I had a hair cut the other day in a nearby mall. At £4 it wasn't the cheapest place on offer but the signs were written on the wall and I'm sick of paying the 'bule' price for everything. A taxi costs £1.50 to Puri from Tanjung Duren. I know because I took one the other day. When I was waiting for a taxi back an Ojek (motobike taxi) driver called me over and asked where I was going. I told him and he said it would cost £6. I laughed in his face. When I tried to barter down he refused to budge at all. While we were chatting an Indonesian walked up and asked the driver's mate to go to a location that was even further than Tanjung Duren and he got offered a price of £1. The driver spoke zero English and unfortunately my grasp of Indonesian isn't good enough to explain why he was being a prick so I walked away and he didn't try to call me back with a reasonable price. I waited for a taxi and the price was £1.50 on the meter again when I arrived back home. Even though I get paid double what non-native teachers at work get the Chinese Indonesian who took an Ojek for a lower price than I could get probably earns more than me as Puri is a very rich area.

The haircut I got was worth paying a little extra for though. The hairdresser cut throat razored the peach fuzz off my face and even turned out to be an amateur chiropractor. When he finished cutting and shaving me he gave me a massage on my neck and face then suddenly without any warning snapped my neck around like you see action heroes do to villains in films. The difference was that when I opened my eyes I wasn't hell, I was in Jakarta, so kind of a little bit in hell. I felt three clicks in my neck like when I click my knuckles but in places that I didn't even know existed till he cracked them. I was still reeling from the experience when he snapped my neck round the other way and cracked the other side. I've woken up with a stiff neck every morning since and will never go back there again but it was still an interesting experience. 
Another interesting experience was taking the bus. When I read leaflets and my companies' information packet about the city they said that buses are only 7p. 'Wow' I thought, 'How fantastic, such cheap public transport!' I didn't realise that a 'bus' is just some dick head with a gutted out minivan that's been painted red with 15 people shoved in it and often with about 12 people hanging off the side. One such bus pulled up alongside my house-mate one day when he was on his way to the gym and the driver pointed to the roof. He got off at the first sharp corner and wasn't charged at all.  

Sitting on the bus to Puri one day, my nuts sweated so that my trousers became a bowl of bakso (look it up) and I thought to myself 'I can't bear another second of this shit.' Everyone who's view wasn't blocked by a sweaty body was staring at me for being white. The 'bus' stopped every time someone grunted and one person squeezed off and another two squeezed on. The driver snatched 7p from everyone who got off and spent every second he wasn't snatching thumbing through the notes and mouthing numbers as he counted the stack of money that he kept clenched in his hand. We passed a huge heap of rubbish over an open drain and the smell of sweat blasted away with the smell of old nappies and food rotting in the heat. Through a haze wafting from someone's armpit I looked through the window and saw some boys who looked no more than thirteen years old sifting through the rubbish looking for valuables then loading it onto carts that they wheeled away. Many of them weren't wearing gloves and it was thirty three degrees. The driver stopped for about 15 minutes to wait for more customers but as I looked at the kids and sweated a pool onto the floor I thought that life could always be worse. I called out when my stop came up and the driver pulled over and I paid the fee- 20p. Fucking bastard.