Some sketches - ""Hey Mister!" pt 4

(Originally written 22/5/2009)

Here’s a few quick sketches that either wouldn’t work themselves into longer pieces, or didn’t deserve to.

The Indonesian People

They are unfailingly polite, and smile almost all the time. Indonesians seem to be delighted if you can speak anything of the language, so I’m always ready with a friendly “Makasi” (thank you), “Sama sama” (the same to you, also, handily, the same again), “Salemat pagi” (good morning) or “Salemat malam” (good evening/good night). They’re genuinely upset if anyone loses their temper, as I did when dealing with an idiot bag-packer in the supermarket who tried to put bottles of beer on top of a box of eggs.

The reason that they are so polite is that they’re raised that way. There are actually three versions of the Indonesian language, high, medium and low. Children are expected to speak high Indonesian to their parents, while fathers and mothers speak low Indonesian to their offspring. Strangers speak high Indonesian to strangers, medium to acquaintances, and low only to very good friends. If you can understand the complexities of using “Vous” and “Tu” in French, you’ll have a tiny insight into the confusing world of communication in Indonesia, where the very way that you speak can confer respect, equality or friendship. Get that sorted in your head, and then they’ll start mixing the high, medium and low in the same conversation and you’re lost again.

“Polite”, though, doesn’t mean “reserved”, as it would do in Britain. Indonesians are very friendly, with a finely-developed sense of humour. Eat in a restaurant a couple of times and the waiters will greet you as a pal next time you go. Eat there five times and they’ll know your name. Shop at the same supermarket and the till staff will beam in recognition as you approach. The lady on the bakery counter, who speaks good English, will want to know where you’ve been, have you seen more of Jakarta, are you going to travel further while you’re here, have you tried these delicious buns that are a speciality… and she’ll ask because she’s interested, not because she wants to sell you something. Apart from the buns, of course, but she’s less interested in the profit than making sure that you try all that Indonesia has to offer.

That attitude seems to persist everywhere. Can they help? Can they talk to you, to improve their English? Have we been here? How about there? Have we tried some local dish, or another? Oh, we really should. It’s very nice, we’d like it. Even the souvenir sellers are unfailingly polite, ahem, mister, maybe you would like this woodcarving? It’s very cheap. No? OK… it’s cheaper than you think, though, sorry to bother you like this (and this exchange will go on for fifteen minutes if you let it, but they’ll never interrupt you when you’re speaking to someone else, just softly interject when you’ve finished.)

Despite the poverty that many Indonesians live under, they give the impression that they’re perfectly happy living here, and they sincerely want you to be, too. It’s great here, isn’t it, they insist. Terribly politely, of course.

It is, too. It’s great here.

The Traffic

Well, it’s insane, really. Here in Jakarta, it’s way beyond insane and out the other side, because everyone seems to be going somewhere all the time, and most of them are trying to do it on mopeds. Cars are very expensive; not only do they attract a big sales tax, but due to the climate they age very slowly. Most of them are Japanese, so they never go wrong, and that means that used cars keep lots of value. There are very few examples of cheap used cars, unless they’re battered wrecks that lay exhaust smoke across two lanes of traffic. Given that Jakarta’s roads are almost permanently full of vehicles, you can see one of these gaseous bangers every five minutes or so.

Of course, there’s a big divide between the few rich and the many poor, so there’s any number of BMWs and Mercedes around, cars that their owners fondly imagined would swish along the road and attract envious glances. In fact, no car can ever “swish” along the road in Jakarta unless it’s 4 a.m. and there’s no one around to cast a glance at that time. 4 a.m. is when the traffic eases, the last of the night crowd has gone home and the morning rush is still an hour away.

So it’s two-wheeled transport for most, and believe me, when you see an entire family on a moped it makes you blink. Yes, you saw right, there’s Junior clinging to the petrol tank, Dad behind doing the driving, and Mum on the back, holding the baby. It’s entirely possible that they don’t have a crash helmet between them, and yet they’re swinging round the cars at traffic lights, swopping lanes with complete indifference, or sometimes driving along the kerb on the wrong side of a dual carriageway.

The articles that are carried on mopeds might make you stare, too. Like ten-foot lengths of wood, or an impossibly high pile of cardboard boxes lashed to the passenger pillion. I think I lost the capacity to be surprised when, early one Sunday morning I watched a serious-faced senior chap carefully heading towards one of the markets with a large wooden box tied to his moped. As he drew past, I saw that the box was full of loose eggs. After that, I reckon I’ve seen it all.

For the first week, I worried about accidents. You do, what with all the lane-changing, tooting and everything missing everything else by scant inches. One moped out of place, one Mercedes driver with a twitchy foot, an errant bicycle… well, there’d be the family all over the road, everyone wondering where the baby had gone, possibly under one of the cardboard boxes spread across three lanes, the planks of wood through at least five windscreens and an older gentleman contemplating the biggest omelette Jakarta has ever seen.

It takes a while, but eventually I realised that there are no accidents. Oh, I daresay there’s the odd pile-up, but I’ve never seen one. Yet I’ve seen a thousand near-misses… except that they’re not near-misses. That’s the way that the traffic moves, and everybody understands it. The tooting is not in anger, it’s simply to warn of how close one vehicle is to another.

One of the major factors influencing the volume of traffic is the town planning. Jakarta is bursting out in all directions, construction of some kind is going on all over the city, and the preferred type of new road is a multi-laned one. There are very few side-streets. There’s any number of side-alleys, but it’s not really possible to get a car through them, especially when a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs have moved in and set up some stalls and an open-air restaurant (capacity when full – six).

This means that cars are often driving in the wrong direction, simply trying to find somewhere to turn around. When I want to go to a fine Lebanese restaurant about a mile and a half away from the hotel, my taxi has to drive in the opposite direction for nearly a mile before it can turn. A few minutes later, we pass the hotel again, but on the other side of the road. And that is the fastest route to the restaurant.

So with all the tooting, the near-misses that aren’t, the ever more inventive uses that a moped can be put to, and half the drivers wanting to be on the other side of the road, you might imagine that crossing the street is best left to the nimble and the plain daft. In fact, it’s very easy. Simply act like a moped. Forget the mirror, just signal and manoeuvre. All you have to do is spot a gap in the nearest lane to you, extend a hand, and walk out. Traffic will slow for you, even stop if necessary, and by the time you get to the next lane, there’ll be another gap because the drivers will have spotted you. And tooted, obviously.

In some places there will be a police officer handy, and then it becomes even easier. My office is opposite the hotel, separated by the main road through the financial district, a three-lane highway. Of course, this means that four lanes of cars run through it in the early morning, with streams of mopeds filling the gaps between them. There are always, though, several police officers on one or both sides of the road. If you stand on the kerb and catch their eye, they will stride out into the oncoming traffic, blowing a whistle to attract attention, baton held horizontally in front of them. As the traffic slows, they will beckon you across with a polite gesture. A cheery “Makasi!” elicits a grin, they drop the baton and walk with you to the opposite kerb, while the extraordinary spectacle that is rush hour in Jakarta begins to flow again.

By rights, Jakarta’s roads ought to be a mass of twisted metal, with any space left filled with ambulances taking the survivors to emergency centres. I can offer only one suggestion to explain why this isn’t so.

It’s my belief that the drivers here are far too polite to collide with anyone.

Alcohol

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, but it also has a tolerant society. Drinking, therefore, is not something that has to be done behind closed doors that might be kicked in at any moment by the religious police. Alcohol is available in bars, in hotels, and in supermarkets. “Lucky old Babba”, I hear you cry. “He was marooned in South Africa with three teetotallers, spent ridiculous amounts of time looking for ‘bottle shops’, and even managed to hire a villa in a dry town for a weekend. At least he can now kick back on a Friday evening and throw down a few brandies!”

No he flaming well can’t, and what’s more, he’s just flaming found that flaming Microsoft flaming Word autocorrects his preferred expression to “flaming”.

If you want to drink in Indonesia, bring your wallet, and it had better be a thick one. Most alcohol has to be imported, and is subject to taxation levels that the British government can only dream of. Once the bar or hotel has added its own profit margin, wine and spirits become pretty expensive. Naturally, with such high taxes, nobody bothers with cheaper brands, so, if like me, you prefer a rough brandy to a fine cognac, lots of luck.

There are off-licences in Jakarta, of course. In fact, I can name four of them. One is a virtual palace of wine for the connoisseur, and prefers to sell by the case. Another has much the same attitude to wine, but also stocks three brands of spirits, Absolut vodka and two blended whiskies. The others keep quite a few spirits and a selection of wine that would be regarded as mid-price back in Britain. In all four, wine prices start at US$40 a bottle and spirits at US$70. There is one duty-free shop in Jakarta, where untaxed booze can be purchased on production of a foreign passport. It’s an hour’s taxi ride from the office and closes at 5 p.m. or a few minutes before you get there, whichever is the earliest.

Supermarkets don’t sell wine or spirits, but they do sell beer. Mainly lager, but Guinness is also a popular choice. A pint of the local stuff, Bintang, costs about a dollar, and I’m getting quite a taste for its fizzy rasp and hint of formaldehyde.

What people drink here, though, is fruit juice or tea. That’s iced tea, and it’s often flavoured with fruit. In fact, lemon tea, lychee tea and peach tea sell very well. There’s plenty of coffee, too; Indonesia is a major coffee producer, so ask for a cup of java and you’ll be taken literally. They have it all – dark roast, light roast, espresso, latte, mocha, iced coffee, Thai coffee (made with evaporated milk), dark berry mocha frappacino (don’t ask me) and even coffee that’s been eaten by a small animal and only roasted and ground after the animal has had a damn good go at digesting it.

It does make for an interesting dining experience, though. I’ve eaten Chinese hot and sour soup with a glass of strawberry juice, sushi with lychee tea, roast beef with mango smoothie, chicken Cordon Bleu with iced coffee, fried rice with ginger ale and, only last night, an expertly cooked steak Diane with beer which had been diluted with lemon squash. Oh, yes, not lemonade, but lemon squash. It was as if someone had passed on the recipe for shandy in sign language and had a coughing fit in the middle.

I did find one restaurant that offered wine by the carafe for around $12, an offer I gratefully accepted. (In passing, I’ll advise that when dining with a teetotal Muslim, don’t order an entire carafe of wine for yourself. She looks at you as if you’re a raging alcoholic.) The wine, which claimed to be French, was a trifle acidic. Actually, it took the enamel off the plates, but on the positive side it did round off some ridges on a couple of fillings that had been giving me trouble. We won’t be going back to that place, though. Zeina made me laugh out loud just as I’d taken a swig, and the owner reckons he’ll never be able to get the stains out of the marble floor.

So no Friday night piss-ups for Babba, or any other night, either. In fact, the ultimate sanction looms – The Sarge (team member and drinking partner, temporarily in Pakistan, where good wine is £2.50 a bottle) has learned of my failure to commit the kind of drink-related indiscretions that our crew are famed for, and is threatening to remove my nickname. Now, “Mad Dog” was won by hard struggle, fearless bravery in the face of Glasgow landlords, and no little personal embarrassment, so I’m anxious not to give it up easily. Surely there must be some local chancer with a well-hidden still, knocking out bottles of “Jacques Danyels”, “Gordon’s Gin-Flavoured Spirit”, “Absolut Mango”, “Tequila Like Mother Make” or “King Victoria’s Famous Scottish Whisko”? After all, they can fake everything else…

What with all the fresh fruit juice and no opportunity to get off my face, it’s like being in permanent detox. In fact, I don’t know why people still check into The Priory when they could come to Jakarta. The weather’s nicer, there’s ever so many interesting places to go, and there’s almost zero likelihood of bumping into Pete Docherty or Amy Winehouse.

I mean, I’d call that a win all round.

Sign in a lift:

“In case of fire or earthquake, do not use lift.”

Made my jaw drop a bit, I can tell you….