Indonesia Trip 2012

I went to Indonesia in March this year, mostly to visit my relatives and also Latte Girl’s in Jakarta, Medan, and Bandung, following a short stop in Singapore.

There were two things I learned about my family during this trip, stuffs I thought I should’ve probably known a long while ago.

The first one: I learned that my grandfather was somewhat a painter (among his other gazillion talents). I saw for the first time awesome portraits of Gandhi, Einstein, and several other world luminaries that he painted. He also received a letter from F.D. Roosevelt’s wife after sending a painting of the then president of U-S-A, pretty cool.

And the second one: my parents had boxes of mineral water bottles in their house, lots of them, it turned out that my dad had been winning those games at the family entertainment centers, and exchanged the prize tickets for boxes of mineral water. One day we were at a shopping mall and about to go home, we passed one center and my dad was checking the score on the machines. There was this one game where you have to press a button at the right micro second to drop a ball to a set of rotating pipes, one of those pipes is the jackpot pipe. If you failed, then the amount of score (jackpot tickets) is increased.

The score was 1000+, my dad sat down, inserted a coin, waited patiently… then he suddenly hit the button, jackpot! 1000+ tickets! my jaw dropped. I asked my mom why didn’t she look surprised, and she said she’s used to it, apparently he had done it many times before, hence the boxes at home. I was like, when did this start happening?! why did no one ever tell me about this?? I used to play the basketball shooting game at the center when I was a teenager, and I could only win 60 tickets at most after breaking the high score on the machine, and there it was, my dad easily won 1000 tickets. Talking about pwnage!

He repeated the feat several days later, and I also learned that he would only play the game if the score was high enough to maximise the profit, and that there were two other people who were as good as him at hustling those prize tickets. I guess we really learn something new every day.

Note: A trip to Jakarta always involves a visit to Bakmi GM for the glorious nasi goreng and pangsit goreng. Bakmi GM, I’m still waiting for your first Melbourne franchisee.