Jakarta From a New Perspective
My business has really taken off the last 2 years and I am incredibly grateful for that. I never expected it to become so big but I think God has a soft spot for everybody who loves to work hard and is dedicated to something. If you really love the product you sell then you will do everything to make selling it a success.
I’m also lucky that I don’t have the business in Asia but in Holland. I have my workers there who do the packing and shipping, so all I do is check payments and send the packing slips every day to my employees.
Since money is not an issue anymore I upgraded my living quarters from a boarding house to a 3-bedroom, newly furnished apartment in one of the most expensive areas in Jakarta. The rentals are very high in Jakarta for this kind of places, and I pay 1800 USD per month.
I also have my own car now and a driver (I don’t like to drive in Jakarta except just after Ramadan when the city is very quiet for about a week). This guy is available 24/7 for me, and takes me anywhere I want and will wait patiently until I come back.
In Jakarta you don’t actually need a car anymore. Now with all the applications like Über, Grabcar, Go-car etc you can just order a vehicle anytime everywhere.
Meeting girls is still hardly possible for me. I go out a lot and have bottles in places like Immigrant, Basque and Dragonfly. In these places I hire a table with bottles per month. I do invite quite often friends to those places to drink with me, most often guys. People really love to be around you when you are generous, believe me. Many of my “friends” would disappear in the blink of an eye if I did not have money anymore to entertain them but that’s fine.
Indonesian girls are incredibly difficult to please and it is quite difficult to make them attracted to you if you don’t know how to push their buttons. I don’t have a clue even though I can speak fluent Bahasa Indonesia (not really necessary in Jakarta because almost all the youngsters are fluent in English nowadays) but it could still help if you know how to talk to them.
Having a lot of money to throw around does not guarantee that you can get lots of girls. Mostly if I go to the clubs where I have my membership, for instance Dragonfly (the most expensive one), the monthly minimum is 8 bottles per month + table + 1 appointed waiter for the mixers and the ice. I go there once per week, mostly on Fridays. The cost for that monthly membership with table, 8 bottles and waiter is 24 million rupia (almost 2000 USD).
In Dragonfly the female clientelle is a mix between haves and have-nots (but pretending to be haves). The have-nots will hover around the tables of the bottle owners hoping to get invited to share in the mixers. But oftentimes a rich girl will also take her chance if she happens to fancy one of the guys sharing a table.
Most often each of my friends will end up taking one (or sometimes more) of the girls home we have invited at our table, and even though I am the host so to speak I rarely get the delight to share my car with a nice woman when I return home, much to the disappointment of my driver. He is even more disappointed than me when I return to the car alone!
The same thing can be said for Basque and Immigrant. Basque is not a real nightclub, but is a mix between a club, bar and restaurant. There is for instance not a real dance floor in Basque. This place that took of about 2 years ago is now one of the most popular places in the South of Jakarta. On weekends it is packed from wall to wall with western guys and Indonesian girls hunting said western guys. This is a real pickup place where you can see almost any white guy walking in and he will be surrounded by girls within 5 minutes. It is really a funny place for people-watching. This place is not too expensive and I don’t have a membership there. But I do have the benefit that I buy bottles there every time I go (usually once every 2 weeks) so I don’t have to stand in queue (in weekends there is a very long queue and it can take up to 30 minutes to get in).
Most of the western guys are a lot taller than me (I’m just 5’7”) and this is one of the reasons I don’t get a lot of attention in Basque and the other places, but it is not the only reason. At the end of the night I always leave also Basque alone. And that is a rare sight there for a white guy to leave that place alone.
When I had little money I always thought the girls did not like me because I could not spoil them in the clubs or other places I met them, but actually in reality it does not matter much if you have lots of money or little money, girls still want to be attracted to you apart from any money and if there is no spark or attraction from their side they will still not bite. Apart of course from the real “working girls” in those places who will go with any John whether they like him or not.
But most girls in the aforementioned places are either not looking for money or looking for money with guys they fancy. The girls who still want to make money but who don’t go with anybody are most often girls who either have a normal job but who need or want to make some extra money for buying “girl’s stuff”, or who need some extra for other reasons. They might not go to the club every week to make money but just off and on or when they really need cash. These girls are actually just as choosy as the girls that only go out to have fun and to find a guy for the night just for fun.
Tinder is also a funny application. Most white guys in Jakarta using Tinder will get flooded with matches every day to the extent that they get confused what to do with all those girls. One of my bule friends (it’s just one example out of 10,000 examples) is 54 years old, has only one picture on Tinder but almost every hot girl he swipes right is a match. But he told me “I don’t need Tinder to get laid, Jakarta is like shooting fish in a barrel you cannot miss.”
But for some weird reason I hardly ever get a match on Tinder. Especially the last 4 months I did not get a match with even one girl I would consider datable for me (and I am not that picky) so a few days ago I decided to delete Tinder altogether because it started to become stressful for me to keep swiping right and not getting a match.
I still have the hope one day the situation for me will change and I will meet somebody, I am not depressed anymore luckily, now I focus on making my business bigger and I have started a new business (not really expecting much but just to keep me busy), so i have enough to do to keep my mind busy. I do have some cool friends in Jakarta (I know not real friends but they are still good company) so I am not too lonely anymore.
I still hope Stickmanbangkok will continue let’s hope there will still come a solution. It would be sad to see another institution disappear from the Internet.
The author can be contacted at : info@webdesigndiensten.nl
