Looking For Love in Jakarta Part 5

It was good to be back in Jakarta. I checked into the same residence again and I even got my old room again. During my absence it had been occupied for a few days but now it was empty. Thursday evening I went to the gym because I really needed a good workout after nearly one week’s rest. After the workout I went back home and had a good sleep. The next day I had a quiet day. Most of the work was finished and there would not be much coming for at least 3 or 4 months so the rest of my stay in Indonesia would be more relaxed then the first month. I went to the mall with Joost for coffee and a good meal and after that we decided to go to the old town (Kota) to visit the old landmarks from the Dutch colonial times. We had a nice stroll though old former Batavia and went back home in the afternoon. I decided to stop by at Sabang Street to go to the duty free store to buy 2 bottles of whiskey (Bush Mills) and one bottle of Absolut Vodka. The liquor here is supposedly imported but one can never be sure. Anyway it does taste like the real stuff and last year I had my Bush Mills tasted by an Irish friend of mine who assured me it was the real thing.

Friday night it was time for a meeting with my long time friend, Diana. Diana had been my first more or less serious fling in Jakarta. We had met for the first time in 1998 when she was a young student. For me Diana embodies the complete transformation that so many of the big city Indonesian girls have gone through over the last 12 years or so. In 1998 when I met Diana she was a young, traditional girl from the higher middle-class in Jakarta. She had just started to burst out of her cocoon so to speak. She got her first car from her parents when she turned 20 that year but she was still firmly anti clubbing, anti smoking and anti alcohol like a good Muslim girl was supposed to be. I was not the first guy she made love with but a close second and it all had to be done in secret.

Nowadays she proudly (chain)smokes everywhere she goes, goes clubbing at least 2 times a week, has a boyfriend who comes to her home once or twice a week or she goes to his place when she likes. Additionally, as a bi-sexual she also has a girlfriend she often spends time with. Her boyfriend and her friends all know this because she does not keep it a secret from anybody. She loves to go to nice cafés or pubs or clubs to drink wine, whiskey and Vodka. Diana is a fashion designer and she makes really good money, but she is not an exception in Jakarta. Wherever you go nowadays in the city you find girls just like her. Girls who drink alcohol in public while enjoying a nice smoke. I still remember the time in 1998 when Diana and I were having lunch in a mall when we saw a few girls on another table who had just finished their meal lighting up a smoke. In those days it was quite rare to see this in public so I remarked on it to Diana. Diana immediately told me these girls had to be bad girls because it was not done for girls to smoke in public and I should never talk to girls who were smoking in public because such girls were up to no good!

Diana and I have always kept in touch even though we have been only just friends for many years now. That was why we were meeting again tonight so I got myself ready to go to another mall in town where we were supposed to meet, the plaza Semanggi.

She was already seated in her favorite restaurant on the top floor of the mall overlooking the skyline of Jakarta when I arrived. She was of course dressed to kill as a fashion designer is supposed to be. I have not slept with her in 11 years but looking at her I really would love to but I knew this would not happen between us again because we had made some kind of agreement that we would be dearest friends in the future but nothing else and up till now we had always stuck to it.

We had great conversation, good food and after the dinner we got in her car and went to Anchol beach where we were going to drink cocktails and stuff.

Anchol is the only beach in Jakarta city and it is quite artificial, with big up class beach chairs with a canvas side that can be erected for privacy and white sand. In the dark it is a bit romantic with the nice lights though. We arrived at Anchol beach and her driver stayed in the car. We went out to go to our pre-booked spot on the beach with our own waiter and table and chairs. The cocktails were strong and tasty and Diana and I got very drunk, slowly but surely. It had happened before that I had tried to talk her into getting intimate with me again but she had always rejected so far. While I was getting drunk in this intimate and romantic setting with a girl who looked still very young and sexy even though she was already 33 years old I could not help trying to convince her once again to get intimate with me. So I tried to kiss her and to my incredible surprise she started kissing me for the first time in 11 years or so. We got so passionate that she ended up sitting on top of me and after that there was nothing that could stop us anymore. After we were finished I felt really good. It felt to me like a renewal of our bond or something and I felt as if I had been transferred back in time 12 years somehow. We were looking at each other and laughed. I asked her why this had happened and what about our agreement, and she said it had just happened and that it had been her fault by taking us to such a romantic and intimate spot. Maybe it had been her intention all along?

We drank and talked more and got more drunk. Something had changed between us and it felt more free and uncomplicated somehow. She asked me what to do next. I was really happy at the beach but I felt she wanted a change of scene as she gets quite quickly bored of something and we had been at the beach for 3 hours by then. I asked her where she wanted to go and of course she wanted to go to her favourite club. I told her I would only go there with her if she would spend the night with me after the gym and she said ok.

So Diana paid the bill (I did not dare to look at the amount and did not ask her). She would never allow me to pay anything when I was with her, only when I specifically invited her. We went back to the car and Diana told the driver to go to the club.

Her driver has been with the family for over 20 years and as a result I also knew him quite well. More than once I had borrowed her car when I needed to go somewhere and because I don’t like to drive in Jakarta and definitely not in somebody else’s car I had gotten to know him quite well. So we had a very nice chat between the 3 of us in the car while we were going to the club. I invited him for drinks with me some time and he happily accepted.

We arrived at the club and went into the place. It is a very upscale and nice place where not many expats go. The crowd is predominantly middle and high class Indonesians of all ages but mostly aged between 25 and 35 years. It is a place where a lot of models and Indonesian movie stars go and other celebrities. It would not be my choice of venue when I go clubbing alone but with Diana it was of course no problem to be there. We had a great time there and I got introduced to some nice people. Many of the people in the club knew Diana as she had dressed most of them. When we were seated people constantly came by to pay their respects to her. We left around 3 pm and went to my place. Diana would have the weekend off so we could spend the whole Saturday together. I had totally forgotten about the date with the girl I had met online while I was in Singapore. I was supposed to meet her on Saturday but that date would have to be cancelled. I sent her an SMS that I did not have time to see her on Saturday and after that I turned off my telephone.

It felt really nice to be close with Diana again, as if it had never been different. As if those 11 years had not happened or something. We had a great rest of the night.

The next morning after dinner Diana called her driver and he picked us up in front of my place. She took me to one of her new boutiques to show me around. I am totally not interested in fashion but I just followed her around. After an hour or so her boyfriend came in, a very nice Indonesian guy. I would not be surprised if he knew or suspected what had happened between me and Diana but he was totally cool. Most Indonesian guys are very possessive and protective of their girlfriends but this old fashioned attitude cannot work with Diana so she and her boyfriend have some kind of open relationship whatever that means, maybe a bit western in style where each one lets the other one have as much freedom as they can.

After our visit to the boutique we went to lunch in the boyfriend's car. After lunch Diana took me to her house. She had just bought a new house in the Pondok Indah area complete with a big swimming pool, roof terrace and big garden. The rest of the day we spent at the pool and in the evening the 3 of us had dinner prepared by her own cook. Delicious baked fish with all kinds of vegetables and potatoes. For the evening Diana had invited a couple of friends for a pool party and around 8pm the friends started arriving. There were many hot girls and also quite some guys and it was a good party even though it never got to the stage that you see in movies where the girls get drunk and jump in the pool completely naked. Everybody kept their clothes on. There was also a life band present playing mostly Indonesian love songs. The party went on but around 12pm many people started leaving to go clubbing.

Some time later Diana and her boyfriend and a couple of others got ready for the club and they asked me to come along which I did of course. We went again to one of those expensive clubs full of obviously wealthy youngsters throwing around so much money they all seemed to own a printing press.

Around 4pm Diana dropped me off at my place and she and her boyfriend said their goodbyes and left.

The economic development in Indonesia and generally the BRIC countries bugs me. Indonesia is not technically a BRIC country as the BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China. But it is at a similar stage of economical development as the BRIC countries. This can also be said of Thailand. I think Thailand is a bit more developed economically than Indonesia but not really that much. The living standards of the so-called developed countries (the West) are very quickly eroding while the standards of developing countries like Indonesia seem to be raising at a very high rate. The middle class in Indonesia is not only expanding very rapidly in numbers but also the amount of money that the average middle-class household in Indonesia can spend is increasing incredibly fast every year.

The reason however for this rapid economic development of the BRIC countries and Indonesia is not related to their economic achievement but has (at least in the case of Indonesia) everything to do with the very aggressive monetary stimulation policy of the Indonesian Central Bank (Bank Indonesia). There is now a whole middle-class emerging in Indonesia that is virtually living on borrowed money. They don’t seem to worry about having to pay back their debts and frankly speaking with inflation rates in Indonesia as high as 7% per year now they would be wise not to pay back their debts as these will inflate to nothingness if they just wait long enough.

I have been diving into the phenomena of Central banks. Every country has one Central Bank and I have found out that most Central Banks in the world (the Bank Indonesia included) are owned by one group of private people from the West (The Rothschild Group). Every Central Bank is just a branch office of the head office, the so called BIS (Bank of International Settlements) based in the city of Basel. So it is quite funny or weird to realize that only one group of people can decide how much money will be printed where and what the price (interest rate) of money is in virtually every country in the world. I don’t know how powerful this Rothschild cabal is but I can imagine they must be more powerful than any man or any empire that has ever ruled on this planet because if one realizes that this Rothschild clan owns virtually all the central banks in the world you can also say they own virtually all the money in the world, and they can almost in each country in the world decide who they will bestow with money and who they will not give any money. Money power is what really rules the world. No politician (including Mister Obama) has even one percent of the power that this central banking elite has. This elite behind the central banks in the world is the group of people who really rule the world and politicians are nothing more than their foot soldiers as are the private banks (serving as distributing points for the central banks) and the big corporations who are behind the screens also for the largest parts owned by the central banking families.

Most people don’t know or don’t realize this, thinking instead that politicians make the decisions for countries and that big corporations also have a lot to say, but the real decisions for most countries in the world are made by a small and secretive group of people with money power. Their goal is of course ultimately total World Power and one Global Government and not only money power. Money power through Central Banking is their tool to achieve this global domination. With this limitless supply of money they can virtually influence everything in the world. All the economic processes but also other processes like politics, war, distribution of food and commodities, information (they own all the mainstream media) etc.

Knowing all this it might not be such a coincidence anymore that the living standards in the West are going down while the living standards in many parts of the developing world are rapidly going up. Central banking through its powerful tool of creating money from nothing has made the economy of the world pretty much a virtual economy. The same is happening now in China where whole cities have been created in recent years that are ghost cities now. There is a big real estate bubble now in China and Brazil and there are signs that this virtual paper money boom economy is going to bust soon in these countries.

On Tuesday evening Yani came again for the night and on Thursday Imoet came to spend the night with me. On Friday I went with Joost to Jalan Jaksa again. I was getting a bit bored in Jakarta at this stage and decided to check the Internet for plane tickets to Bali. I had not been to Bali for at least 10 years and I was curious to see it again.

I found a cheap ticket with Tiger Airways, only 500.000 Rupia for a 1-week return ticket leaving Friday next week and I booked it.

That Saturday I had an appointment with the girl I had met online while I was in Singapore. I was supposed to meet her last week Saturday but that had been canceled because of my date with Diana. I was supposed to come in the evening but on Saturday morning I decided to call her to ask her if she would come in the daytime. I called her and she was ok with it. She was living a bit far from my place in a suburb of Jakarta called Bekasi, so it would take her about one or two hours to reach my place, she told me.

This is also something to mention in regard to Indonesian girls. It can happen quite often that a girl agrees to come to your place straight away even though she never met you before. Of course I had been having quite heated conversations with her on Yahoo Messenger so she was really up for it, but it is quite weird when you think about it that girls do things like that.

The girl arrived around 2pm. She was a bit fatter than I had expected, In her profile she had written that she was 162 cm and 47 kilo. In reality I judged her about 156 cm and around 50 kilo or so. Anyway it did not really matter too much and there is no use sending her back because she was a few kilo more than I normally liked. She had a shower and after that we got to business right away. It was quite amazing actually, I don’t experience this a lot but with this girl I just could keep going non-stop almost, even though she was no great beauty, so she really got what she wanted and even more probably.

Around 5pm we were finally done and I went out to get some food. I brought it back and we had our dinner and watched a movie. After that it was time for her to go home again because I had told her that I had a meeting with a male friend that night.

That night I went to Red Square disco with an Italian guy who was staying a few rooms away from my room at the same place. This guy, Tony, was a very handsome 42 year old guy who did not look older then 30 in my opinion. Tony often went to Red Square and always managed to get the prettiest girls from there. He really liked the place.

But before we went to Red Square we had first a couple of drinks in my room. I still had the whiskey and Vodka bottles I had purchased in the duty free recently. Tony is a bit of a chain smoker and the more whiskey he drank the more he started smoking. While we were drinking we talked about the strategy to use in Red Square. Tony liked dancing so he normally would hover around the dance area. When he spotted a cutie dancing he would then join in and start dancing with her. This would often be a good ice-breaking strategy and while he was dancing he would start talking and touching the girl to check her mood and willingness. He told me he could sense in a minute if a girl was up for it or not. But sometimes a girl would need a bit of work and these girls would initially also act as if they were not up to it while they actually were. So even if a girl did not appear to be up for more some extra effort might be needed to get her in the mood. Mostly he would get a girl in Red Square but it was quite important to find your target before 2am. After 2am most of the nice girls would be taken and what was left were mostly the girls looking for money and one thing that Tony did not want was a girl he had to pay the next morning.

I told Tony that I was not very good with pulling girls in clubs. The only person I normally went home with after visiting a club was the taxi driver. Tony told me he would try to help me getting a nice girl also.

So in this spirit we went to the club. Like many clubs in Jakarta the Red Square club is located in a hotel (the Arcadia Hotel in this case). Like I mentioned before, Red Square is the number one pickup joint at the moment in Jakarta for white guys looking for Indonesian girls. This is the reason this club is mostly filled with white guys and Indonesian girls, not so many Indonesian guys are to be found there. The problem with Red Square is that it is very small and very crowded especially on Saturday night. It is virtually impossible to walk around because the people inside are almost as packed as a sardines in a can. That Saturday night was no different so we got inside and shouldered our way to the bar to get a drink first. We got our beer and looked around. There were of course lots of pretty women but almost an equal lot of Western guys standing, walking, sitting and dancing around the place. Tony started talking to a few girls who were also standing at the bar but did not get very far with them. But soon after a half drunk young girl stumbled literally into his arms. I don’t know if it was by accident or design but Tony did not waste this chance and soon he was dancing with her holding her close. This girl was really hot that much I could see and it did not look like anything was going to separate them at least not this night, so I told Tony I would go for a walk around. Tony told me he would keep an eye open for me and if he saw a nice girl he would try to keep her there, so in case I came back without anything there might be a nice surprise waiting for me. Well knowing my luck and skills in clubs the chance I would sooner come back with a pot of gold then with a sweet young thing.

So I walked, or better said, stumbled around for a look and right as rain I did not encounter any interested sexy female as usual. Most of them were not even looking at me and I don’t dare to approach a girl in a club who is not giving me a hint, and the ones that were looking were all types I don’t fancy (old, overweight, looking for money). I got another drink and posted myself near the entrance up front. I did not want to go back to Tony and his new friend too fast. So I had a drink and watched the crowd. Most of the guys were in their 20’s and 30’s and tall. It seems that expats get selected for height nowadays because I rarely saw a bule who was shorter than me, virtually all of them were at least a head taller than I was. And there was almost not one who was not pulling or at least talking to girls. This is a real pick-up place but one has to be careful now because in recent times more and more freelancers have started coming to this place. It is not like a few years ago when about 90% of the girls inside Red Square would be regular girls out for a good time and a good lay without having money on their mind. Nowadays probably 30% or more of the girls are looking for money here.

After finishing my drink I went back to Tony and his lady. They were still at the same spot dancing and having a drink. They would be going together tonight – no doubt about that. Even though I had had quite some afternoon delight just before I was really ready for a new girl. Unfortunately Tony had not found a proper candidate for me yet but he was just now mobilizing his new friend to help. For starters they never come alone to a club and if they do they always have friends inside. So he asked her if she had a nice friend for me. She eyed me for a moment and then she got her phone punched a number and waited with the phone on her ear. It really bugs me and I never understand how they do it but these Indonesian girls must have very keen hearing because they seem to have no problem talking to others on the phone while they are in a club with loud blasting hip-hop or trance music. I would not be able to hear a word if I would have to talk to somebody on the phone while I was in a club.

Anyway, nobody picked up so she sent a message to somebody and told us to wait. I offered Tony and his girl a drink and got another beer for myself. A couple of minutes later the girl started shouting and waving with her hands and another sweet young thing came over to us. Tony’s girl introduced us to her and I started talking to the new girl. This one was as cute as the one who was with Tony. I think not much older than 20, if that. She was also a bit tipsy which often helps and I was in a very good mood tonight so I asked her if she would have a drink. She asked Chivas Regal with Coke and I went to the bar. I know one of the bartenders at Red Square very well and he happened to be working that night so I asked him over and ordered her drink. I asked him for an extra amount of Chivas which he did. He put only a bit of ice in it and then filled the quite big glass way over half with Chivas and topped it all off with a little Coca Cola. When I gave her the drink and she took a sip she pulled a bit of a face first but she liked the strong drink and gave me a thumbs up. I asked her innocently if the drink was not too strong but she said it was ok.

Anyway the night was progressing well at that stage, but then the girls suddenly told us they wanted to go home. This was not what I and certainly Tony who seemed to have a good chemistry with his girl had expected. Tony still tried to get his girl to go with him but she did not want to and of course my girl also did not want to go with me. So the girls left and we were alone again. It was well after 2 AM now so the pickings were getting slimmer. The best girls all had a guy now already but there were still some new ones coming in (most of them looking for money though) so we decided to give it another try.

Tony latched into a few other girls, one of whom was smoking hot. This girl was really gorgeous and sexy and if I was not mistaken definitely not one for money. The other one unfortunately was quite fat and not pretty, a bit the opposite of the other one. Tony did not want to lose this girl again and she had given him the eye which meant she was interested in him. So he used all his considerable Italian skills and charm to win her and it worked like a charm. Within no time they were kissing which always seals the deal in Indonesian clubs. Meanwhile I was left with the fat one who was totally not my type. The sexy one however did everything to make me attracted to her. She was dividing her attention between me and Tony. If she was not kissing and feeling up Tony she was talking to me, telling me how nice her friend was and how good we looked together etc. This is of course a strategy because when a girl finds a guy in a club she likes to leave her friends in the care of a trusted guy (in this case me) because they don’t like to leave their friends alone and go with a guy. Anyway it did not work out between me and her friend so she left alone and I went home with Tony and his girl. The following weekend I would be in Kuta Bali and hopefully I would have a better weekend there.

Stickman's thoughts:

It really does sound like there's HEAPS of fun to be had in Jakarta. Very nice series this!