For short time stress release, the Expat Rockstar has found the perfect place downtown. More precisely, at the edge of town, on the outskirts of South Jakarta at Pondok Wisata, just a few hundred meters away from Lebak Bulus (Pondok Indah area).
Some have desperately sought this place for years and pass by without even noticing the place. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a hotel and therefore many people ignore it.
However, most taxi drivers know the way, especially the ones from Jalan Paletehan (expect a 15/20 minutes drive from Blok M at night to be around 50,000 Rupiah if you are good, or closer to 100,000 if you are drunk or a poor negotiator.
Each room at the Pondok Wisata hotel comes with its own private indoor parking so that no one can see who comes in or out and there’s no reception desk! Think of it as a drive-in where you pay up for a six to twelve hour stay. Hundred of beds are available and all rooms are equipped with huge mirrors on the wall that reflect private activities.
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Just like a little boy that begs for something sweet, an Expat Rockstar expects his massage to end with a happy ending. Unfortunately, when you find yourself at the wrong place, this does not always happen. If you are craving more than just a massage but you don’t get what you want, it doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t ask for a tip. To some though, no happy ending equals no tip.
This is where the cultural gap widens and gets lost in translation. Sometimes it’s painful (literally) to find out the hard way that some Asian masseuses refuse to perform the act you desire.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of massage parlors or spas in downtown Jakarta however, not all of them offer full service to expat patrons. There is a difference in the vocabulary: Keluarga (family) or happy ending.
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Being an Expat Rockstar, your profile is very attractive to many Indonesian women. There are two categories of women: the collectors who change their boyfriend as often as they change hand phones and the unlucky ones who find it really soooooooo difficult to approach the object of their desire, Mr. Prince Charming from overseas.
Good news ladies, you can now follow the guide and learn plenty of useful tips and tricks with How to Catch Mr. Bule (Bule is the word for Westerners in Indonesia).
An Indonesian woman, Erlinawati, who is married to Duncan Graham, an Australian journalist now living in New Zealand, published the book in Bahasa Indonesia several months ago.
The author, who Mr. Hubby apparently helped with her writing, aims to teach her counterparts on how to manage a relationship and end up married.
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‘Stand your ground’ could be their motto. Jalan Paletehan taxi drivers in Blok M, Jakarta, belong to a very restricted category, and they don’t allow just any other colleague to enter the family.
Like the plague-stricken, the respectable Blue Bird taxis are not even allowed to operate on their territory (as a matter of fact they stand by outside the perimeter up the street).
Sitting on the car hood while chain-smoking Kretek cigarettes, the average predatory Paletehan taxi driver is out to chase his prey. The target is anyone who looks more or less like a pedestrian Bule (Indonesian word given to Western people) strolling from a point A to a point B.
Even if you clearly seem to be just going next door, they will still call out to you for a ride. Indeed, they don’t really care about your destination. Rather, what preoccupies them is how they can get as much money from you as possible.
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An ongoing joke Mr. Smith and I have going is whether this “hotel” actually ever has people calling to reserve rooms. I found the BathHouse at the Alexis Hotel late one January night in ’08 buried in a sea of web pages about Indonesian night life.
What interested me the most about this place was that not only were there local women there, but also lovely ladies from Thailand, Uzbekistan, Myanmar (Burma), Russia, and mainland China. After determining that this place was well indeed worthy of a trip, I telephoned Mr. Smith and made plans for the following night to hit up the Alexis Hotel.
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Given that the long Christmas/Muslim New Year/Ordinary New Year holidays were falling from weekend to weekend this year I decided we’d spend the week down at our place in Anyer on the west coast of Java, and hope to God that Anak Krakatau (’Son of Krakatoa’, he’s a big lump of an adolescent now with all the temper tantrums and eruptions and emissions that that entails) wouldn’t be emulating his old man’s finest performance while we were down there.
I chose Anyer quite deliberately, it’s a quiet little resort and only two hours drive straight out of Jakarta and for most of the time you travel along a decent toll road, although it should be pointed out that once past the grim industrial town of Cilegon the road is pretty awful. Now when I say “resort” don’t imagine we’re talking about Pattaya or even Kuta here, we’re not, not in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s a place for local people and the night life consists of hanging around roadside sea food restaurants eating delicious freshly caught fish, but little else.
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The Melawai Hotel, is a run-down cheap hotel on the edges of Blok M. A few years ago it was known for its busy and popular disco but now it is a convenient place to take girls for the night who have been picked up in My Bar or Top Gun on the Blok. The room rates are reasonable and the staff are discreet, although don’t expect luxury.
However, within its walls is the real reason why this place has got a glowing reputation from those expats who have been here a while. The 5 + 1 bar as it is affectionately called or the sixth floor of the hotel is what gives it its legendary status.
There is no sign or poster proclaiming its existence, but if you take the elevator to the top floor of the Melawai you will be confronted with a tatty bar surrounded by sofas. On the sofas will be a number of girls of all shapes and sizes and ages.
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Ok, so I’m a big movie buff. When I was in Jersey I had the good fortune of living 5 minutes away from a theater with 10 screens. More or less I would try to see about a movie a week. Sometimes it be 3 movies a week and sometimes it would be 0 depending on what was out for the week. The point is that I really love a good movie and watching it in a theater makes it 10 times better for me.
So one of the things I had to know was: what is it like watching movies in Southeast Asia??? Well, my first experience with this was Ironman at a “normal” theater in Bandung, Indonesia. I was there with a little sweetie who would later turn into the New Years Eve Stalker (I’m still a little creeped out by the “gift” she sent to my hotel room).
Right off the bat you notice something that makes total sense and makes absolutely no sense that American movie theaters haven’t adopted: when you buy a ticket you’re actually buying a seat. At the register there is a screen which shows you all the open seats and you pick where you want to sit. How ingeniously simple is that??? No more getting to the theater, buying a ticket and sitting in the nosebleeds or sitting so close to the screen you have to continually pan left and right. Oh and the tickets were only like 3 bucks.
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