if you need to take refuge in a local war ten years ago when foreigners hang-out of the city were more alive than they are aujourd ay, the infamous backpacker street in Jakarta, Jalan Jaksa, may have been best. This is not because some budget hotel rooms were like concrete bunkers. It was not that the food in the restaurant could have been used as biological weapons of mass destruction. It was not even that there were prostitutes ready to repopulate the planet for only a few dollars each in the case of the war escalates into nuclear Armageddon.
This street of gay iniquity had long been the haunt of drunks, losers, and charlatans. These charismatic lowlifes were men who claimed to be former members to make bold military units like the British SAS and US Navy SEALs. Find one of them was not easy, or was, depending on how you looked at it. You hit a conversation with another drinker, a loner. Talk turned to the ancient crafts.
"I'm not allowed to say," whispered abroad.
"I understand perfectly." You changed the subject.
"It is confidential," he insisted.
"It is quite correct."
He shifted right by. "Actually, I was in MI6." And then he told you all about it in exchange for a drink - neither shaken nor stirred - because he was broke. It did not take long before you realized that, while entertaining, skulduggery tales of the man were simple sociopath, and that it was unlikely to have been responsible for a license to hunt rodents, and even less a license to kill Soviet spies.
As far as I know no one had ever been shot in the street by a "James Bond" Walther PPK or otherwise, if I remember a poignant passing away. The victim was known Chinese Parkir an unofficial car park homeless attendant who wore rags and lived at his post outside one of the busiest restaurants. When not shouting directions to the car park, he was a stool on the sidewalk. This was where he rested, ate and slept.
One morning, a crowd had gathered around him. He was dead - arms crossed, chin on chest, having slipped away in his sleep - but people were prodding him. Some pushed him to confirm that he was really not more. But others have done cautiously, as if suspecting he was playing a joke and can jump to his feet with a cry of "Ah-ha!" Later, when I went through, he had been on the pavement and covered with a tarp. There would be no ah-ha. Cars were left to park forlornly and without using that day.
I once had breakfast in a restaurant on Jaksa where an angry customer complained that the hamburger he had ordered like a sandwich loaf. I immediately imagined him to be a restoration of a former officer with the Navy SEALs. Rejecting the meat patty pink offending one side of his plate, and the crumbling pieces of bread in the other, he said - with just a phone call - he could invoke an Indonesian five-star general he knew personally to come close the restaurant down. he was fuming for a long time. he was an American, you see, he knew a thing or two about hamburgers.
Navy SEALs anchor side a dubious marine assortment dropped to Jalan Jaksa over the years. The most famous of them was the commander Tim, a former American naval officer whose hard liquor habits were funded by a modest military pension, and who never tires of showing his ID chart. Although it was difficult to imagine a sane government giving the command man of 30,000 tons of premium sea military equipment bristling with rifle barrels, unless towed by sea to be scuttled, he seemed to have a talent for stealth. This is evident in the myriad ways he snuck not expensive whiskey in restaurants -. In small plastic bags in water bottles, in a hip-flask hidden
This may not seem like a feat, except that his nemesis was the owner of the restaurant eagle eyes of the more despotic street, famous for its long list of "no-nos" pinned to the wall (which not included gratuity) and blocking most of his regular customers, often just to use the toilet before going to 'order. There was even a "wanted poster style 'of his customer number allowed - FORBIDDEN ACCESS OR SERVICE THIS MAN printed in black and white mugshot of look at it as a desperate fugitive. His offense was to set up a fraudulent website in the name of the restaurant.
Maybe the owner could not be blamed for being especially vigilant. When the restaurant opened, several table tops nice glass are clubbed into fragments by a local gang because he considered the payment of protection money to local mobsters a no-no.
Yet sometimes a place has received real protection. I was in a tourist bar when a group of drunken men strolled in Ambon. One of them pulled a chair under a table to sit down and found a kitten curled up. He picked up the animal and threw it in the air. It bounces off the ceiling, narrowly missing a spinning fan, thus accelerating its path and bounces on my table before skimming out of sight along the road. I managed to keep sipping my beer as if nothing horrible had happened. After harassing customers, these men were driven by local thugs. The resilient kitten lived cowering another day.
This incident shows the dangers of alcohol consumption among some Indonesians, transforming the otherwise amiable souls in the equivalent of scolding British hooligans on pub football pre-match crawl. Country in whole never had alcohol culture, despite the prevalence in some regions of Sumatra tuak , a white liquid - though often a mud - made from fermented palm leaves which, frankly, much pongs. Alcohol is a no-no to the majority population of Indonesia Muslims. And some can be fanatical about it.
The REIT, an extremist Islamic organization known for targeting bars it deems to operate illegally, came to a Jaksa Ramadhan, its members dressed in white and brandishing sticks. However, it was not the clash of civilizations predicted by some. Not even a tense impasse. They simply gathered in the middle of the road and prayed, perhaps imploring Allah to put all the wine in the near harmless water - but at this hour most drinkers were too drunk to notice the miraculous change in their glasses, though Jaksa bars do not serve anything from berries that did not have a Fanta label on it.
disappointing, no questionable military types were everywhere to be seen when trouble was brewing in the street. The REIT will not be thrown on each side of the road by the critic hamburger Navy SEAL. MI6 guy did not push a button to open a pit shark beneath them. Tim and the commander did not order an air strike from a warship off the Bay of Jakarta. Maybe these people were spent in the bars of corners having scrounged a drink too.
PULLOUT :.
Navy SEALs anchor side a dubious marine assortment was down to Jalan Jaksa over the years