Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

So Manila is fine so far, the meeting went well and I’m getting ready to crash (we have to leave the hotel at 6AM to catch the flight). I haven’t taken any pictures yet.

I just wanted to say though, when I was on the plane coming here I caught the flick 50 First Dates. I had never really heard of it until I saw it then, and I gotta say: holy shit. This is probably one of the best movies I’ve seen, which boggles my mind. Usually Adam Sandler is partially funny, and his last attempt at a romantic comedy (Punch Drunk Love) didn’t do anything for me. But 50 First Dates was absolutely great. I was laughing my ass off for the first half and almost crying for the second half. That’s pretty rare for me since I basically have no emotions (Matt can testify to that).

Anyways, I watched it and I was “moved”, actually moved by it. So we get off the plane and I’m still in this mindset of thinking about this movie, when two of the guys I travelled with (who weren’t sitting me) start talking about watching the same movie and how it did the same stuff for them. So it’s not just me being nuts.

I’m going to Manila again tomorrow for a two-day stretch, same as last time. Meetings and what not, fun stuff. I’ll actually try to take some pictures this trip though.

We went and watched Kill Bill Vol. 2 tonight, and on the way home we saw a man with a little tiny dog, and a skateboard. The dog had its front paws on the board and was kicking with his back legs, and then jumped on and skidded behind the man. It was amazing. Again, I vow never to forget my camera.

Went to Jakarta again today, and just got back (at like 11:00PM local time). It’s such a fucked-up place - it’s cool in like a life-threatening, terrifying sort of way.

The trip to Manila went well. We had to leave for the airport to get back to Singapore at 5:30AM, so I’ve been totally exhausted today. I got back into the office around lunchtime and I’ve been dealing with the nightmare that is our ISP. Fun stuff, good times.

I’m going to Manila today for a meeting. My first thought was to be nervous, but then I realized that after seeing Jakarta nothing worries me. Hey Rob, want me to buy you a gun while I’m there? Kidding.

Made it back into Toronto, and the apartment wasn’t nearly as swamped with mail as I had thought. Although it looks like someone “serviced” my digital cable box, and left my door unlocked. For like two weeks. My apartment looks as if it was looted, but that was just me. Goods, don’t worry, the television is still here.

I’m at home packing and what not, getting ready to take off this afternoon. When I’m in Toronto my number is 416-580-6009 (at least, I think it is - I’m fairly sure that I’ve been good at keeping up with the payments).

Jakarta was insane. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, and far more fucked up than I could have possibly foreseen.

Seriously though. Here’s a list of thing I saw or witnessed in approximately the correct order:

• The airport itself was nice, fairly clean and stunk like powerful cigarettes everywhere.
• The roads from the airport to Jakarta were about 3 inches of water away from being flooded. Apparently we were extremely lucky, since usually the roads are flooded. When that happens, military ATVs are sent on routes between the city and the airport ferrying stranded passengers.
• Once you hit the city, you start noticing that the average income is extremely low. A sizable portion of the houses are collapsed, although that doesn’t deter anyone from living in them. All the roofs have holes and pieces missing, and so on. The freeway is built at least 20 feet above these houses, and it feels like its purpose is to shield people from seeing them.
• People burn garbage in their yard. Any type of garbage. All the time. Smoke trails come from every direction you can see, and the air is well, pungent with the smell.
• Speaking of garbage - it’s everywhere. There are piles of garbage in every nook and cranny that can hold it. Piled really high too, sometimes over ten feet tall. Usually nestled around the piles are homes, as well as stalls selling food.
• The streets. Wow, where to start. OK - there are lines for lane designation, but no one cares. On two lane streets there are three or four lanes of actual vehicles with hardly anybody bothering to use signals. And major roads are shown as being one way, but vehicles occasionally come at you from the wrong direction.
• You can probably see in the photo that people are literally hanging out of the buses. That’s no big deal, and it happens in a lot of countries (though this is the first time I’ve seen it).
• There’s certain roads reserved for vehicles with 3 or more people (like carpool lanes). So at locations where these roads begin - and that’s usually in the middle of nowhere, halfway to the airport - clusters of kids hang around, and for about 50 U.S. cents they’ll jump in your car so you meet the person quota.
• This is awesome: When big trucks are driving down the road, people run alongside them with a tube and a gascan, and steal their fucking fuel. While it’s moving. I saw almost crapped my pants when I saw this happen and realized what the guy was doing.
• There’s two classes of people there with absolutely no gradient. You’re either really poor, or massively rich. The wealthy families live in big, gated communities with armed guards.
• It’s dangerous being a foreigner there. Truly dangerous. Most cars have dark tinted glass to minimize the chance of anything bad happening to the passengers. In face, a guy named Rupert wrote on my entry the other day saying that, “there are plenty of instances where people pull up on a motorbike, smash the window with a gun and relieve you of your phone etc“. He’s right; that shit does happen there.
• Most people don’t have phone lines, nobody has the Internet at home. But pretty much everybody has cellular phones.

So yeah, it’s another world. Chances are that I’ll go back, but I’m not tingling with the desire to do so. And I’m not embellishing in the information here - Chris, my coworker who accompanied me, will probably read this and kick my ass if I bullshit about his homeland.

The best image I could get:

I’m going to freakin’ Jakarta of all places tomorrow. I go there in the morning, and then fly back to Singapore around 9PM, then back to Japan about 2 hours later. So yeah, tomorrow’s really gonna suck.