Stress in Jakarta

553 days ago
	Man, the last weekend was one of the more stressful ones that I have had lately, but altogether a decent experience and I was actually looking forward to getting back to the insanity of work to escape the insanity involved in having fun. David, a friend of mine from Spain (who has been working in Indonesia for a while now) came by for a stay, and so we have been having good times chatting and eating out. It is great to have visitors... but my work is definately taking the toll due to lost sleeping hours. I guess that ultimately I would love a job that allows my schedule to be flexible enough so that I could be really busy when it served me well and then at other times not busy at all. The weekend started innocently enough... we went down to Jakarta to meet anouther friend (Asti) who had come back from England. Our rendezvous point was in the mall, however David and I are not mall oriented people so we chilled out and had a good time. David tried hard to break all stereotypes about white people being drunks by carrying around an opened beer while perousing the mall. I did join in at times, but really I prefer to have my beer while sitting down. Following this, we met up with some other friends and planned the activities for the night. We ended up going out to a club called Stadium, which was ok but neither I nor Kiky were really in the mood. My tolerance for the pounding beats has gone down considerably lately, now I crave for some mellow downtempo beats or some nice jazz. We ended the night early due to general exhausted feelings from our group. The next day Kiky and I went to the pool with Asti and David. they had to pay 60000 to enter! That is crazy, seeing as we pay 150000 a month for the facilities. I never realized how good of a deal we were getting. Kiky and I had to run though since we were to meet Dr. Risk. I used to work for him in Canada and on short notice found out that he was in Jakarta for a couple days, so I made the effort to go down and visit him. Note to self: Never ever ever take the bike into Jakarta again. Apart from the ride being stressful and dirty, I got pulled over not once but twice from the police. On both occasions I was asked to pay due to a traffic infraction. The second time I struck out and ended up giving the guy the money for the ticket, but the first officer was reasonable enough to allow me to go. Driving a bike in the center of Jakarta is difficult to say the least, and since it was my first time I was going by the map that I had studied to ascertain which way I needed to go. The streets have tons of rules making that impossible, because in many cases you cannot turn right anywhere along a road and the lanes split and merge in an uncanny manner. To make matters worse, Kiky was in a grumpy mood and so I had a bit of backseat driving going on in addition to the intense stress of driving. I admitted to Kiky after the fact that the thought of pushing her off the bike had come to my mind, and not surprisingly she had had the same idea. In the end we were late for our first meeting with Mike and so he had moved along. We did catch him later at his hotel, but again the driving around had worn both of us to our cores and so Mike had to deal with two relatively glum characters. We were so tired that after all the driving we ended up staying just under an hour, then headed back home. As a topnote to the whole calamity it had rained so I was eventually covered in grime from the streets. Thankfully a guy gave us a hand with directions and in about an hour we were back in our neighbourhood. The whole ordeal makes me wonder about some of the people I work with... they tend to be very cheerful considering that they must go through what I have just explained everyday just to get to work. It makes me feel kind of petty, but then again I guess that they are used to it and for us it was just the shock of the whole situation.