More pics from jakarta

I've just after getting a few more pics from my trip to Indonesia from one of the other guys who was there, Michal. So, here's his gallery

Last Day.....

Well, I'm on my last day here in Indonesia, before I head back to the "real world"! I have a 6:50 flight this evening, getting into Frankfurt airport at 5am monday morning, then a 5hr stopover before finally getting home at about 11ish. I'm going to be wrecked! And frozen - am going from 28 degrees to 14! Is pouring rain at home as well, it looks like my first purchase from Singapore is going to come in handy again!

Will be good to get home tho, I feel a bit disconnected from reality here....

Bali vs Work

I've been deliberately avoiding saying anything in my blog here so far about how things are going at work. This is because I didn't want my whole blog to turn into one big rant. Remember before I came over I had the opinion of the people I was working with here as barely competent muppets? Well, my opinion of them has plummeted in the last few weeks. The engineers seem competent enough most of the time when you can get them to actually do stuff, but to do that you need to wade through so many layers of management and process that I nearly need to bring a new can of air freshener with me each day. And when they do stuff, they do no more than the absolute minimum needed to fulfil what they have been told to do. Before I came over we were supposed to have a public network for our application to run on. We arrived and found we didn't have one. I finally got it working after much effort - on Monday this week, or 3 weeks after I should have had it. This involved me being their sysadmin and their network admin for a lot of it, just to get it done. To give an idea how well things went, I discovered last weds week that the network, contrary to what I'd been led to believe, wasn't even cabled in! I asked for this to be done as a matter of urgency on the weds, and it was finally done on the Tues after. I then discovered that the cable monkey who'd set up the wires had never plugged them in - and he'd cut them all to the same length, so two of them didn't even reach the machines at the bottom of the rack! I ended up spending a whole day in the server room, physically having to connect up the cables to the switches myself, and make sure the network was working properly (which it wasn't)! And this is just one example of the problems. The base team won't even have a build for me for a few weeks as they're still waiting for data, so I'm running a generic build not the custom one I should have!

As a result, on Monday I was in the wonderful situation of having until Friday to do what I should have had 4 weeks to do - get the software running and bedded down on the network. I managed to get a good bit of it done before I got the network, but you never really know how these things are going to perform until you start everything up and start running data through it. So, I'm under serious time pressure to get stuff done here, and that assumes nothing else is going to go wrong (not likely to happen). Once I get the basics up and running the tweaking can be done from home, but I need that up first!

Because of this, my holiday next week is looking less and less likely. I was supposed to have the whole week off, and I was heading to Singapore for 4 days and Bali for 4 before I pissed off home. Singapore has to happen, as I have to leave the country and re-enter again to extend my 30-day visa, but the chances of having the work done in time and heading off to Bali are receding by the minute. Guess who's not a happy bunny! I may, if nothing else blows up or refuses to work, get to Bali on Thurs evening and come back sat morning before I fly home on sun. Maybe.

About the only solace I can take from this is that after this particular job is done, every other implementation should seem like a piece of cake - and in future my ass is refusing to get on a plane unless we have all the networks, databases etc we need!

Back to Shcool sale on the 3th floor....

I saw these two signs earlier tonight in a shopping mall we went to to look for pressies for the folks back home......





:-)

BATS

Well, I've now been to the Jakarta version of Maggie's in Beijing. One of the guys who was here on a previous trip kept telling us about this club called BATS in the Shangri-la hotel. According to him: "The women outnumber the men 5-1 and they're all hookers. You can't even make eye contact with anyone in there as they'll be cracking onto you straight away. It's a great place for a single guy". I was inclined to take this with a pinch of salt perhaps, but it was an interesting enough description to warrant a look.

So, Saturday night, me and the two guys from home that are still here took a wander out to this hotel to see this infamous club. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I got in, but it was disappointingly normal looking at first. Then you start to notice that a lot of the girls have that look in the eye, not "I'm out looking for a good time" but "I'm looking for a customer". As the night went on it was easy to spot all of the goings-on - young fairly pretty-looking local girls dancing and getting all up close and personal with these older western men, who in normal circumstances wouldn't get a look-in probably. Was sort of sad to watch actually, all these middle-age men chasing after some pretty little asian entertainment for the night.

Angelo, my project manager, kept pushing me to talk to a few of these girls - was almost like he was wanted the weekend status report to read "Got Kieran laid" :-P There were a few nice looking girls tehre all right, but I wasn't really in the mood to chat up a woman of negotiable virtue, and besides, Angelo was starting to piss me off. If I'm going to talk to someone I'm going to talk to them, and I don't appreciate being pushed into it. Eventually he sort of manoeuvred me into a spot where I had to talk to two girls or look really rude, so I decide "what the hell" and started chatting away (as you do). Revenge was mine though, as after a few minutes of chatter one of the girls leaned over and said "I think your friend is cute", pointing to Angelo! Was nice to watch him squirm after him pushing me to talk to someone all night!

Sure enough though, despite his insistence that "they're probably not all on the game", the topic of money came up near the end of the night, so our next task was to extricate ourselves and make our exits. All in all, not sure would I go back, but was an interesting experience!

Shopping pt. 2

Well, I got to do a bit more shopping today I was originally planning on heading out and doing some touristy stuff, but then Angelo (my boss here) said one of his friends was in town from Oz, and was offering to bring us out shopping, as he'd been here a few times before. Cool I thought, someone who knows where all the funky ethnic stuff is. So, I decided to postpone the sightseeing and go shopping with them.

Turns out tho that this guy's idea of shopping wasn't quite what I had in mind. We headed for Senayan Plaza, a big shopping mall which I'd seen already. Was mostly all high-end stuff, Gucci, Prada, Dior etc - I'd forgotten that I was going with a couple of upper management types whose pay packets weren't exactly the same as mine! There were a few more "normal" shops as well, and I managed to pick up

The most interesting part of that place was when we stopped for lunch: the cafe we went to had a very interesting way of brewing coffee! Have to find where to get one of these things!

After that, we went across the road to Senayan City, another mall I'd been to with Anirudh and Michal. I actually managed to pick up some stuff there - they had a shop that did DC comics-themed clothes, so I picked up a Superman t-shirt and a Batman pait of jeans (they have a big batman logo in denim on the ass). After that, Angelo's friend dropped us back at the hotel, where we decided to go to the ITC (the mall near the office) to look for some stuff. I was fairly successful there as well - picked up another t-shirt, a load of bootleg DVDs (including Shrek the Third!) and a batik shirt which will definitely make me stand out from the crowd back home! The t-shirt is quite intersting, I saw some like it in Japan - it's an Astro Boy t-shirt (some manga character) with a hologram pic on the front - if you look at it one way, it's Astro Boy, if you look from another angle, it's an x-ray view of Astro Boy (not as icky as it sounds, he's a robot).


So, a good day's shopping, but I still have to buy pressies for people!

Shopping

Well, I've got my first taste of shopping here. After work, I went to a shipping center called the ITC, which is maybe 5mins walk from work, as I needed to get some stuff (a new pair of shades and a backpack mostly). There's two parts to the center, the part with "proper" shops where you can't really haggle, and the part with stalls where you can. So, I made a bee-line for the stalls!

Well it's a fair bit different to China! The layout is roughly the same - a big building wit a few floors with little aisles filled with small stalls, but the attitude is different. They're not pushy over here like they were in china, you could actually look at the stuff in the stall for more than half a second without the owner being in your face to buy something! It was only when you went over and started actively looking at stuff that they paid you attention. It's almost too polite - I didn't think I'd be missing the "Looka looka, special friend price for you! Good bargain!", but you sort of do! They're sort of apathetic enough about it over here that you'd almost feel bad about haggling!

I ended up getting my shades anyway, but I couldn't find a bag that suited me. I didn't even bother haggling over the shades either - at RPY20,000 (€1.70), what's the point? They had a few stalls with decent-ish looking glasses tho, so I may be looking for a wraparound pair for skiing next year. Were a few stands selling fake rolexes etc as well - they looked the same as the ones I got last year, but they were starting at 200,000 so I reckon I can get them for about the same price as last year of not cheaper.

There's a few open-air markets around I must hit as well. Lots of shopping still to be done! :-)

Bandung pt. 1

Well, the weekend was interesting anyway. Long and a lot of it was spent in traffic, but it was good to get out of the city!

Our plan was to head to a city called Bandung for the weekend, about 4hrs drive east(?) of Jakarta, and go the slightly longer route via Punchak and the mountains to get the view there (and so that Michal could take pictures of the tea plantations!). Unfortunately, it was a bank holiday weekend here, so to beat the traffic we had to leave slightly early in the morning - as in, get up at 5am and leave the hotel at 6am! That wasn't fun!

Was pretty crowded in the car, as we had Me, Anirudh and Michal (the guys I'm working with), Joey (Anirudh's friend), Nina (Joey's boss) and Fiona and Lauren (friends of Joey's). Joey has a big jeep, and Fiona and Lauren are wee little slips of things, but it was still quite "cozy". The first few hours were fairly quiet, mainly because everyone was still mostly asleep! Wasn't really much to do but stare at the scenery out the car window. there was something not right about what I was seeing, but it took me a good bit of time to realize what it was - the trees I was looking at were palm trees! Everything went quietly enough until we got near the top of Punchak Pass, where we discovered that we had a flat tyre. So, that had to be changed in a lay-by near the top of the pass - in the spitting rain! Once that excitement was over, we motored on a bit more until we came to a restaurant at the very top of the pass. Seeing as we'd been on the road for a good 2hrs at this stage, we decided now would be a good time for breakfast (and a few pictures). I decided to be a bit adventurous and, instead of coffee, try some local drink which was made from ginger, coconut and something else(?) Was a real acquired taste, and by the end of it I still wasn't sure whether or not I liked it!

On we travelled anyway, and nearly everyone in the car fell asleep bar me and Joey (the driver). This was about the first time that it hit me that I really was far away from home: up til then we'd been in jakarta, and sure a lot of ppl didn't speak english, and things were a bit different, but we were spending all our time in the CBD, and one city's CBD is much like another's. Now though we were passing by little ramshackle villages, and palm groves, and paddy fields - even saw one guy in a paddy field ploughing with a water buffalo. Was like being in a National Geographic episode! :-) Unfortunately we were going a bit fast for me to get any pics - I tried a few, but they came out blurry.

We were going to stop off on the way at a Safari park for a look, but unfortunately we got there at 9 and they didn't open til 11. So much for that plan - there goes my chance to play Steve Irwin: "By crikey, look at the size of that lion! I'm going to try to piss him off now, see what happens!" ;-) By about an hour out of Bandung though, we started to catch up with the traffic heading that direction from jakarta, and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day - traffic jams! Was about 1 o'clock when we got into town, so we went for food in some random steak place. After we were fed and watered, it was time to head to the volcano, Tangkuban Perahu. Traffic wasn't too bad once we got out of town, but then we got to the foot of the mountain and had to pay some random guard-looking guys 300,000 to drive up the mountain. We decided "screw that" and went another road, where we only had to pay 80,000. Was some difference in the roads though - made the country roads at home look like super-highways! We were lucky Joey had a 4x4, and even then we were thrown out the bit while crawling along in 1st gear!

When we got up there, the view was less than awe-inspiring. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting (maybe I've seen too much footage of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, with all the flowing lava etc) but it pretty much looked like a quarry with a small lake at the bottom, a bit of steam coming out at one end and a really really strong smell of sulphur. You're able to walk around the rim of the crater though, and we were just about to do that when the clods came down and it started pissing rain! Seeing as we weren't really expecting this it came as a bit of a shock - we had to "rent" an umbrella off a hawker for 5,000 to avoid getting soaked! Even when the rain stopped, visibility was down to a few dozen feet, so we decided that we'd seen all there was to see so we headed back to Bandung.

After that, we decided to go to get something to eat in a resort that one of the girls knew about - a place called Kampung Daun (or "leafy village"), which was on a hilltop just outside Bandung (and by "hill" I mean mountain - Bandung itself is about 700m above sea level!). The road up to it was only marginally better than the road up to the volcano, so I didn't really know what to expect when we get to the top. All I can say is "wow!" :-)

Instead of a "normal" restaurant, it's like a jungle path with little open-sided thatched huts every few meters where you sit in and eat there - with a stream and waterfalls going down the side. Really impressive! And the food was damn good, and dead cheap too. We chilled there for a few hours and then decided brave the traffic and to head into town.

Before we did though, Joey decided to ring the hotel to just confirm our booking. Unfortunately, he'd originally said we would be checking in about midday, so when we didn't show the hotel had given away our rooms. Homeless! Luckily Nina had an aunt in Bandung, so after a few phone calls we were able to stay in her place. One slight problem: Nina didn't know where she lived! So, we dropped Fiona and Lauren off in Lauren's place, and then the adventure began. In between the heavy traffic, the 3 wrong turns and Nina arguing down the phone with her cousin about the directions, we finally got there an hour and a half after we set off. Nina's aunt's house is apparently a typical middle-class indonesian home. A bit different from ours, especially in the bathroom! The toilet didn't have a flush, there was a bucket beside it to pour down the drain to flush with, and the same bucket was used for the "shower" - a tin tub beside the loo to stand in. If you wanted hot water, you put on the kettle!

The sleeping arrangements were fairly rushed-together - Nina was sleeping in with her cousin, the other 3 guys were sharing 2 mattresses in one room, and I got lucky and got a mattress to myself in a room that just about fit the mattress! And so ended day 1 in Bandung.

Early

Argh. For some reason, despite the face that we're going to a place that's a two-and-a-bit hour drive from Jakarta, we have to leave at 6am to get there. Want to beat the traffic or something? Tomorrow morning is going to be worse. the lads want to catch the sunrise over the tea plantations, so allegedly we'll be up at 3am to drive from Bandung to Punchak. So much for sleeping in on the weekends!

It's too early in the morning to be this early in the morning....

argh!

So much for "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically"! Was writing a big long blog on and off all day, said the thing saved, so I exited. I come back, and all I have is the first line! Don't trust it now, technology has let me down. Going to write the next version up in notepad and save as I go along!

So, what was I saying? ah yeah....

Jakarta - Not a "tourist heaven"

Well, I had my first day out in Jakarta yesterday. Up until now, I've seen pretty much none of the city apart from my hotel, the office, the road in between and a few restaurants and shopping malls we've taken taxis to. Normally, I'd head out and take a wander around by myself in the evenings, but it';s dark by the time we get back to the hotel, and besides, you can't really walk around and see stuff locally (as in, we've been advised not to by the hotel). Luckily, one of the guys here has a local friend, Joey, who promised to show us a bit of the city, so we headed off early yesterday morning to "get touristy".

When I say "headed off early", I mean we left early-ish, but then we hit a slight snag - traffic. Anyone who thinks dublin traffic is bad, should head over to SE Asia and give it a go over here. Even Beijing didn't have this many cars clogging the roads! The concept of lanes seems to equate to "whatever space is big enough to fit my car into", and traffic lights are things that happen on the major roads around the CBD. If it were just cars it'd be ok, but for every car on the road there's maybe 2-3 bikes (sometimes with 2-3 people or even whole families) that are weaving in and out between them at high speed, sometimes with inches to spare on either side. So, in between having to collect a few other people (two of Joey's friends, Nina and Ami) and having to inch our way through the traffic, it was maybe 2pm before we got into the "old city".

Once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to be seen. It definitely isn't a "tourist friendly" area, there's a few museums to see but it isn't the type of place you'd happily wander around for hours. We hit two museums, the bank museum (which technically wasn't even open til the next day, but they let us in anyway), and another museum which seemed to consist of nothing but teak furniture - and which let us in without telling us they were closing in 15mins! Apart from that, we wandered down a few fairly run-down streets and went to an old colonial-style cafe called Cafe Batavia to get a drink (which was necessary since most of us aren't quite used to that type of heat).

After that, we headed out to Sunda Kelapa, the port area. That was interesting enough, as all of the boats were the old-style Junks which are nothing like what we get at home, and all of the loading/unloading is done manually as there's no cranes or any equipment - so you have work gangs of guys loading/unloading 50kg bags of cement or big planks of wood off trucks onto the boats.



Two of the guys we were with take their photography quite seriously though, so we spent a lot of time there as they went for the artistic shots - maybe more than us non-photo people would have been happy with. So, we wandered around the port for a few hours, then as the sun was going down, we decided to brave the traffic, go back to the hotel to freshen up, and go out for dinner and a drink or two.

Once we got to dinner, things became interesting. One of the guys, Anirudh, is a vegetarian, and we'd picked this Thai place he'd found on the internet as they were supposed to have a vegetarian-friendly menu (which is apparently really hard here). Unfortunately, when we got there, he discovered this wasn't the case, about all he could have off the menu was steamed rice, so he kicked up a big fuss. Eventually the Maitre'D called out the head chef and together they worked out a plan where he'd come up with something especially for Anirudh. The rest of us weren't quite as fussy, so we went for the usual arrangement of picking a few dishes for the center of the table and helping ourselves to a bit of each. What we got was Fantastic, and even Mr. Picky had to agree that the food was good - and cheap!

After that, it was drinks time! We headed to this bar called CJs which was supposed to have a live band, but when we got there we discovered that the "live band" was a boy-band type cover outfit who made n'sync look like talented respectable artists! The music was laughable, the drinks were expensive, but we stayed around for a good while nayway. The women were mostly pretty good looking, but the problem is that most of the bar/club scene is based around hotel bars, where a good few of the girls would be working girls trying to latch on to the rich western guests ("western" here equals "rich" - I wish!), so it was hard to tell which was which, girls there for fun or for "business". After a while the smoke was getting to Nina's eyes so we moved on to another, quieter place. where we stayed til closing time (2:30ish, same as back home). So, first real night out in JKT, was an interesting occasion!.

So far so good

Well, I survived my trip over anyway. Is bloody hot here tho - will take a bit of getting used to walking out of a building and feeling warmer rather than colder! Is like walking onto a public swimming pool except without the smell of chlorine - hot and sticky, is like 30+ degrees and 95+humidity. Also, I have to wear "casual smart" - decent pants, shirt, suit jacket - so that makes the heat worse.

The flights went without any problems, apart from the button on my seat that's supposed to recline it not working and having to sit upright the whole trip (made sleeping uncomfortable). Oh yeah, had a few screaming babies within 3 rows of me as well. Plus the taxi from the airport dropped me off at the wrong hotel. Apart from that tho, everything has been fine!

Work-wise, there were a few sticky moments the first day yesterday where I had to bullshit a bit but I managed to get through it by letting the other guy who's here with me talk. The people are nice enough but there's an undercurrent of politics involved that I don't like - have had to say a few times "well, you'll have to ask Angelo about that" (my project manager) when they were pressing me for stuff I shouldn't really be giving them.

My hotel room is cool tho - is about the size of my apartment without my bedroom! Haven't been able to do any sightseeing yet as it gets dark here earlier than at home, was fully dark when we left here at 7 last night, so we just went for food. We're planning stuff for the weekends though - maybe a trip to Bali or to see Krakatoa.