Hot Child in the City

Last night's picture exchange was exciting. Everyone from the trip showed up, and lots of people who didn't attend the trip showed up as well. It seems standard for most gatherings I attend involving my new German friends to evolve into some massive blob of global connections. An Australian will show up, followed by a Finnish guy, then more Germans will arrive, and suddenly like 20 people are squashed in the corner of the lounge we're hanging out in. I guess it's quite fun though :)

I don't have any new pictures on hand, I had Sascha (German Jakarta Post intern) copy them onto the memory card of his camera and plan to get them from him since I see him at work.

But an interesting development occurred last night: one of my German friends, Christian (a law school graduate working at the German Embassy), is leaving for the rest of the month to travel around Indonesia with his girlfriend. He lives in Benhil, which is a popular home stay area for expats and people working temporarily in Jakarta. His room is paid through the rest of the month and last night it was suggested that I move into his room.

Living with my uncle has been fine, but now that I've been going out more often during the evenings I've realized how far away his house is from most things in Jakarta. It's not even terribly close to my office, and Benhil is actually quite close to the Jakarta Post office. Just getting to my uncle's neighborhood is at least 20 minutes from most places that I hang out, and getting to his house takes another 5; this usually sets me back about 30,000-50,000 Rp for each trip, which is really only $3-5.50. But it adds up after a while. So to save some taxi money and to experience living in another part of the city, I plan on moving to Benhil next week after Christian leaves. I think all that I will have to pay for is laundry service, which is totally fine with me.

That being said...the progress of my internship has been slower than I had anticpated. It's been a laborious process just getting my articles into the newspaper. I've been at the features desk for two weeks now and have written two and a half stories (the half was a restaurant review that I helped Sascha write), one of which has an unknown publish date despite being written TWO WEEKS AGO. For a while, I was a little annoyed at my editor, Kanis. But yesterday he accompanied me to a madrasah where the Seattle-based NGO Uplift is doing relief work. I've been following this story for a few weeks now and have done research and interviews in preparation for a feature. But I finally got to talk with Kanis about some things and he admitted that the Jakarta Post was pretty disorganized in telling the editors and staff about my arrival, thus squandering part of my time here by not knowing what to do with me. Kanis also explained that he's expected to do a lot more work on his page than the average editor does, and for the last week his assistant (A Japanese woman named Chisarto) was on vacation, leaving him to fend for himself. It did explain a lot of things, actually. My only hope is that the next intern from the UW to come to the Jakarta Post will have a better experience.

Well, I will try to post more pictures from my Pelabuhan Ratu trip soon. There are some really fantastic waterfall shots and some cool black and white pictures from Sascha's camera.