Originally Posted by jpatokal

The classical muzak of last time, however, was replaced by a four-letter peppered heavy metal rendition of "I Will Survive", both a comforting and somewhat disturbing choice at the same time -- I mean, it's nice to survive, but it's nicer not to end up in situations where "survival" is a top priority in the first place.

Originally Posted by jpatokal

I left the office a little under three hours before my flight, and spent the first hour and a half of that studying that lovely Jakartan phenomenon known as macet (traffic jam). On radio the DJs were joking about the traffic report -- "it's Friday afternoon, so why even bother, because the entire city is jammed as always!" -- and I got to further my studies of macetology a little. One step above the ordinary macet is the macet banget, flippant Javanese slang for "very jammed"; more staid is the formal-sounding macet terus, or "straight jam" all along a road; an even more thorough clusterf*** of cars is macet komplit (as in "complete"), and worst of all is the inescapable soul-sucking quagmire known simply as macet total. Today the situation was merely komplitly messed up and I got to the airport 15 min before the check-in closed.