Jakarta, Indonesia – Day 2
Good morning! Well yesterday was a very interesting day. Selim and I woke up and decided to walk around the city, the worst areas we could find, for a few hours. Our first desired location, the largest mosque we could see. We dodged traffic, headed through alleyways, through a garbage dump with a huge flock of dragonflys, through the slums we went. It was quite interesting, dodging traffic is now a new skill we have acquired which is totally useful here, maybe not so much at home – although it’s so crazy it feels like a dream world when we’re doing it. On the way to the mosque we walked down a very narrow alley and at one point a van’s mirror hit my elbow at about 20mph, and broke my arm – ok just kidding about the breaking of the arm but the rest is true. At the mosque, which was also a tv station and school, the security guys just stared us down the entire time, so we decided we should take off. We walked for quite a long time and in the 90 degree, 100% humidity, it was quite a sweaty walk. We stopped by a local mall to use the toilet, and this is where things got a little out of hand. See Selim wanted to figure out the butt sprayer, the toilets here have no toilet paper, except for the “Western” hotels and a few upscale restaurants. I watched Selim (fully clothed) kneel down next to the toilet and turn the little knob which violently raised a plastic rod that shot water out of the toilet hole, straight out the stall door and all over me. I stood there in disbelief with butt cleaning water coating the front of my body, my pants, my shirt, and my face – I’m just going to leave it at that. After that we explored the mall, left and continued walking. We kept saying we knew where we were, knowing we were lost – but that’s what makes it fun, we eventually found our way back to the hotel in time to travel to our next client.
Traveling to our next client was crazy! We took a taxi to the nearest plaza were we waited for a couple of guys on motorcycles to pick us up, we got a couple of vanilla cones while waiting for 10 cents a peice. Finally this guy, which we didn’t know, said in Indonesian “fasd asfienfa fasjdfiewlfaksdf jfiasdflke afidfakj adosijeoima djfialkj” and motioned for us to come with him, so we followed. He showed us his motorcycle and we had no idea what he wanted us to do, he pointed and said “asd fasldkfaowe fasdpfmasiefm afmodsfmadimfa oafmdsfoiamd fad” and then pointed down the road. So, we waited a while looking at each other and waited some more, watched the traffic, and about 10 minutes later another motorcycle showed up. They pointed to the cycles I hopped on and asked him how to hold on and where to put my feet and all of a sudden he took off, so I put my feet wherever and held on to him like he was my man. About halfway through the ride I stopped praying to God “please let me live”, and started to enjoy weaving through traffic and almost getting crushed by cars about 30 times. After that we were at our location where we met with Gimon who owns a bunch of motorcycle accessory stores. After working with Gimon for a couple of hours we went to his house, waited for him to take a shower and change, road to dinner and listened to a presentation by Eroll (where Selim fell asleep). The end of day 2.
I uploaded a bunch of random videos that have not been edited in any way, have fun:
http://www.youtube.com/user/VertoTheWorld
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I hope you took pictures of the “dousing” epsisode! I got stares from thoes around me at the Hong Kong airport as I LOL!!! Thanks for the early morning humor!