Don't Say I Never Took You Anywhere NICE

What with the leper colonies, waria, dockyard swastikas, death-defying Frogger traffic dashes, graveyards, ukulele boys & crippled, blind karaoke singers on the economy class train, I feel we showed cousin MF the best of Jakarta.

MF is an intrepid traveler. All this week, even just for the heat & smog, I felt cause to reflect that many people I know would have gotten cranky & fainted long ago, while MF remained (outwardly) cheerful. Well into the second hour cramped in a sweltering angkutan kota “just like the locals do” van heading up into the Bogor hills, I felt a little mystified at why I myself have not yet fainted.
And why I keep doing things like this.

When other people come here, they go to the Bali beach & relax with an adult beverage. The only time I’ve been to an Indonesian coast, we saw THIS:



Look at this picture: Here we have a typical multi-use space. Photographed from the Dutch East India Company’s centuries old Syahbandar lookout tower on the north coast, a corner of what Captain Cook once called the most hospitable port in the world: now (or still) a dump & chicken ground, a highly disgusting edge of green sewage water, & an old man drying fish on a tarp right in the middle of it all.

Before I launch into all the things we did do this week, let me list for you some of the very few things that cousin M “I Will Try Anything…Almost” F would NOT do:

• Eat that fish.
• Order fried spleen, fried lung, or fried intestine.
• Hold a baby orangutan.

But that’s about it. We also snuck into the national museum. That’s what ruffian academics like E do: brazenly sneak us into closed museums to observe unlit, unlabeled artifacts for free. And enjoy it. The man can’t be stopped.