fast on the slow lane

An Indonesian citizen committed suicide in New York, today. A Bambang Weilianto was found dead on the main floor of the Indonesian Consulate General building in New York. Cause of death was confirmed as suicide by NYPD Precinct 19. Noone yet knows the motive of this suicide. I suppose they are calling upon friends and family who might receive a last minute communication from him to come up with a reason why. They could’ve interviewed him, but he’s dead. So that’s a no-go right there.

The news in brief can be found here, courtesy of Metro TV News.

Speaking of Suicide
Omong-omong soal bunuh diri nih ya, kemarin ada pembicaraan panjang lebar antara dua orang yang ndak punya kerjaan (saya dan teman). Pertanyaannya mudah: kira-kira apa sih cara bunuh diri yang paling asyik? (Memangnya ada bunuh diri yang asyik?)

1. Nenggak cairan pembunuh serangga. Ini salah satu cara yang paling biasa dipakai oleh orang-orang banyak. Awas, jangan kesaru dengan lingkaran nyamuk. Boleh juga ditukar dengan formalin (sekarang sedang ngetop dan naik daun). Keampuhan: Lumayan. Boleh dicoba dulu pada keluarga besar kecoak (yang notabene serangga tahan banting). Kelemahan: Rasanya kurang enak. Tapi sekarang sudah ada cairan rasa lemon, mungkin agak enak sedikit.

2. Gantung diri. Ini juga salah satu cara yang biasa dipakai orang. Juga sebuah cara bunuh diri yang sangat fleksibel. Keuntungan: Murah. Cuma modal tali. Bisa pilih tempat gantung diri (dari enternit bisa, dari pohon bisa), juga bisa pilih jenis tali (walaupun biasanya paling ampuh pakai tali tambang. Kalau pakai benang jahit, kurang pakem). Keampuhan: Lumayan. Tapi kalau alergi dicekik, mungkin susah juga ya. Lalu pilih tempat yang tidak banyak dilewati orang. Salah-salah sudah keburu diselamatkan orang banyak. Kelemahan: Kalau punya rumah ber-langit-langit rendah, susah juga. Kalau di kebun sendiri tidak ada pohon yang sesuai juga susah. Mosok mau pinjam pohon tetangga? Bisa-bisa…
3. Potong urat nadi atau menikam diri sendiri. Seperti Bapak Bambang Weilianto di atas. Keuntungan: Katanya kalau orang kurang darah bisa cepat mati. Keampuhan: ampuh, kalau tau motongnya di mana. Kelemahan: kadang-kadang kalau bukan dokter atau anggota praktis medis, tidak tau bagian mana yang harus dipotong dan/atau ditikam supaya hasilnya maksimal (dengan usaha minimal). Salah-salah bisa sakit sendiri dan tidak jadi mati.
4. Kelebihan dosis obat tidur. Jalan keluar yang mungkin agak tidak menyakitkan. Tinggal tidur, tiba-tiba lewat. Keuntungan: Tidak sakit. Paling-paling melayang, mengantuk, lalu tidur selamanya. Keampuhan: ampuh. Tapi harus tau takarannya. Kalau kebanyakan boleh, tapi kalau kurang, bisa-bisa jadi mual, sakit perut, badan cekot-cekot, dan malah harus ke rumah sakit (lalu diceramahi dokter karena menyalahgunakan obat). Kelemahan: Karena dosisnya harus banyak, dan obat tidur kualitas bagus itu mahal (harus pakai kualitas bagus, mosok mau mati juga masih pakai pelit-pelit segala). Akibatnya, kalau tidak punya uang yang cukup, harus memikirkan alternatif lain. Boleh juga mencoba memaling apotek. Atau boleh juga coba memaling ayam tetangga sebelah. Akan tetapi hasil kegiatan permalingan ini bisa saja menyebabkan kita dikejar-kejar warga kampung dan dipukuli sampai mati. (Lumayan juga, akhirnya mati juga)

sebenernya tujuan catatan kali ini apa ya?

Ah! What a longish weekend. And still another off-day to go! Saturday… Sunday… Monday… Tuesday! Well, I reckon I wouldn’t see anymore holidays like this very soon, so might as well enjoy it. I love the fact that the government see fit to declare public holidays for all major religious festivals. However, I have a sinking feeling that this fact is made possible by the fact that Indonesia only recognises four major religions: Buddhism, Christianity (and that means the Roman Catholics and the Protestants. I still don’t get it why people insist on making a distinction between these two), Hinduism, and Islam.

Unlike The United Kingdom, which recognises nine religions. That’s five religions more! In addition to the four, there’s the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Judaism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrian. I’ve seen the Shap Calendar of Religious Festival. And if the UK ever decide to do what Indonesia does… well, I don’t think anybody is ever going to get a decent workday week!

Go to the BBC Multifaith Calendar
Now compare it to the UK’s Public Holidays

Office is fairly quiet today. Quietude is… not good. It makes the brain think of things that are either unsavoury or melancholy.

It’s been a while since I spoke to or trade some correspondences with my ex-classmates. Then again, they must be fairly busy. I know one of them is a travelling scholar now, presenting papers at seminars both sides of the Atlantic. I wonder what happened to the Monday Alcoholic Anonymous, held almost every week after classes on… you’ve guessed it: Monday.

The last class(es) of Mondays were almost always an enigma, the kind of classes where you end up asking yourself: “What’s the point? It’s obviously important, of course, but…” The first semester we had the unfortunate “privilege” to study what all Philosophy undergraduates need to learn in three years. Only that we weren’t fortunate enough to have three years. We had ten weeks. That’s it: ten meagre weeks. Those who came from a sociology background were the more blessed and fortunate. Those from a background like mine (what was my background anyway?) were fortunate enough not to repeat. And that’s why I missed them (my friends), for they were ever-so-helpful, both in the theory of things and the grammatical/vocabulary misgivings I had.

There were times when I sat back and speed-dialed a particularly friendly friend and said: “Okay, now explain to me what Gramsci was thinking when he wrote Prison Notebooks, apart from the obvious boredom that was likely to plague someone in such a hell hole.”

There were also times during the second semester’s Monday ritual when I wondered about the virtues of inter-departmental module of classes. Now, why was I in some War Studies class again? Oh right, Inter-departmental.

I missed how those same friends put up with my constant whinging and whining. Juvenile, I know. And I shouldn’t be the grief I was, really. I chose this particular brand of hell myself. But as often the case, one just don’t know what one had signed up for until too late.

I miss y’all. A lot. And not just the splitting headache after one Pub Quiz night over a birthday.

Or the time when we ventured out to the open-air seating of Somerset House to enjoy a rare sunny (and thankfully warm) day out of the classes… It lasted a grand total of five minutes before the wind picked up speed and the steel chairs under our arses turned too cold. Or the lunches on the National Theatre’s balcony only to have everything not bolted down upended by the mighty wind over the Thames. And that included the filling of my sandwich.

I didn’t even know I missed those days until… well… until the next time the thought of school scared the living daylights out of me. No school. No more. Y’all have the license to shoot me down if I ever mentioned anything about going back to school.

Yesterday, it has started to rain again. Yesterday was a day of rain and gusts of winds that ripped mighty trees from shallow earth. The winds whistled past the eaves and boughs and brought down mighty pillars and towers. A friend of mine saw an unfortunate car crushed under an aging tree, it’s expanded girth spanning whole roads. I wonder what happened to the passangers within.

The sky outside is dark. It is raining again and the rainclouds are thick and pitch black. The lamps on the streets flickers and the sign-boards sway against the coalescing wind.

I used to like rain, I still do. But rain in the cities bring naught but trouble, stench, and devastation. I like rain that falls on hills and mountainsides; rain and wind that sing and promise of fine blue skies. I like rain that falls on green leaves and calls forth the rainbows from its hiding.

An amusing sight
Kemarin, ketika pulang dalam terpaan angin dan hujan yang tidak jelas kapan akan berhenti; kendaraan kami berpapasan dengan sebuah mobil kancil. Memang sudah sering juga melihat mobil kancil, yang bentuknya dan ukurannya agak mirip bajaj (”agak bagusan dikit daripada bajay,” kata temanku dulu) dan dicat seperti layaknya bis busway:warna oranye di bagian atas, dan warna merah di bagian bawahnya.

Yang membuat kami tertawa tergelak-gelak adalah ketika kami membaca apa yang tertulis di kaca belakang mobil kancil tersebut: “cucu baswei”.

Sumpah deh, gile aja tuh abang kancil.

Pernah lagi kami melihat kendaraan kancil dipamerkan di sebuah pameran hasil karya anak bangsa, beberapa tahun silam. Waktu itu mobil kancil masih dalam tahap perkenalan, masih dalam tahap penjajakan (sepertinya belum digunakan secara bebas terbatas seperti sekarang. Waktu itu, bemo-bemo masih berlarian di jalan dikejar-kejar tramtib). Di sisi kiri dan kanan mobil kancil itu dibubuhi gambar elang bondol (fauna Jakarta). Teman saya sempat menyeletuk: “Wah! Itu ya? Mobil kancil digambarin elang, yang pake monyet. Lengkap banget mobil kebon binatang.”

More aptly called: you are older than you were a year ago. There are a lot of expectations…. uh, expected of somebody gaining a year. One have got to be more mature, more wise, more of everything they say. Well, more of everyting that the society deems good and fit for a modern woman to have - whatever it may be. They are obviously things that I haven’t figured out as yet. Sometimes it’s good to be told. Although I don’t necessarily envy those women who lived in the Dark Ages, or before the Suffregettes… suffered, but oftentimes I think somehow that some freedom ball-handlers just took off running way too far. I know that we aren’t supposed to have everything both ways (that’s not what life is supposed to mean, according to some wise people), but whatever happened to going the middle way?

Who draws the lines on these things, anyway? I really would like to have a word with ‘em.

But still, although we strived to be better, to overcome our flaws and get better at what we do, what is the significance of anniversaries? That our planet, the humble Earth, happened to revolve around the sun every three-hundred-and-sixty-five days (give or take), that somehow a yearly cycle is much more important than a daily reflection of things? As opposed to living on Pluto, for example, where it takes absolute ages to make one complete circle around the sun. Plutonians, aren’t they? (or whatever, since NASA were unable to find evidence of intelligent, or not-so-intelligent, life forms on that planet yet)

I’m nitpicking, I know. Sometimes I wonder that my getting older doesn’t necessarily any more wise, nor does it make me any more mature. But one thing for sure: more nitpicky and that much closer to having a menopausal disorder.

Talk about having one’s glass half-empty.

By the way, the birthday was yesterday. I waited for another day to mellow down a bit. Trust me, the glass was nowhere near full yesterday.

Today we talk about food, as we always do.

Breakfast consumed, it was obvious that the mouth was to find another vocation to keep it in business. Between food and gossip, it would never go out of business. The challenge was to find a topic good enough to accompany some seedless oranges.

Speaking of food, I was reminded of a small conversation some months ago. A friend of mine told of his backpacking escapade across South East Asia — Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, to be precise (not the shoestring version though sadly. He’s pretty well-off, and add that fact to the other fact: the exhange rate fact, I mean). He was telling this story because I happened to gripe at him about the lack of good (cheap) food in London. He told me of all the places he had been in those three countries, Indonesia (especially Jakarta) was the one place with no easy access to food.

Indonesians would understand my difficulty in keeping a straight, diplomatic face as I asked him to elaborate more clearly.

“Well,” he started (unaware of the coming of a storm, namely from me). “It’s just that whenever I stayed in hotels across Bangkok and Thailand I was always within spitting distance to some delectable food: restaurants, hawker stalls, street-side food, and things like that. Only in Indonesia (and by this he meant Jakarta) that I can’t find food anywhere.”

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. A few things happened all at once. My face went red, my palms slammed onto a nearby surface (I think it was a table, but I wasn’t paying much attention at that point), and I started screeching. Over-reaction, I know. But nobody insulted Indonesia and its food, and gets away with it. As I said, over-reaction.

Food. It’s everywhere in Indonesia. All the back streets have them — hawker stalls, semi-permanent stalls, and eating outlets of various styles, size, taste, and — woe be it for me to say this — hygiene. There are men and women pushing food carts and carrying baskets of delicacies, hot food, cold food, spicy food, sweet food, drinks, and many kinds of things that other countries only wished they have.

Either he didn’t look or he was staying in a wrong part of town. Oh yes, even as I said that food can be found anywhere, there are parts of this town that even cockroaches wouldn’t want to be caught dead in.

He stayed in a nice, grand hotel, he said. It overlooked a large and busy street. But he swore to me that he couldn’t find a food seller. He told me he would have to go to a shopping mall, or another place, but never close at hand. I came to a conclusion that he didn’t bother asking and didn’t bother looking. A large and busy street. A street with hundreds and thousands of commuter, and no convenient hawker stall in sight?

Or maybe he saw the stalls and decided that they were too hazardous for his stomach lining, perhaps?

But even then, there are still a lot of places with lots of decent food that are… foreigner-with-sensitive-stomach friendly.

Too bad class decided to start and all manners of conversation were cut short to give way to some Research Policy lecture.

Two things happened after class was dismissed and we dutifully piled into the Student Union pub: I made him promise that he’d seek me out anytime he’s in Jakarta (so I can properly show him what kinds of food are available, exactly); and he promised not to diss Indonesian food too much (within reason I can still handle).

Fine indeed. Less than fifteen minutes to the weekend, and everybody’s brimming with anticipation. The clock is very slow, but what’s new? And blogging is definitely a way to spend the measly fifteen minutes.

Do I have stories to tell? What’s in a day’s work? Unfortunately, I don’t have the eyes nor the sense to look at the scenes playing right under my nose. There were (and will be) times, of course, when I could (and will) definitely see something marvellous in an otherwise a work-a-day scenery — times when everything could be bright and shiny and… well… just bloody wonderful. Those were times when I could find moments long enough to evaluate whatever I knew about what I thought I’ve known — about the people around me and the live they lead.

But most of the times, there isn’t any reason to wax poetic. Most of the times the only reason you are trying to find is the one reason that can get you out of the monotoneity of life and into a rabbit hole. Most of the times, I wonder: “What I wouldn’t give to tumble down a rabbit hole.”

A moment of stupidity
Kemarin, ada teman kantor yang membawa kue kering buatan sendiri (rajin sekali euy!) Kue putri salju dan kue sagu itu dititipkanlah ke mejaku. Maklum, saya ini memang pemilik meja yang paling luas (selain si Bos dan… yah, ndak banyak lah yang punya meja luas. Sebenarnya, mejaku luas juga karena mejaku yang paling ndak ada tetekbengeknya. Bisa dibilang malas (minta kerja), atau bisa dibilang rajin (rapi-rapi)).

Baru berapa menit terbit, berita adanya makanan enak di meja langsung tersebar ke seantero kantor. Bak semut melihat gula, semuanya langsung merubung, ndak usah permisi-permisi lagi. Memang sih, temanku itu kalau buat urusan kue-kue begitu memang aduhai enaknya (yah, lumayan lah, untuk harga yang diminta! Sekalian iklan nih).

Ada satu teman yang kebetulan ada di luar kantor waktu turun makan itu, jadi dia terlambat tau berita makanan enak. Tapi waktu dia datang, langsung matanya (yang memang awas itu) berbinar-binar melihat kue.

Salah dia bertanya, “Ini kue apaan ya namanya?”

Aku dengan bolotnya jawab, “Yang mana?”

“Ya dua-duanya lah.”

Biasa, setelah makan siang yang kenyang, lalu mengantuk (itu sih hal lumrah sekali, ya?). Makanya jawabannya juga lupa. Aku dengan pe-denya menyahut, “Ooooh itu… itu kue putri salju dan…” Waduh, yang satu lagi namanya apa ya? Dan temanku itu dengan sabarnya menunggu jawaban. “Itu lho. Yang satu putri salju, yang satu lagi… sodaranya.”

Duh, malunya itu ndak bisa digambarkan dengan kata-kata, deh. Untungnya temanku juga sama bolot, mungkin pengaruh formalin yang banyak terdapat di dalam makanan yang sering dia makan (dia itu setiap hari harus makan bakmi bakso, tahu, dan ikan). “Oh… saudaranya ya? Putri burik, begitu?”

Menjelang pulang, semua sekarang kenal yang namanya “kue sagu” itu sebutan kerennya: putri burik.

Jayusnya kantor ini memang nggak ketulungan.

See…. told you there’s a lot of things to do on a Monday, and lo an behold, it’s almost lunch time. Still can’t fathom why people hate Monday so much. Maybe the waking up factor is the worst, I know I absolutely hate-hate-hate waking up any given morning. But that’s not just Monday, but really (and exactly) any given Monday of the week.

Right now, I’m catching a breather behind the boss’s back. Don’t tell, or I’ll hunt you down and stab you with a paring knife. (You know I love you, really).

The Australian Open Tennis starts today, and I am entirely too jealous to say anything intelligent. A friend of mine is somewhere in the skies between here and Melbourne to watch the whole shooting match. I’m not really a tennis fan, but travelling…. I like. Have fun, you.

Today is also the day to cherish, at least in the “wedding invitations” front. No more huge invitation pile to send me into palpitations. I like weddings, and I like comparing the different food they serve at weddings (and weddings provide my mother with fodder to fuel her wedding fantasy. I shudder for the day my brother, or me for that matter, walk up the aisle). But, the past two weeks had been hellish. Hellish, I tell you. It’s like a marathon out there. I know of a relative who required massages and kerokan.

Funny story from a life abroad, re: kerokan. Once I got a fellow Indonesian to do that to me, because I was feeling a few sheets to the wind. I went to college the following day with red welts peeking from the collar of my t-shirt (note to self: next time do laundry more diligently, so when need arises, the appropriate clothes can be worn). The whole class was in uproar thinking I was some kind of domestic abuse victim. Ummm… no?

I’ve touched on wedding cultures here and abroad (especially modern West European weddings, or more precisely English weddings…). On Saturday, my parents went to a sit-down wedding reception, the one with RSVPs and five-course meals. It’s certainly an interesting premise one can try to implement in Indonesia, but I really can’t see it happening any time soon. The foods for one (according to my mum) — almost unapologetically western — didn’t go down very well on the older section of the invitees. The limited invitation went against the grain of brotherhood, as a lot of people were left out from the invitation list. The overly formal space stopped people from having a good chatting time, let’s not metion the amount of time taken for speeches (Bestman and father of the bride, I can handle. But not a whole slew of friends to the bride and groom. “Five” is three times too many). To top it all off, RSVPs should only be reserved for those who have a good sense of time and discipline in carrying out their promise to attend. Jam karet is unfortunately still the name of the game in most places in Indonesia.

From that one experience (heard second-hand from mum, and therefore a caveat for slightly biased ranting), I figured that the younger set of the invitees didn’t really care. But the old wives and old whoevers were slightly unnerved. But I’m over-generalising, here. When I was small (younger), at least half of the receptions were sit-down. But they’re not even half as formal as the one just mentioned above, and they serve Chinese dishes (eight courses of ‘em), which suited the appetite of many.

Anyway, I’ve ranted enough. I’m sure there’s some social scientist out there who could describe this better than I can.

It is January and it is raining heavily: the monsoon season is here. Last night was the first of many thunderstorms (according to the Met Office), and it made me realise that I’ve grown unaccustomed to such a natural phenomenon. In London, I rarely get to experience it, and not in the brutal way it presented itself back here in Indonesia. The skies lit up in an eerie glow, and the sounds travelled to an ear-splitting magnitude. It was a wonderful sight, but somehow the effect of it left little to be desired.

The skies really opened up and deposited a great volume of water on a city whose sewers have all backed up. You’d be forgiven to think, for once, that you live in Venice, or some seaside town. The water level was alarming and would continue to rise as more thunderstorms are predicted, and more water coming from higher cities make its way through the channels of Jakarta, straight to the Java Sea.

Thunderstorms are supposed to clear the air, make the ozone “cleaner and fresher”. The skies are clear this morning, and you can probably feel the clean air (in your mind). However, sewers are closer to the nose than ozone, and the aftermath of such flooding would be vile stench and every unwanted debris left propped against your house, straight from the bowels of the sewers, and the deep brown, mulchy river.

So, we look up at the skies and channel better days.

Exactly when did I stop referring to Friday as what it is and started subliminally counting down to Saturday? It’s not a good thing to do, but I really can’t stop myself. Friday is… hell. Time goes as slow as anything, like a congealed glob of non-movers. It’s just the most painful day of all. Monday, in retrospect, is the fastest mover of ‘em all (weekdays, I mean). There’s always stuff to do on Monday; stuff that if not completed would mean hell when the higher-ups caught scent of it.

It’s Friday the thirteenth also apparently. I’m not one for jinxes, but why do I have a feeling that there’d be something very strange down the line?

Dear Friday,
Please don’t go any slower than you already have.
Thanks!

Life at the Office is hitting a slow spot at the moment. It is just… slow. After a frantic few hours before lunch, things died down to a considerable pace that we did nothing but filing and fiddling. But time stretched inconsiderably, that even mundane things like filing failed to speed things up. Or, maybe it’s because of filing being such a mundane thing it slowed the clock a little bit more. It’s unnerving.

So, when all avenues of gossip had been exhausted (who’d thunk it, really?), we shifted to the utterly amusing game of Othello (having steered clear from touching the Halma board after one of my colleagues contracted ’sleep-talking’ last night).

Play Othello online!

Despite the object of the game being defending one’s colour and gobbling up other people’s colour, however, we seem to take great pleasure in singlemindedly aiming for a one-colour domination. Who said voluntary autocratism is dead?

Now, who was it that said: time flies when one is having fun?

It is! It really is out. The postman came last week bearing gifts. Not exactly gifts, actually, but my transcript. I was quite surprised to see the results for my thesis, pilot study. Whatever. It was the one sticking point that made me fear the letters of the “Not Pass”. I lived in abject terror for the past couple of months not knowing how it would go down with the markers.

It was written in effectively two days (after my computer died in the middle of typing, thus disabling any possibility of a backup, and the oldest backup happened to be a week old). It was submitted without any sort of editing. It was bound upside down by the binding people (who bragged about their trustworthiness and diligence).

And it was the one with the highest mark of all of the papers and assignments I submitted the whole year.

Fate should really stop taking pot-shots at my cardiac muscles.

Well, how do you?

But that’s not the purpose of this entry. No, not at all.

Anyway, today is a holiday, which meant a lot of thinking and doing nothing - an entirely pointless thing to do, I know. I could have, of course, gone out and do the community a lot of good (but I didn’t). I could have gone out and blow a hole in my checking account (which I did, moderately, by accepting some last minute window-shopping invitation from mum and mum’s friend. Result: food. Not so good food, but food nonetheless). So, no. Nothing extravagant about the day at all. Just a lot of people-watching and dripping saliva all over an expensive boutique’s front door. Some of the things they had on display were just…. delectable and equally expensive. But that’s cosmopolitan life, of course.

There’s also the television, providing comic relief and news updates. Comic relief came in many forms, most notably slapstick comedies, and musicals. There’s obviously the ever-present dose of Dangdut on television, as well as some soap dramas that have evolved to resemble each other. On another note, I just wished that this year’s Eid’l Adha wasn’t so shrouded in catastrophe. They’re still rebuilding in Aceh, and now we’re dealing with flash floods, and malnourishment.

My thirteen-year-old cousin was doing this English homework, something about the sounds that animals made. There were easy ones like: “dog - bark”, “duck - quack”, “owl - hoot”. We were stumped on “goat”. We were arguing about sheep (or lambs) and goats at that point. I suppose, I should have realised that most of the time they are rather (relatively) synonymous to each other, at least here in Indonesia. When you spot “Lamb Chops” in one of those fancy restaurant menus, you’re most likely to get goat. So, the whole hour was spent asking “What is mengembik in English?”

A goat sounded “mbeeeee…” and a sheep sounded “baaa…”, my cousin argued. We came to the sordid conclusion that “mbee” and “ba” could just be variations to the same theme; merely accents and diction of the same Bleating Language.

Today is what some (or most, or whatever nominals you’d prefer) Indonesians call “Harpitnas” (short form for Hari Kejepit Nasional, or the National ‘In-the-Middle’ Day): A workday squashed in between two holidays (Sunday and Eid’l Adha). It isn’t exactly Bank Holiday Monday, but it can almost be like it if work gives you a day off. But they don’t. January is often the months of many holidays, and companies are loathe to give more reasons for employees to be happy.

But, sometimes there’s just nothing to do between mid-morning every-ordinary-Monday hecticness, filing (double ugh!), and…. playing Halma with fellow colleagues. So, we crossed the road and got ourselves some DIY magic kit. Pay ten-thousand rupiahs (roughly a dollar) and get two tricks: the pencil-through-paper trick, and the ring-through-chain trick. Now, the trick is to find a sufficient window of office time to practice our magic trick.

On another bend, yesterday wasn’t as lazy as I thought it would be. There were weddings to attend and people’s hands to shake. Obviously occasions such as those were excuses to dress up, play nice, and zero in on food not normally consumed outside festivities.

Sometimes, though, I wonder why I should bother dressing up nicely (or too nicely) at all. Unlike all day receptions in most western countries, most wedding receptions ever held in this city last no more than three hours, and guests spend no more than an hour in most. There are still places where they held receptions for days, obviously, but not in a big, sprawling metropolitan cities where monies for building hire can easily support a small country or two.

If one Monday should fall…. it should fall with good food and good company

Had dinner at Yuraku, a Japanese-style buffet restaurant. It served good food, with a decent selection of dishes (from dimsum and sushi, to teppanyaki, to the porridge, to all those boiled stuff and… stuff). Some of the drinks came with free refills, too. Unfortunately the restaurant wasn’t for the visually-challenged, with its dim lighting and cramped space. Mum complained about there being not enough staff to cater for the sell-out crowd, but any more staff (or customers) and nobody’d be able to move anywhere. A golden rule would need to be put into order: “Don’t wait up for them to serve you. Serve yourself. Failing that, approach a member of staff with your plate, bowl, and/or glass, then state your purpose clearly.”

They had cute, aww-factored eating utensils, and small parrafin-powered burners that could lick eyebrows off everybody who came too close to the fire. They were aiming at minimalist chic, I guess, but I wouldn’t know anyway, what with the lighting and the crowd (can’t say much about the crowd, because… hey! Good for business, right?).

MSG though… a different story. The two boil-pots (what on earth do you call them anyway? Shabu-shabu? What?) provided diners with two choices of flavours: stock (most probably beef, or chicken, or both. But most probably beef broth) and Tom Yam . They both taste slightly similar, the Tom Yam being the slightly more tangy of the two, obviously. You’d notice the MSG, not immediately, but you’d notice it for sure. Right now, I’m ditching my mug and is opting for a more straightforward bottle version of water. “Dry as the Kalahari” comes to mind. I’m drinking water by the gallon, and drinking water is definitely on the healthy scale of the market. Not so sure about the MSG though. But as far as I know, the other non-boiled food are quite okay. It’s unclear whether they contain MSG at all, but they may do, in smaller doses. Or it could be just me and my slightly screwy radar.

The dessert entered the realm of the could-be-wonderful, but obviously (dot dot dot). It’s dessert: fruits, cakes, and jelly. Can’t go wrong with jelly, I suppose.

Yuraku: West Boulevard, Kelapa Gading. From Kelapa Gading Mall Roundabout, towards By Pass. Opposite Makro (or Angke restaurant), Inkopal Gading complex.
Price: around 60,000 rupiahs. That’s… 3 quids and some change (!). Or 6 dollars and a few loose change.

Obviously, I could start ranting about exchange rates, but I shan’t. It’s not good for the appetite.

Con-ster *coughs* introduced me to Blogsome last night. Trust her to make me hyper-aware of how technologically-challenged I am (at least, where pop-tech-culture is concerned). I told her about my discovering Delicious for the first time a month ago. Pathetic, I know.

Today is obviously a lazy Sunday. I’m thinking of either going back to bed or stuffing my face full with cakes. Somehow, it makes me want it to be Monday again. At least I’ll have something to do in the office rather than sit around moping all day long. And contrary to other people’s beliefs…. there’s absolutely nothing on terrestrial TV channels.

Hello world indeed…