Alterity | Jakarta and Bali

Holy Mackerel! There is only one place to be in Jakarta tonight (23 Oct 2009). And that is at Blowfish (City Plaza @ Wisma Mulia, Jl. Gatot Subroto, No. 42. Telp: 021 5297 1234) Because from 10pm onward, the incredibly talented DJ’s Mia Guzman and Emily Scott will be doing their best to raise temperatures to astronomically high levels. Both girls are also top notch models in their own right, and as a torrid duo they are more than capable of creating a heat wave tonight. In fact I think the thermometers might even crack… ..................Emily Scott ...............Mia Guzman

This is incredible. Eight women dressed in burkas have been nabbed at Jakarta Sukarno Hatta airport for trying to bring in £7.5m worth of drugs into the country! The group of drug smugglers were found with 27kg of crystal methamphetamine at Indonesia’s Soekarno-Hatta airport. They also had 23 litres of the drug in liquid form, said customs chief Anwar Suprijadi The drugs, wrapped in plastic food containers and cleaning fluid bottles, were packed into hand luggage. But the oddly-shaped packages were picked out by officers operating scanners. By wearing conservative Islamic clothing the women tried to 'fool officers in a country like Indonesia, where women in black veils are generally considered to be good women', the customs chief explained. Source: the Daily Mail You can cover your faces but you can’t pull the wool over our eyes

Looks like the decadent ways of the West are having an even greater impact on Bali than I thought. Such a shame!

Approaching the famous Sarinah shopping center in the heart of Jakarta, and it’s another WTF moment – - the Golden Arches are gone! Hurrah!!!!!! But hold on a sec – what’s replaced the world’s greatest purveyor of cardboard foods? Toni Jack's?!!!!!! And as to why the Sarinah McDonalds outlet was replaced by an Indonesian-themed hamburger joint, it’s all because the Americans burnt their bridges by selling their shares in their Indonesian chain to Teh Sosro behind the back of their Indonesian partner, Bambang N. Rachmadi, which, apparently, really pissed him off. 

Stare at this pic. After about 30 seconds you should begin to see a boat appear in the background. Amazing! *** Some men report it takes them several minutes to see the boat, so be patient and really focus!! Yes folks, it really is difficult to take your eyes of Kiki Widyasari (Friderica Widyasari Dewi). And that’s not surprising really. Because, believe it or not, she was a hot model for the men’s magazine Popular before she changed career direction to become the Director of Business Development for the Indonesian Stock Exchange ! “Creating value through a focus on strategic assets” is a textbook investment strategy Despite a turbulent investment climate, Kiki remains undaunted

Yet another MOOving story in the Jakarta Post :   And if you look closely at the top left of the pic you can see that the JP has even decided to create a new “Bestiality” Section! Wow! But is there really enough of this sort of stuff going on to justify the creation of a Bestiality section for the esteemed Jakarta rag? Well, if Google News is anything to go by, there certainly is!

I’d like to "valet park" them into a new life. > Elizabeth Gilbert in writing about a destitute family in India You live in New York, your life is crap and you’ve just gone through a divorce. But never mind. You’ve stacks of cash, so you buy plane tickets to a few countries that you’ve always wanted to visit. Your final port of call is Bali and you have so much sex there with an exotic Brazilian that you get a bladder infection (certainly enough to take your mind of the depressing divorce). To get cured you visit a medicine woman who gives you a foul-smelling concoction of roots, leaves, berries, turmeric and – just for good measure - a “shaggy mass of something that looks like witches’ hair”. And then it’s back to the States, a completely revitalized women... And that, in a nutshell, is the synopsis of the film (based on the best selling autobiographical book 'Eat, Pray, Love' by Elizabeth Gilbert) that Julie Roberts is now filming in Bali. Crikes – I would have r...

If the average Balinese dude wants to make some decent money he doesn’t have many options open to him. Driving a cab certainly isn’t going to make him rich (see my previous post ) and neither is working in a hotel or in a restaurant. And as for rice farming, well, when was the last time you saw a rice farmer driving a Merc? So what’s he to do? Well aside from entering the world’s oldest profession and pursuing wanton middle aged women on the famous Kuta beach there isn’t much he can do. Except perhaps for one thing. Paint. Oct. 13 2009 (Bloomberg) -- A weekend of sales in Singapore showed that demand for Indonesian contemporary art has rebounded, with prices for some better-known artists such as I Nyoman Masriadi returning to pre-slump levels. Borobudur Auction Pte’s Oct. 11 auction tallied S$9.6 million ($6.9 million), compared with the company’s presale estimate of about S$8 million. Masriadi’s 2008 painting “Book Lover” sold for S$588,000, against a top estimate of S$200,000. One o...

And who’s won this year’s Putri Indonesia contest? Aceh’s Qory Sandioriva!!!! But not everyone is rejoicing in her victory and the clerics up in Aceh have said that she has shamed the far flung province because she entered the competition without wearing a veil! Quite how the judges would be able to ascertain her beauty if they couldn’t see her face is not explained, but, I suppose they could take into account other factors… Qory Sandioriva shows some leg as well as her face

Bali may be Paradise Island for foreign tourists but admission to paradise is subject to large incomes and a lot of the Balinese are not admitted. This is not to say that tourism doesn’t generate wealth in Bali – it does – just that there are many Balinese who don’t benefit. “Oh it’s so terrible,” said the pony-tailed new-aged hippy as he tucked into his organic vegetables in one of the nice little restaurants in Ubud . “So many beggars have held our their hands to me and I’ve ignored most of them and now feel terrible. But my £1 can be worth ten or even twenty times their currency – will I still go to heaven if I give it away?” Nice sentiments but it doesn’t really work like that. At least not most of the time. I was reminded of this when I had to get from Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport to the port of Padangbai so I could take a ferry across to Lombok. The problem of course is that it’s not easy to give away money without generating problems that make the process of giving money away sel...

The latest craze to hit Indonesia is a young Japanese lady called Maria Ozawa (or better known as Miyabi): But looks can be deceiving, and despite her undeniably sweet and cute face, Miyabi makes her living from Japanese AV, a bizarre world in which sexy ladies do the strangest things unimaginable . Yep unimaginable. And I mean really unimaginable. Now I won’t delve into it too deeply (sorry!) but I will say that her first "inte##acial" title was called Multiple Bl#ck R#pe and it was released by Dasdas in May 2008 (no googling please: Minister for Communication and Information Technology Mohammad Nuh would NOT be pleased). And after a series of “conventional films” she then recorded the infamous and highly controversial film Shemale O#gy Gan#ba#g R#pe (with three transsexual actresses naturally), followed by a film in the Japanese por#n tentacle r#pe genre called, unimaginatively enough, Monster Swallowing Ecstasy Maria Ozawa. Anyway, the lovely lass is due over at the end of...

PIZZAeBIRRA have got an oktoberfest coming up, but rather than enlist the services of some busty German beer-maiden lookalikes to promote the event, they’ve only gone and chosen a picture of the old führer instead! WTF! Now I know it’s “only” 60 odd years since WW2 ended, but you’d still think that the Indonesians would find something just a little more pleasant to associate with Germany than one of the most evil human beings to have ever lived, wouldn’t you? But apparently not.   Now while this is all incredibly insane, it’s actually nothing compared to the infamous urban legend that Hitler escaped to Indonesia at the end of the war to live – in all places – on the island of Sumbawa!   The idea that Hitler escaped to Sumbawa was ridiculed by many of course, but an interesting finding last week that the skull found in the bunker where Hitler was assumed to have committed suicide was NOT his but instead belonged to a younger woman gives some credence to the claim tha...

There’s lots of red tape in Indonesia and it gets everywhere. Even into films and onto Fauzi Baadilla's belly button – admittedly objectionable content but hardly likely to corrupt the nation’s youth. At the same time, the authorities didn’t like the tagline of the film either. Entitled "Manusia terbaik di Indonesia adalah seorang penjahat" (The best man in Indonesia is a criminal) – it probably is just a tad too close to the truth :) - and all the posters had to be taped over only a month prior to the film's release (New Order style). In his love life Fauzi Baadilah has also seen red and married the beautiful Uzbekistan model Senk Lotta. So far she’s avoided the red tape over her body parts but experienced the red tape at immigration where she was asked to pay a Rp700,000 fine for failing to have an exit permit. Well she should have red the rules shouldn’t she?  Hahaha!

God it’s getting worse. Not only has the Obama administration banned the sale of Indonesian clove cigarettes in the US but they’ve also decided to snub Indonesia in the US President’s upcoming Asian visit! WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's first Asian trip as president will include Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea, but NOT Indonesia, where he spent four years of his life. Obama and his mother moved from Hawaii to Jakarta, Indonesia, when he was 6 years old. They left to return to the United States when he was 10. It’s not made clear why Obama has lost his love for his childhood home but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s worried about taking some stick from the Indonesians over Uncle Sam’s absurd decision to outlaw clove cigarettes. Oh well Obama. You’ll just have to wait until you can try your bakso meatballs again - which ironically with all the borax packed into ‘em are probably a damn sight more dangerous than puffing on a kretek!

If you’ve been working in Indonesia a while - or perhaps only a few days - you’ve probably entertained thoughts of dating a local woman. And why not indeed?! But before plunging headfirst into the dating game, it’s important to do your homework and identify the kind of woman you’d like to date:  The career woman. They say you should never mix business and pleasure, but there’s no sense in passing up any good opportunities whilst on the job. But be careful and never date a fellow employee as that could well be a recipe for disaster if things don’t turn out well and she decides to exact revenge - as is more than likely.  Pros : these girls are independent, well-mannered and educated.  Cons : they love their careers so much they may have very little time for you. And if you don’t meet up to her lofty expectations in the long run, she certainly won’t have any qualms about dumping you for a more successful partner!  The university student. Borderline jailbait, don’t e...

Indonesians like to have a fag. And who can blame them? When I once suggested to a spluttering chain-smoking bajaj driver that he’d probably feel a lot better if he gave up, he curtly told me that smoking was one of the few pleasures in his life (sex must have been one of the others, I assume, as he had to support a wife and 7 kids on his meager income). And Indonesians don’t mess about with wimpy low tar “mild” cigarettes either. For this is the land of high tar kretek cigarettes. A blend of tobacco, dried cloves and a special sauce, these fags are loved by Indonesians for their characteristically sweet taste. But they are also killing them. And in huge numbers. According to one estimate, Indonesia has 53,175,006 smokers, or more than any other country except the US, China and India. Of this number, half will eventually die from smoking related diseases – or an incredible 27 million smokers! Thank God Indonesia has a large population. But unlike in Indonesia, many Western countries ar...