Happy new year

2008 is upon us. In a scant six months or so, it will be safe to go back to Beijing, post-Olympics. Well, apart from all the toxic particulates in the air, anyway.

I jetted over to Jakarta to stay with CK and her family, on the 22nd of December. The flight was with Cathay Pacific, which was pretty good. Not as good as China Airlines, though (rolling seatback movies instead of on-demand... the privation!), probably because Cathay has bigger fish to fry than the Jakarta--HK route.

I arrived in time for the traditional new year floods, with plenty of submerged fields visible during our descent to Soekarno-Hatta, but the roads were clear (except where disgruntled locals had set fire to a bridge on the airport toll-road) and the rain was mostly just a reason to occasionally have to shelter under an awning for a while.

Over Christmas itself we went up to a mountain region outside Jakarta called Puncak, and stayed in a rather odd little resort of holiday villas large and small, available in a variety of configurations and styles named after world cities. The difference between the "Monaco" and "Monte Carlo" villas, for example, was lost on me.

The purpose of this mountain retreat (close to the presidential summer residence, no less) was for weather-avoidance purposes, cold and rainy being considered preferable to hot and rainy. Lest the reader become envious, be sure I was not spending Christmas in utter opulence. You may well read "villa" and imagine fancy summer-houses with kidney-shaped swimming pools. These were not quite so grand. They weren't bad, but I was forced to reacquaint myself with washing in the traditional Indonesian shower, which is not so much a shower as pouring warm water over oneself from a small bucket with a panhandle.

At Christmas Eve, we went to midnight Mass in a large church that's part of a sort of retreat complex with an attached monastery. It was here, amid a congregation of a couple of thousand, that I achieved what I think is my largest scale only-white-guy-in-the-room moment to date.
To get there, you proceed up a winding road through a village (paying several small tolls en route, which seems pretty common around there) and then up a hill, punctuated with stations of the cross, before you reach the auditorium-like church proper. It's not exactly somewhere you'd happen across by accident.

Crowds were big on Christmas Eve, as you'd imagine. You had to get there early, and pre-Mass entertainment was laid on for the waiting throngs. I think I did OK with the Indonesian-language Mass itself. The hymns were easy enough to interpret, though I put this down to the rather generic lyrical content of hymns worldwide.

We returned to Jakarta by the afternoon of Christmas Day, much to the concern of little Nikki, CK's niece, who was anxious to get home and thus to the presents.
We stopped off for lunch at a restaurant in the town of Cimory which is bizarrely based around dairy products. Not all the food, you understand, but they have a shop that sells yoghurt and fresh milk and that sort of thing. And the playground has a Frisian cow theme. It's exotic foreign food in Indonesian eyes.

Nikki was then further dismayed to discover that not all the presents were for her.
I got her a drawing set and a Lego ambulance, which as tradition dictates ended up being put together by adult males--her dad and his brother-in-law.

(I got shirts, cuff-links, a dressing gown, chocolate, that kind of thing. You know. Luckily, I had learnt the Indonesian for "cuff-links" the day before (it's 'manset') so I was able to say thank you properly.)

Post-Christmas it was the usual round of malls -- Mangga Dua, Artha Gading, the other one -- stocking up on new clothes, formal shoes for work, knock-off PSP games (5000 rupiah each!) and so on. I briefly considered buying a low-cost and low-quality bass guitar, but didn't have room in my luggage. I don't want to spend too much on one, since I don't really play it, but I do want to get away from recording bass parts on a guitar and then digitally dropping it an octave. It just sounds a bit odd sometimes.

I also unfortunately got a bit of a bad stomach around the 29th or so. More unfortunately, CK told her mum, which led to extreme fussing. (Note to self: anything you say in the house will be repeated to everyone else...)

We went for tennis on the Saturday morning. Now, in this I had been misled. When they said "do you want to play tennis?" I thought they meant we'd go and, well, play tennis. Not go and have tennis coaching for a couple of hours. Still, I gradually remembered how to hit the ball vaguely where I wanted (after an eight-year hiatus) and scored a couple of points in the doubles game we eventually played. Doing anything with my right arm was a bit of a struggle for the next 24 hours, though.

New Year's Eve featured dinner at Sizzler's, who were woefully unprepared for a rush of customers, and the food wasn't great when it arrived. 2008 was heralded by some increasingly out of control fireworks nearby. CK and I had to settle for New Year hugs, since kissing in public is Not Done in Jakarta. In fact, on the way back to the car, we took advantage of the darkness therein for a bit of the old kissing, at which point the alarm went off on the car next to us. Even the motor vehicles are against public canoodling!

I flew back on January the 1st, feeling rather glum. I am not terribly happy to be back in Hong Kong, but what can you do?