500.00. That's an extra good month of work for me! I can buy a lot of curry and beer with that! On Monday I still hadn't gone into E P to get my stamp and by the time I got to my new home I had only 5 remaining hours in which to do so. I figured I had better get a move on.
So I put all my belongings away and set out for E.P. I knew it would be a bit of a walk, like maybe 45 minutes, but I needed the exercise after sitting in the cab for 3 hours and I knew there was a refreshing, free beer at the end of the journey. The place I live is in a bit of a labyrinth of residential roads, sideroads, alleys and offshoots. I hadn't really done much recon since moving in. Another reason I was champing at the bit to get out there. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I knew Herry's place was close and it was on the way to Kemang so I decided to try to find the route to Herry's and then continue on to Kemang where E.P. is. I got lost. I mean really lost. It was a beautiful, post rainfall fresh smelling evening to get lost, however, so I didn't fret too much. And this is the kind of butt puckering I seem to thrive on when I'm not in my home country. I just kept walking. I had found that to be effective when lost in Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia, you name an Asian country, I've likely been lost in it. There weren't many taxis driving by so I figured in a big city I'd come to a big road eventually and I could catch one. Sure enough after about an hour of wandering I saw what looked to be a busy street up in the distance. A cab pulled up behind me and blew its horn. I waved it down, got in and said, "Kemang." The driver waved his hands, shook his head and after uttering a few phrases in Indonesian that I didn't understand he said, "Water too much." I understood that to mean Kemang was flooded. So I showed him a piece of paper with the exact directions to my kost written on it. He again waved his hands and gave me a confused look. I really DO live in an out-of-the-way corner of Jakarta I guess. So I got out of the cab and walked to the main street. It turned out to be Fatmawati. I had gone the opposite direction I was supposed to have. It happens a lot to me. But taxis were driving by every few seconds and it was no problem to flag one down, then another, then another, then another. NONE of these people would take me to Kemang because, I ascertained through multiple charades, it was flooded, and not a single one of them knew where I lived.
From my severely undependable sense of direction I calculated that the main road leading to my area, Jalan Abdul Majid Raya, couldn't be too much further down Fatmawati and I was pretty sure I could find my place if I made it to Abdul Majid so I started walking. I turned onto one of the unmarked streets that went the direction Abdul Majid goes hoping it was in fact Abdul Majid. Luckily the road had gates and, (here they are again!), YES, security guards! I asked in my paltry Bahasa, "Ini jalan Abdul Majid ada?" I'm not even sure how accurate that is but I think it's approximately, "Is this Abdul Majid street?" There were about five of them and they hopped right to giving me directions. One of them spoke some passable English and told me I had to go back out to Fatmawati and go another 200 yards to reach Abdul Majid. I thanked them profusely relieved to no longer be lost and still have a shot at getting the stamp for the day.
I found Abdul Majid and was able to get back to my area. It was still only 8:30 so I started out in the opposite direction than the one I had taken. After another half hour of walking I was lost again. But I just retraced my steps and got back to the kost. I went into my place and called E.P. One of the bar girls answered and told me it was indeed flooded and I couldn't reach the bar, but that they were still open and, she said, I guess you could walk from the main street. So I asked one of the guys who works at my kost to call me a taxi and ask if they could take me to Kemang. He was nice enough to do so. I was surprised that he was so fast about it. I guess it's the advantage of speaking the language.
At about 10:30 the taxi arrived and the driver said he could take me to Kemang. I started off for the third time to get my beer at E.P. But we got to the road that leads to E.P. and it was blocked off. I just paid the taxi driver and got out. When I walked just a little way down the road I saw the river below the road flowing dangerously fast washing debris down it and almost reaching the height of the bridge itself. It reminded me a lot of the Calgary flooding of last summer. I walked just a little farther and the road and sidewalks disappeared. They were under water. I'm talking water as deep as the girl in the above picture. It was dark but it looked like this:
What could I do? I was a block away from my goal. I just walked right through the knee deep water right up to the front window of E.P. where one of the girls gave me a smiley wave and pointed me to the door. I got inside the bar and noticed that most of it had ankle-deep water on the floor. This might cost Lens some renovation money. The first thing that went through my selfish mind was, "Oh no! Maybe I won't get my 25 mil!" But I got my beer anyway. It was now around 11. The girls told me they were about to close down for the night but I asked if I could wait till 12:01 so I could get my free beer for Tuesday as well. They said that would be okay. So I played pool, had a few beers and left at 12:05. I took an ojek, (motorbike taxi), to my place. It was ridiculously easy to find. I have no idea how I could have gotten so lost so many times!
And, oh yeah, the call I received in the taxi that I completely got sidetracked from telling you about was from the Japanese embassy. There is a dude there who would like to practice his English with me. Maybe I can practice my Japanese too. Apparently we had arranged a meeting weeks before that I had totally forgotten about. If was supposed to have happened at about the half way point of my 3 hour taxi ride. So I had to reschedule my meeting at the Japanese embassy.
Life just keeps getting interestinger over here!
No comments:
Post a Comment