This Saturday I finally tried 'rendang,' with a student and his two friends. It was a slice of beef about the width of my fingernail coated in a ball of red spices the size of a bulls testicle. Like all the food in Indonesia it induced a healthy sweat and tasted like flames. After I ate rendang, which wasn't 'the best food in the world,' me and the guys went and played pool. It cost about £1.50 an hour and there was a lady who sets up the balls when the game finishes. It struck me that pool costs more in the UK and you have to set up your own balls like an animal. But, as I know from the maid, people are cheap in Jakarta. It seems like there is someone to do everything for you. Someone always packs your bags at the supermarket and every time you reverse into the road a little man pops out and stops the traffic. I even saw a guy do this in an empty car park. The custom is to always give them about 10p.
Apparently the people directing traffic have nothing and the parking system works like an unofficial tax. My AC constantly explodes and sometimes I have to make the 30 second walk to the house during my break to point at part of a mechanism I don't understand and mutter in English to the 'technician' so he can scratch his head look out the window. Rather than walk though, the manager always gets the office boy to drive me on his scooter. I've hardly got on before I have to get off again. Trying to stop the service is impossible. In those same breaks it's possible to watch the 'delightful' children of the school being spoon fed by their maids. Some of them are aged 8 years old...
As we drove down to Burger King after pool my student opened the window so I could look at the prostitutes.  Some of them looked very young and my student told me that was because they were very young. Many were underage girls from the villages who get sucked into it because of poverty. He pointed to a hotel which sold rooms by the hour. While we ate our burger a couple of guys sat down and ate with prostitutes before walking over towards one of the hotels.
A weird thing I found out today is that the native Indonesian teachers at the school get paid less than half the salary of the white teachers, despite the fact we have the exact same job. They don't get medical insurance either. Personally I think the severity of equal rights movements in the UK often undermine what they set out to protect by making unnecessary allowances. I think a rule is fair only if it applies to everyone. For instance I think everyone should expose their face in petrol stations. The pay difference is uncomfortable because it's a direct contradiction of my ethical beliefs. Still, I'm the one who gets paid double, so I'm not going to complain too much for now.

I've had a request to write something about the food. When I'm at work I order in 'nasi goreng' pretty much every day, mainly due to the office girl looking at me blankly when I try to order anything else. Nasi goreng is fried rice and extremely popular in Indonesia. It normally has chicken and chillies but sometimes it has egg and even vegetables if you get lucky. It varies day to day even though it comes from the same place. You always get an inflated plastic cylinder of chilli sauce too. I'm pretty good with hot stuff but sometimes two drips of the sauce is enough to render the hole thing inedible.  Other times the hole packet does nothing but water down the rice. Using the sauce is a roulette that can leave you sneezing blood and belching flames during your next lesson. The whole thing including delivery costs about 70p.
Food on the street is everywhere. Carts that can be cycled around line just about every road. Even our house, which is in the middle of nowhere, has a 'ketaprak' bloke right next to our gate manning a little cart. Ketaprak, from what I've seen of it, seems to be like a cold potato and noodle salad but despite the bloke outside looking at me wide eyed and offering me food every time I walk in I've yet to try it.        
This is because when I first arrived and my house mate was throwing up every five minutes he'd shout from the bathroom 'It was that bastard ketoprak man! I ate there yesterday,' and I haven't been brave enough to try any. This week one of our students is hopefully going to take me to try 'rendang' which is apparently 'the best food in the world.' It has been recommended to me about 84 times and it's some kind of spiced beef. If I don't get to try it, maybe I'll man up and speak to the ketoprak man.

I'm still nursing the cold from hell so I haven't been up to a lot this week. I've been a bit lazy uploading photos because my phone fell victim to the marble floor the day I arrived so I need to plug in my camera. Above is a rare picture of a green area in Jakarta which was taken at 'Little Indonesia.' Sadly, because Indonesia is a 'developing country,' the mentality seems to be to build anywhere and everywhere and worry about the consequences later. I've yet to have seen anything that resembles a park apart from a little area around Monas and I'm sure that's the reason why it floods every time it rains.

Here's a picture of me at a health spa a few weeks ago when I was strapping and healthy, or at least healthy. It cost less than a pound to get in and you have access to pool tables, a gym and a swimming pool (obviously) for as long as you like. The pool ques had a little ball of leaves on the end instead of a tip. 

This weekend one of the teachers, who is Chinese descent, took me to a performance of the 'Lion Dance' at a local mall. She said it was 'to ward away evil spirits or something for the Chinese new year.' It's the year of the horse which is the year I was born so she said that was a good omen. The dance wasn't the best but contained some impressive athleticism when they walked over high bars with the suit on. It would have been incredible if it was over some spikes or fire but apparently that never happens. It's very good luck to rip one of those beard hairs off and wear it but they don't come easily. I leaped over the barrier at the end of the performance and tried to yank one out but three men lifted me back over before I even got close.

My throat feels like it was stabbed by the devil. I thought it would be impossible to get a cold when its 24 degrees but I suppose it's unsurprising that I'm ill considering how filthy the Jakarta is. Yesterday when I was coming down the lift from school I looked in the mirror and discovered there was a cockroach on my neck. My house mate said he'd never seen anything like that before but it wasn't particularly encouraging considering it had just happened.
Since I've been ill I haven't been up to much apart from winding up my roomie. Our maid has left us because she somehow 'lost face' after some of my room mates clothes went missing for a month. They are back now but before she left she sent us an apologetic note written in Bahasa. While I was sitting around I offered to tap it into google translate so we could work out what it said. It came out with a load of gibberish so I wrote this message out and showed it to him.
'Mr Cam,
 I have always been a modest with you but please stop making semen party on your underpants. It is very sad face for me to washing.
Maid'
He blushed.

My first week is now officially over and I have a six day schedule next week to look forward to.

A view of 'Little Indonesia' from a cable car. One of the students was kind enough to take me and my house mate for Chinese New Year.


I naively believed what I had read about mosquitoes. Namely that they were only active at dusk and dawn and that a little repellent would keep them at bay. In fact they will happily suck your blood, and fuck you off, at any time. They will even bite you through clothing if they have too. I know this because I'm currently nursing eleven bites on my left foot and six on my right. I often exaggerate but that is the honest truth. They seem to love my feet even when I wear socks to sleep and taking a step now, despite a liberal dose of anti-itch cream, is excruciating.  It doesn't help that my AC is broken. At least I have the noisiest fan on the planet to put on every night until it gets fixed, so I can't complain too much.
Mosquitoes aren't the only irritant in Jakarta. There is a drain in the corner of our bathroom floor that all the shower water, and the occasional rouge shit, flows into. It's also an entry point for over half the cockroaches in the house. There's one huge one that frequents kitchen. He's white and about an inch bigger than average. Somehow he's managed to survive two direct hits from a shoe which has left him with a tell-tale limp. A few times it's been possible to pick out the distinctive trail he leaves in the dried suds after the maid has mopped. I have to think back to Ahab and his crew and lay my shoe back down before my obsession with that roach gets the better of me. He isn't the most famous white thing in the neighborhood.
That prize goes to me and my roommate. There are many places in Jakarta where just being white is enough to make you a sort of local celebrity. A few days ago the shop attendant in our local supermarket waved his camera at me hopefully. After I nodded his friend snapped a quick photo. Then they swapped places so we could take one with the friend. Then, seeing her opportunity, a woman in line at the checkout leaped in between us for a third photo on her camera phone. Just the other day when I was running away from a bat on my way home I got lost in a thatch of houses and got to know half the neighborhood after shaking their hands while they shouted 'bule' at me (slang term for 'white'). I don't mind it, but I can't help but wonder what attention white people who were born here get.  

A Komodo Dragon from Komodo Island. This was alive but sadly many of the animals in the 'Little Indonesia' enclosures were just carcasses that had been left to moulder. Indonesia is famed for Surabaya Zoo which has the worst animal care in the world. Animal care didn't seem to be valued here either.