Immi-negotiation

Petrol prices have just gone up by 2000 rupiah a litre ( about 10p). This has happened after the election of the new Obama-esque president Jokowi. The petrol prices used to be subsidised by the government so they actually lost money from selling it. Petrol is still cheap at under 50p a litre even after the price increase.

A day before this I received a call at about 9 o'clock in the evening from my co-worker. She told me not to go outside because she was just arrested in a blaze of camera flashes. She sounded a bit shocked and was in a bus full of other foreign people being taken to a 'shelter.' She said she had no idea what it was about. After I hung up I called an Indonesian friend who was on their way to my apartment and told them if there were any police on the floor to not bother knocking and also to lie if anybody asked her any questions on the way in. Next I phoned up my manager to ask what was happening.

My manager told me there was an 'immigration check' going on and that it was nothing to worry about. I continued to check in on my co-worker by text to make sure she was OK. Turns out the 'immigration check' is just the police teaming up with immigration to round up as many foreign looking people as they can then scare the shit out of them. Once everybody is suitably terrified with whispers of 'detention' time because of the long process involved to check visas a 'deal' is offered. My co worker was eventually released at 3:30am after my manager arrived and chatted with the officers for hours before paying an undisclosed bribe.

For some reason I escaped the check. I took a taxi to the door that day as I was feeling lazy and that may be why escaped it. The officers did knock on people's doors but as I am high in the building I suppose they were feeling lazy too. I'm glad that in the UK people can't get rounded into buses for looking different to the ethnic norm because that 'immigration check' is about the most corrupt thing I have ever witnessed. Some of my Indonesian friends told me that those immigration officers may lose their jobs soon under the new government and that the money they make will work towards a retirement fund. It is also possible that they needed to reach an end of year target that they hadn't achieved. Either way if any of the new petrol money went towards reducing corruption like this I think everyone living in this 'developing' country would be happier. Well, the foreign people at least.  

First bribe

I was thrilled to experience my first bribe yesterday. My friend was driving us to get dinner in the evening. As we pulled onto the main road a policeman waved us down. My friend had forgotten to turn her lights on. Since it was a woman driving I was expecting the guy to just tell us to be careful and wave us on. Instead he smiled at us both and said. 'Wow, you have a very handsome boyfriend.' For some reason I instantly took to the guy and smiled right back.  He chatted to us for a bit about where we were going and recommended a few restaurants.
Then the policeman told us he would unfortunately have to give my friend a fine and set a court date for her to appear at next week because she wasn't using her lights. Poor guy looked pretty cut up about it but he said he really didn't want to do that and gave us a wink. When he asked for my friends driving license he gave a subtle nod towards her purse. As soon as she withdrew 50,000 (£2.50) a couple of cm past the edge of the leather it had disappeared up his sleeve with an action that looked like a magic trick. Then he glanced at the driving license and told us to have a safe journey.

My favorite websites were blocked the other day (imgur and reddit). When I tried to access them a little message popped up up saying that I could call the provider if I thought it was blocked wrongly. Since neither of the sites contain pornographic material (which is always blocked in Indonesia) I called up the provider and asked them to unblock it. The woman on the phone said the block had come from the government and that there was nothing she could do. I used a proxy to go on reddit and try to find out what had happened. Turns out that a conservative Muslim minister (Tifatul Sembiring) was about to go out of power and decided to fuck up the internet before he got ousted. It also had a link to an article about the politician that showed various tweets and statements from him saying he was too pure to ever touch a woman who wasn't a family member of his. He then accused Michelle Obama of forcing him to shake hands with him when she visited Indonesia. A video showed him jabbing someone else out of the way in order to shake her hand. Since I found all this out through reddit, the block probably had nothing to do with pornography. It was just a political attempt to choke free press.
Sembiring came up again later that week in one of my lessons. According to my students he is part of the same muslim union that banned Lady Gaga from entering the country because of satanic symbols in her performances. He was also instrumental in jailing a an Indonesian singer after a personal sex tape was found on his computer by someone who stole it from him. Then my students showed me images on the computer of 'Paris Hilton-y' type Indonesian celebrities in scantily clad clothes next to campaign posters. In some of the photos they looked like they were in bars. The women were very popular on Indonesian TV. Can't help but think if they got some decent porn in they could get rid of that shit.

Last weekend I went to a '4d' cinema. It engineers the fourth dimension by wiggling the seat around in a way that makes my amateur chiropractor/hairdresser appear to have the fingers of an angel. It also squirts you in the face with water every time something wet comes on the screen.  Towards the end of the film this seemed to have a deliberate delay so that when I put my hand over  the nozzle to block the jet of water nothing came. As soon as I thought it was safe and put my hand down it let a big squirt rip into my face.

To further satisfy my lust for water I also went to sea world with one of my students and his friends from work. At the petting aquarium I got to hold a starfish and even touch a shark. There are some photos floating around somewhere from one of the guys we went with but he has yet to upload them anywhere. This is despite the fact he took about 1000 photos a minute like a true Indonesian. The student works with a fashion company and all his fashionista friends and him were too nervous to touch the sharks. There were some instructions in Indonesian I didn't understand but I decided to have a go. When a sizeable one swam past I leant over the edge and ran my hand down its back. As I turned around to smile at everyone the bugger snapped around so quickly with its teeth bared I leapt about two meters away from the tank. 

After sea world we walked down 'The Bridge of Love,' which had a much nicer Indonesian name that I've forgotten. It was a big heart shaped bridge out into the ocean which a load of lovers had painted there names on or carved them into the wood. It was totally gay. When we stopped for coffee some of the fashionistas showed some concern about what I was wearing. They said the tattered shorts and poorly fitting 'I Love Singapore' T-shirt just didn't accentuate my natural style. I looked at my student and asked him if he knew what time it was. 'Makeover time,' we said in unison.

The sight of all the fish in the aquarium and our time by the sea got us hankering for sea food. We went to a fancy place in Ancol Mall where you could choose your own fish or crab/lobster from the tank. I saw a particularly large crab make a bid for freedom and manage to flop out of its container. I immediately knew that this was the bastard I wanted to eat and told the waiter to take it to the kitchen straight away. The satisfaction of seeing the same crab on my plate a few minutes later was profound. It was pretty expensive for Jakarta though at around £8.

The next weekend I saw the new Spiderman film with my fashion designer student and he acted as my stylist and picked me out a new 'semi-format' outfit for after the film. I proudly wore my new style out of the mall and  showed it to my housemate who said it was 'all right.' I later wore it out with a female friend and she told me I looked 'very gay,' so I might just pop the outfit in a drawer for a while.

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.

The same week I went to Singapore I went to Taman Safari with my housemate and two of our students. The animals there seemed much happier than at Taman Mini. They mostly had free roam of the park. As we drove up to the safari we went past about one million ragged villagers who stepped out into the road to wave carrots at the car. We stopped and bought a bag from the one who clawed his way to the window first.
As we drove to the different enclosures I stopped eating my carrot mid-chew when a zebra stuck its head through the window. Elephants and what looked like Ankole-Watusi wandered down the road and grabbed them from every car down the lines of traffic that formed whenever people stopped to look at an animal. I was having great fun stroking all the stragglers and it looked like everyone else was doing the same. I couldn't decide whether it would be miserable walking down lines of cars all day eating carrots and having people poke at you or whether it would be awesome.

When we arrived at the event area there was a sea lion show. We arrived five minutes late so we were amazed to see that the entire front row was free. We were amazed right up to the point that the sea-lions completely soaked us with a spray so powerful it blasted my wallet out of my pocket. Other people had clearly been before.
The only miserable part of the safari park was the petting zoo where you could pay to take photos with a lion tiger or leopard that had been doped up. Whenever they made a weak attempt to bite a customer who teased or stoked them too aggressively an attendant jabbed a stick in their mouth. All the guys tried to persuade me to take a photo with one but I refused because I didn't want to promote the practice in any way. My flat mate tried to argue the lion he took a photo with wasn't drugged but his argument was made redundant when he lifted the lions head and it half-opened its eyes instead of ripping his face off.  I did take a photo with a baby orangutan that looked happy enough.
Other than the petting zoo the contact with the animals was delightful. I had to stifle tears of joy after watching a small child crawl under a fence into the kangaroo enclosure. It stepped on a baby kangaroo's tail and received a savage kick to the face. This was particularly wonderful to see after a week of teaching the little treasures. 

  

Because of bureaucracy in Jakarta the way to get a work visa isn't through an embassy. Instead you have to fly to Singapore and give your passport to some bloke in Mc Donalds who gives it back four hours later with a visa inside. My DOS needed his visa done at the same time as me so we set off at 3am on Friday morning. The school booked the tickets with the cheapest airline possible. They are also notorious for being the worst airline in the world. They hold the record for most engines blown upon landing because of inexperienced pilots landing too fast. One of the girls at work has a boyfriend who works for Lion Air and he said they had a pilot working there who was fired in New Zealand for drinking on the job. When talking to the boyfriend at a works dinner, he told me proudly how it took him only two years to train. 'My literature degree took longer than that' I thought 'and I still don't get Jane Austin.' I asked him if you still needed 20/20 vision and he laughed and said he needed glasses nearly as thick as the bottom of the beer he was holding. He then pulled them out and put them on.
'Wow, you have green eyes?' he asked, before walking into a table. 
'Not really.' I said. Then his girlfriend came along and told him to stop drinking because he didn't want another incident at work. I hoped to myself that I would never have him as a pilot. This was a hope I would come to sorely regret. I would gladly have had him or the pilot who was fired for drinking over who I had on Saturday.
I was very glad to have the DOS with me the morning we left because I don't function without sleep. I miss-spelled my name on the departure card and kept drifting off while I was walking around. I might as well have been reading 'Pride and Prejudice.' I had no idea what was going on but it was making me more sleepy with every minute. When we got on the plane I plugged my ears and put a blindfold on. There was no safety announcement and no bullshit. The pilot whopped that plane into gear and made for the runway. I ignored normal take off protocol and reclined my seat. Then I started dreaming about a City that doesn't smell like shit all the time. My peace was short lived.

As the plane wound up for the take off and rammed us all back into our seats there was a big clunk a group of women screamed near the front of the plane. The plane wound down. One of the doors had fallen off.
'Standard Lion Air take off.' I joked.
'I'm glad we aren't sitting there,' said my DOS 'We'd be holding the door on for the next one!' We laughed with another white person who overheard us. Then the pilot came over the speakers to reassure us all about the 'rejected launch' and each of our smiles was wiped. I looked over at my DOS and he had gone very pale. Everyone on board was suddenly frozen as the cabin crew exchanged nervous glances. The babies stopped crying. By the time the announcement was finished you could have heard a pin drop on the carpet. People didn't need to understand English to get the message. It was a woman's voice coming through the speakers. The pilot was a woman.
Understandably a few poor bastards couldn't take it anymore and made a dash to get off. It was no use. Our fate was sealed. It would have delayed the plane so much to let them off that the passengers who were crazy enough/ needed to get to Singapore so badly they would risk there lives gave them such stares that the shame was too much for them to bear. This was particularly true with Asian culture as it is.  We waited for the door repair and the paper work then set off again. Of course nobody could get any sleep after finding out about the pilot so we were forced to endure a flight where everyone jumped out of their seat at the faintest hint of turbulence. Thank God we made it.

Changi airport in Singapore is incredible. It has a free cinema, free water, free phone calls, a snooze lounge and many other wonderful features. After we dropped off our passports with the most stressed man to walk the earth,  we took a walk through the city. There were hardly any cars on the roads because apparently there is a kind of lottery to get driving licenses. Every road, pavement and toilet seemed cleaner than most tables in Jakarta. We wandered around a huge market place and I bought a fridge magnet for my nan and an 'I love Singapore,' t-shirt. When we got our passports back we went straight back to the airport and tried to get some sleep in the snooze lounge before the return flight. We were both still a bit shaken from the flight over.