The Banjir's Gonna Get You

Banjir, of course, being Indonesian for flood. Since last Saturday, many parts of Jakarta have been flooded. In some places the water has been four metres deep.

Four frikkin' metres! I mean wah lan eh. There is like poor city management but this is seriously fucked up lor. And of course everyone is blaming everyone else. The governor's saying the neighbouring province cut down too many trees to build yuppy malls so the ground can't retain the water. And then the media is fucking the governor for letting this happen again since there were damn bad floods in 2002. And then yesterday on the news there were these university students who had nothing better to do and decided to protest the floods. As if it would help make it go away.

And then in order to relieve the flooding in other parts of Jakarta, they decided to open these sluice gates so that my area gets flooded. Wah lan eh. So on Sunday the water level on the road outside my apartments was like up to waist level. Shiok man. Luckily my apartment compound has a backdoor which wasn't flooded. "Luckily" because when everyone was getting all flustered and scrambling o buy supplies for their homes in case they got flooded in, all I got was a carton of milk, some salad, a new loaf of bread and some orange juice. I did however remember to buy a couple of pirated games for my Xbox 360 in case I got flooded in and had nothing to do.

Of course when things cock up, they must all cock up together. So my internet was down cos of the floods and so were the telephone lines, and then the hard disk in my office-issued laptop decided to develop a terminal error (luckily I transfered all my porn into my ipod at the first sign of trouble in case the office computer guys decide to be helpful and try to recover my data) and then my office computer decided to go screwy too so I was totally uncontactable for a few days which was not too bad actually.

But I think by far the best quote was from my friend who called me from Singapore and told me, in all seriousness, to beware of the "pestilence" that usually comes after floods "because the hygiene very jiat lat".

If I remember correctly, after pestilence comes the big death ray from the sky that kills all these pagan non-believers and some grungy dude with a 'fro keeps saying "let my people go!".