Lunatic Weblog

A lot of friends in Twitter asked me stuffs about Nyepi today, mostly the dos and donts. I’ve lived in Bali my whole life, so although I am not a local I get a pretty good sight of what’s going on in Nyepi days.

In theory there are four rules Hindu people must obey in Nyepi, this set of rules is called Tapa Brata Penyepian. They are amati geni: no fire/light, amati karya: no work, amati lelungan: no traveling and amati lelanguan: no fun/recreation (source). That said, you should get the point of Nyepi now, right? Basically just lay around doing nothing from 6am until 6am the next day, what an awesome way to celebrate new year.

But in reality, more or less this is what happens:

Several days before Nyepi, people are going on a shopping spree. They shop for food, DVD, games and the such because they’re paranoid of this one day when they can’t get out of the house all day long. Because of that paranoia, some richer people decide to stay in a hotel during Nyepi. This is because hotels get special permission to operate during Nyepi, limited to activities inside their premises tho. Poorer folks are stuck at home, exhibit A: me.

Nyepi – 1 is the peak of the shopping spree, people need to stock up while the stores want to close as early as possible because the roads are going to be close by night fall thanks to some Ogoh-ogoh parade going on in several parts of the cities.

Interesting fact: some people light bigass firecrackers and fireworks on this day. It is as if they’re saying “Fuck I’ll have to be silent all day tomorrow so I need to unleash all my noise today!“.

Super noisy. But hey, whatever makes them happy right?

And finally, Nyepi day comes. The road’s clear, there are no vehicles traveling at all. Shops are closed, people are inside their own house (or in a hotel, note the envious tone) waking up very late and wishing for the day to end soon. No activities at all except for some traditional authorities called pecalang patrolling around. You can tell pecalang by their outfit, they’re wearing black and white chessboard-like pattern sarong.

The morning in Nyepi day is the awesomest. The air is clean, and it’s very quiet everywhere.

But then afternoon comes, you start to see several kids running around the street. Then some of their friends come along, then their parents joining, then the grandparents joining.. next thing you know there are two sets of children football teams having an exhibition match on the empty protocol street with their friends and parents cheering. And where are the pecalangs when law needs to be strict? Somewhere in a closed fried rice stall that turns out to be open on the inside. Surprise surprise.

Seriously, no shit. I took some photos a couple of years ago but a pecalang and a police officer came to me and threatened to put me in jail if the photos got published. I promised them I won’t publish the photos, so yeah, sorry this blog post is a wall of text. Blame those gentlemen.

Come nightfall, people are returning to their house. This is probably the only rule that still stands from the tapa brata: no fire/light. At least nothing the pecalangs can see from outside your house. So yeah, you may turn on any lights inside of your house as long as the light doesn’t “leak” to the outside. From the outside my house looks pit black but inside my room I am playing Need For Speed Underground in a well lit room. The trick is: cover your windows with cardboards :p

Around the area I live in (Tabanan), the pecalangs have very little tolerance to foreigners and non Hindus. Meaning even if you’re not celebrating Nyepi, you must also respect the rules.

My advice is, you can do all your daily activities as long as it’s not noisy and it’s done inside of your house/building. If you want to listen to music, play video games or watch movies, use earphones/headphones. Only turn on important lights at night and make sure people can’t see it from the outside. And of course, stock food and beverage. You can cook as long as the process isn’t noisy and the food’s aroma not strong.

Simple as that, and the next thing you know Nyepi is over already :)

I’m actually pretty excited about this year’s Nyepi because I have work to do, and the silence will most definitely boost the mood for working. Let’s just hope my ISP stays up tomorrow.

So my Blackberry had been hospitalized in Blackberry City Denpasar since beginning of January. And since I am a man of one phone, I had no backup phone and I was reduced to my old phone when it was hospitalized.

The day the berry got admitted, the staff said that “The repairman’s not in, so we can’t process this immediately. He will come in on Monday“. I said okay and they took my berry. Naturally, I called on Monday to ask if there was any news of it.

“The repairman extended his holiday and he’s not here yet.”

“When will he be HERE?”

“We will call you as soon as he’s here and check your berry, sir.”

“… okay.”

By that time I sensed something weird, do they have only ONE repairman and he could extend his holiday as delicious as his belly button?
And then three days go by, I called again.

“The repairman is still checking your phone, we still can’t tell if it’s still repairable or not.”

“Okay, when will you be able to tell if it can be repaired or not?”

“We’re not sure, we’ll call you as soon as we have a clue.”

And of course, a week went by and they never called back. How come it took THAT long just to check if the phone can be repaired or not? Hardware gurus, help me out here. I started to get impatient when they still haven’t called in a week, so I called them again. This time they told me to call back in 3 days, said nothing about any progress.

After 3 days, I called back again and the response I got was pretty standard, “We will let you know when we have news on it, it’s in process right now“. But when I asked what process, repairing or just checking if it can be saved, no answer. I started regretting why on earth did I go here to repair the berry. Yes there are other service centers but this was the biggest one around. Apparently biggest doesn’t mean best.

When I bought the Hero to replace to berry, I cut them some slack. I wanted to know how long would it take for them to call me back. One full month after the admission day, still no phone call, I even checked the receipt if they got my number right, which they did. Day by day went by, still no effing phone call. Now it was more than a month already without a single fucking phone call.

So this was my limit, and I was ready to go there to drop the bomb on them. I wanted to know why it took almost 2 months just to diagnose if my phone was repairable or not.. and they still haven’t figured it out. Either the repairman was dumb or he hadn’t even touched my phone, I suspected the both. I went there, and before I could say anything I was told that my phone was beyond repair.

Bummer.

“And why did it take almost 2 months just to come up with this?”, I asked.

No answer. My blackberry spent almost 2 months in their hands, and the only thing they could diagnose was that it’s beyond repair. Just that, no other information. The customer service girl looked so dumb I couldnt even begin to utter any words to protest, afraid that she wouldn’t understand anything I said. So I took my berry and just left.

Perhaps it’s better off if I fix it in Jakarta tomorrow. No, definitely.

Some people say that they never want to grow up, childhood is enjoyable.

Being a child, having no responsibilities is awesome. You can do whatever the fuck you want, screw up as hard as you can and someone else will clean up your shit after you.

Come to think of it, it IS awesome isn’t it?

But check this, I actually have a friend who doesn’t grow up and she thinks it sucks. I trust her, but I always tell her that everything sucks anyway whether you grow up or not. So if you’re reading this right now, listen to me (or read me.. or whatever). Chin up, we know for sure that we are not someone to everyone but at least we’re someone for some people who matter to us.

And in the end that’s all that matters, right?

What other ways could be better to remember what I did on 2009 other than checking my blog archive? Can’t think of any right now, so I’m reading my own blog posts of 2009 while giggling because I was a silly guy.

I started 2009 by moving into an office/workspace in Renon, Denpasar. The first website we designed there was our very own website, divdsgn.com. This was when me and the boys rebranded ourselves as the divdsgn team.

We went on taking new projects thanks to our dear clients’ word of mouth advertising, it’s good to know people were starting to recognize us as web developers. Also, we started working with an Australian based real estate website developer on some really interesting websites.

Work on Trippert has also been wondrous this year, I’ve learned so many things during working on some projects with the guys over there at BD lab.

Whoa that was heavy, on to the love life then.

Me and the girlfriend have been together for over a year now, and 2009 was an awesome year for us. Due to the nature of our relationship – the LDR – we traveled quite a lot this year. Every couple of months I visit her to Jakarta, and every alternate couple of months she visits me here in Bali. Granted, one time we got bored with the 2 towns and decided to just meet in the middle. That was the time we went to Yogyakarta during the Easter holiday.

Next we’re planning to go to more places, including Gili and of course the near-future-destination: Singapore. Yay!

But that’s still a few months ahead. Now I’m just going to be excited because she’s coming over for the new year and we’re escaping to an island.

While we’re on the personal life part, I’ll share a bit about the part when I moved out from a goddamned garage to a real house.

At the same time I also applied for (so called) broadband internet on Global Extreme, so I finally settled at home again. I’m a home worker now, I rarely go out anymore unless it’s to see clients. In fact I’m writing this post now on the couch-potato pose :D

In the beginning of this year I was using the trusty SonyEricsson w900i and I thought I was never going to get rid of it. But then halfway through the year I was tempted to use a Windows Mobile device: HTC Diamond. That phone rocked, specially with the Garmin GPS navigation installed in there. It helped me and the girlfriend when we were lost driving around in Bandung.

But then a couple of months later the need to stay online rose. I started to need push email and gtalk badly, so finally I got a BlackBerry. Oh, right, thanks to the berry I now have a 365 project: a photo a day – http://anima365.tumblr.com/

Hmm.. what else did I do this year.. oh right, I spent one night at the airport!

The very idea of spending the night on the airport was stupid, specially because it’s in Soekarno Hatta, but I met some interesting friends and I learned a lot about traveling. I guess I really really have to travel soon, I’m missing out a lot!

And last night I had a little get together with the high school guys, BBQ night.

Which ended up with some of us boys went to Kuta beach to have a couple of beers and just chat.. and broke some fences, srsly.

Yeah I guess that’s about it, my 2009 so far. I’m guessing there will be more highlights happening on the year end itself because Nana is coming to town, but that deserves another blog post :)

Merry Christmas and have a rocking New Year party, guys!

Whenever the chinese boy is in town, we have a somewhat weird habit that is going somewhere interesting and.. take pictures. This time the pick of “somewhere interesting” was Buyan lake, not the usual side where people camp and all that, but the fishing side of it.

Apparently there are plenty of fish in this lake, I never quite thought about it before. About 20 meters from the lake side the natives built those fishing pods. Funny pods, built from something that looks like dried sugar cane bars as the foundation and the platforms are made of bamboo.

Oh and the water’s green, this must be the color of the algae in there. Right?

It took less than 5 minutes from the lake side to the pod we were in, I figured the time it would take to reach other pods wouldn’t be too far off because they’re only separated 5 meters from each other. We got to the pod by boat. Awesome eh?

The ride was pretty smooth, I enjoyed every second of it perhaps due to me not paddling :p

But the pod itself is pretty small, around 2.5 x 5 meters. The 4 of us had to sit very close to each other to get this picture taken. We took some pictures there, I ate a small cup noodle and we went back. That’s right, nobody bothered to rent a fishing pod, lazy assess :))

Oh an interesting thing! When Mr. Boat Driver dropped us on the pod he said if we wanted to go back to land just call him. He said he would be there on the lake side, on standby.

Sure as fuck he was, but he was facing the other way! LOL! We had to yell, clap our hands and use all force to send telepathy signal to the old geezer when we wanted to go back to land. It took ten minutes to finally succeeded to reach him.

This is Mr. Boat Rider with his scary-looking boat, we didn’t think it could function but it did handsomely. Round trip boat ride from lake side to the pod (including pod rent too, I guess?) is IDR 10k per person. Very reasonable.

If you’re looking for a place to fish or just to relax, you might want to add this one to your list. Here’s the map.