Blok M diary, December 2003

Sisters Week

Whilst chewing the fat one night with a veteran reveller who gravitates to the Blok every few months or so on his regional perambulations, the Reveller casts an appreciative eye round the upstairs bar in D’s Place and remarks that there are lots of young new girls milling around.  ‘Ah, that’s because it’s sisters week’, is the cryptic response. ‘Its sister’s weak’? muses the Reveller - has his good friend dropped his marbles? ‘Yes, it’s when they all come back from the kampongs after the Id with their younger sisters’, he patiently explains.  Ah, the penny drops.  After a spell of creative drinking the Reveller is sometimes, in the words of A A Milne, ‘a bear of very little brain’, and it takes a while for words to coalesce into meaning.

So after his friend drains his beer and moves on to greener pastures, the Reveller plays his own version of the parlour game ‘Happy Families’. This consists of looking at the new girls and trying to find facial similarities with the older ones, and sure enough he soon spots four or five of the fledglings whose features he matches with their elder siblings.  And there must be quite a few others that he hasn’t noticed.

The Reveller reflects that Indonesian families tend to come in economy size, and usually have large broods. So any one girl may have upwards of three or four sisters, and a veritable army of near relatives. Humming a tune from HMS Pinafore, the Reveller remembers those inimitable words of Gilbert and Sullivan - ‘her sisters and her cousins, and she numbers them by dozens’. He then slides into a passable rendition of the legendary Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Thank heaven, for little girls’, to the bemusement of a couple of nearby revellers who are not accustomed to the normally taciturn Reveller bursting into song like that.

Girls in Black

One night, after he relocates to his favourite corner next to the disco to watch the dancing, the Reveller observes that almost all the girls are wearing black, or a mix of red and black. In the Stygian gloom, picked out by the spotlights, the strobes and the dancing coloured beams from the rotating mirrors, their dancing has a disturbingly macabre eroticism about it - not a sight for any reveller with a dicky ticker, he reflects, as his own pulse goes stratospheric and his hormones shift into overdrive.

Now there’s obviously no conscious colour coordination going on here, no fashion diktat has gone out, so what’s the explanation of the phenomenon? Is it simple coincidence, is it an example of Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, or is it the Zeitgeist, a particular mood that’s prevailing on that day? Applying the statistical laws of combination and permutation, and assuming a 25% probability of wearing black as opposed to other popular colours, the Reveller swiftly calculates that the likelihood of more than twenty out of thirty girls all wearing black by chance alone is infinitely small.

Whatever the explanation, the Reveller is bewitched by the sight and enjoys one of the most memorable evenings he’s had on the Blok. The moral of this happy episode?  There’s so much variety and surprise in Blok M, something to suit everybody’s taste.

Knowing your onions

As he picks his way gingerly down the stairs from D’s Place upstairs bar late one night, navigating the sirens and politely but firmly resisting their smoochy invitations to horizontal dalliance, the Reveller is surprised to hear gales of laughter and loud guffaws coming from the downstairs bar. ‘It’s the onions’, someone calls up to him, ‘come and look!’.

Pushing through the crowd, the Reveller sees one of the girls frantically munching a whole peeled onion as the gang counts down to zero. Guys have contributed to a pot for the winner, and there’s some big money lying on the table. As he goes out of the bar clutching his helmet and jacket, a roar goes up when one of the girls beats the clock and chomps her way to the substantial prize.

The rain of terror

No, the Reveller isn’t talking about the horrors of the French Revolution, but the present wet spell in Jakarta. It’s been bucketing down every night for the past week or so, and some malign fate decrees that the heavens will open just as he’s got on his bike and is going home after a heavy night on the Blok.

Now it’s a law of nature that there isn’t a single metre of flat road anywhere in Jakarta - from gentle undulation to chasmic fissure, the tarmac is a palimpsest of skimped investment and chronic neglect, a patchwork of gloriously inept repairs and irredeemably sagging infills. The only warning the unwary driver may get of a particularly cavernous hole in the road is a tree-branch stuck in a box on top it.

The Reveller is convinced that the drainage system in Jakarta is cunningly designed to channel the rainwater into dips and hollows at strategic points on all the main roads, turning them into white-water torrents or miniature lagoons. This makes the journey an epic of unexpected bumps, jumps and jolts, as he braves the flooded roads of south Jakarta and splashes his way home.

D’s Place - the web site

Staggered by the success of the Blok M web site, and beaming at the number of new customers who tell him that they found out about D’s Place from some web site they visited, the owner has - with great vision, and commendable acumen - commissioned the Reveller to create a brand-new web site just for D’s Place.

The site is even now under intense and feverish construction, and due for its grand official opening on the 29th of December. However, you may have a sneak preview and watch the creative process first-hand by pointing your favourite browser at http://dsplace.jakartablokm.com.

Lies, damned lies, and web statistics

It’s amazing, really. One busy night, as the troops muster upstairs in D’s Place ready for the evening fray, the Reveller reflects on the Blok M web site and its inexplicable success far beyond the confines of Jakarta - and indeed, Indonesia itself. Last month there were regular visits from web surfers in no less than thirty-eight countries, making an average of more than 1,500 hits per day, and they keep coming back for more. What started life as a simple public-service web site for would-be revellers visiting Jakarta for the first time has grown, like Topsy, into an international succès de scandale.

So whoever you are, wherever you are, thanks for dropping by - and the Reveller hopes that you get as much pleasure from reading his ramblings as he does from penning them. As you’ll have gathered, they’re a personal homage to a real, vibrant, living community here in the depths of south Jakarta, a place which in all his travels - and he’s worked in, and visited, nigh on thirty countries - is quite unique. The Reveller raises his glass, and drinks to your very good health.