Entries Tagged 'life' ↓

If you look closely under the bridge, you can see hundreds of motorcycles sheltering from the rain — and blocking all four lanes, causing one motherf—er of a traffic jam. Anywhere else in the world, someone would get road rage and plow through them. I’m not saying that would necessarily be a bad thing…

The house in Ketanggungan is beginning to look suspicously like, um, a house! We both seriously underestimated just how big the house would be. With a total floor area of 240 square metres, it’s a pretty big place! I’ll be having a look for myself in just over two weeks. Mum and Dad arrive on Saturday and we plan on making a trip to Central Java the following weekend. I can’t wait!

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We spent half an hour buying lamps in a shop on Jalan Fatmawati yesterday afternoon. Actually, it took about 5 minutes to find the lamps. The rest of the time I spent sitting on a stool under the aircon unit while Awan negotiated the price.

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It’s rare to see a vanilla sky in Indonesia. There’s no dusk or twilight to speak of — we’re to close to the equator. This little beauty lasted only 5 minutes…

…comes from Han’s Bakery. The Han brothers opened their first bakery in Upper Thomson Road in 1977. They are now a bit of a Singaporean icon and were awarded Superbrand status in 2004. This little delicacy, Chinese kue (cake)  is a peanut variation on my current favourite, tau sar piah. Yum!

There was media hysteria at FX yesterday afternoon as someone apparently famous graced the eatery/mall with their presence. I have no idea who it was. Just some ugly dude with a too-thin mean-spirited looking wife/girlfriend/beard. The camera-men rushing after them were much more interesting. Hence, you’ll notice I didn’t bother trying to photograph the selebriti.

Yes, it’s a bus. But it’s  not just any old bus. It’s one of the 25 TransJakarta buses now ploughing the Lebak Bulus busway. So what? Well, it’s taken over a year to get the 8th corridor of Jakarta’s busway up and running - and we are still short 20 buses. It remains to be seen just how effective this corridor will be. Unlike the other seven busway corridors, a large part of this busway — the bit that runs through uber-rich Pondok Indah — is shared with normal traffic. This is unbelievably stupid, mainly because the entire point of the busway system is to get commuters out of their cars and on to buses. The only way this will happen is if the busways remain clear of ordinary traffic.

Thanks to Eric Setiawan I have discovered this cute web application which traces the words used in a certain website and lays them out in a ‘weighted cloud’. It’s called Wordle. I am sure that there are really clever ways to use this which are beyond me. I just like the pretty pictures. The one above is from this blog. The bottom two are my two Twitter accounts, spruiked and brettmcguire.

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Awan and I are building a house in Ketanggungun-Brebes over in Central Java. It’s a two story number, incorporating a couple of ruko at street level. Construction is supposed to take 6 weeks, but it looks like it will be finished much quicker than that. After only a week, they have completed the overall structure. I suppose having 26 builders on site helps.

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Wow, those tau sar piah that I like so much are bad news if you are looking to stay trim. They are basically fat and sugar! Okay, one a day should be okay if I cut out the dairy milk chocolate…