New Year 2009

Duri, 15th January

It's 15th of January already. It's one over 24th of a year! It's 4 days before I'm Austin bound! I remember how happy I was when I got to Jakarta. My mom and my aunt were fetching me from the airport, and of course as most would react, they were surprised at how much fatter I looked. But, I prepared myself for that already, so I wasn't sad or disappointed; it was expected. Now, here I am, after five cities, twelve old friends, a lot of family members, eight medium-sized bags of chitato, seven packages of my favorite hot cassava chips, two weddings, and countless DVDs, I am unfortunately almost at the end of my vacation. Reality hit when my boss asked for our work schedule for the coming semester and I suddenly remembered that I had to buy my books already. I still hadn't bought all of them yet because one of the transactions got cancelled; the bank said it was a suspicious transaction and it needs my approval first. And another book got sold out. So, I realized that WOW, school is really really coming soon.... and I freaked out a little, but then I watched "Mamma Mia" and ate my hot cassava chips, and all is good again :)



I've got to say that New Year's night was awesome. I was just with my dad, mom, and my sister. It's the new year that I remember the most. Probably because it happened most recently, which makes a lot of sense. But, I think it was pretty special. The four of us don't get together much, you see. Just a few days in a year. And, we are not the loudest or the roudiest bunch either. In fact, we are pretty calm and boring people. My sister, for example, could glue her eyes to her Nintendo DS for hours. While, I, myself, was geeky enough to be satisfied with reading my new book, 'Maryamah Karpov', which I think was certainly entertaining, but was not that excellent. My parents, they looove sleeping and watching TV at home. So, it was safe to say that we were not going to go out partying on the streets of Jakarta. We did not even want to go out to the mall because we did not want to be stuck in the traffic. Yes, we are that adventurous.



We stayed in my uncle's apartment in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, on the 18th floor. In the afternoon of 31st December, we were just watching TV. Since my sister hadn't eaten dinner yet, we went down to find food. The apartment building is surrounded by people selling food underneath big tents. The tents are only set up at nights and people are selling a large variety of food. They have everything from Japanese to Javanese. When I say tents, I mean spaces underneath a tarp. So, it's just open space, with tables and chairs and an open kitchen, with a tarp over it. My sister wanted to eat a steak, so we sat underneath this blue tarp in a tent that sold American food, and she ordered a chicken steak. The rest of us were not really eating; just french fries and calamari as our side dishes. I don't remember exactly how we got there, but our conversation over dinner got pretty special. The conversation is not any secret at all, but it's pretty personal for me. Let's just say that there was a few tears and more laughter than usual. I'm not gonna go into details, because I tried and it got boring. It's basically about how life was pretty tough on some of us and at that particular moment, looking back, it's pretty amazing that we got to that point. And, over the chicken steak and the taste-like-rubber calamari, we cried, and we laughed. We laughed at how life can be too overwhelming sometimes but it's full of blessings at the same time. We laughed at how each of us walk our own path, but our paths intertwine so tightly that we walked together. We did what we ought to do more often: we laughed at life.

After dinner, we played Cluedo, this American board game that I actually bought for my cousin, but ended up being my sister's. We played all the way til midnight. Right at midnight, we saw the governor of Jakarta on TV giving a speech, then we realized.. It's New Year already!!! So, we ran to the window and saw this spectacular view of Jakarta. Mind you, we were on the 18th floor. From East to West, as far as your eyes can see, there were fireworks everywhere, cars stuck in traffic were honking and little kids blowing their trumpets as hard as they could. But, the fireworks were the most amazing. Litterally we were surrounded by flights of lights of every color, with their explosive cracking sounds. There was one Chinese guy, on the street right in front of the apartment launching his fireworks, too. So we got a great show right in front of our eyes. I was clapping and shouting the whole time, so excited like a kid on a magic show. It was fantastic. Then, only 20 minutes later, the whole thing died down. I know that this is gonna be a party pooper, but man, I can't imagine the amount of trash that had to be cleaned out the next day. But, for that half an hour, the whole Jakarta forgot that flood is still going to come this year, and the trash we just threw did not help at all. We forgot that there was still work tomorrow and traffic jams to face. We forgot that people are still dying not only in Gaza, but in all corners of this country. We just allowed ourselves to be drown in the celebration and closed our ears to everything except the cheers. We were happy for 30 minutes.

That was my New Year.

Happy belated New Year!