Blog Besar Jakarta, Day 3 - 9th September 2007

Assalamualaikum and Greetings,

We woke up early that morning, and had breakfast, together with Negation. We took photos and discussed in depth about a lot of stuff.

Robin text messaged us that he would be treating us lunch, and by 12 noon, he arrived at the hotel. By then, all of Damokis had also woken up. All of us checked out from the hotel, and thanks to the hotel, we were allowed to put all our luggage for a little while more in Torture Incident's room while we set out for lunch.

Robin led us on a mini jogathon to a not-so-nearby restaurant. It was a seafood restaurant, and it was jammed packed on a Sunday afternoon! All of us were sweaty and hungry by then and so we quickly walked in and waited to be seated. Bob Agigi and Madie Negation went to check on Torture Incident as they were not together with us in the initial hiking session. Shortly afterwards, Ratna & fiance, Deck & partner, and Ayen showed up, and we went in. We got seated and Robin placed orders. We had a very nice lunch of rice, fishes, and squids, and lots of coconut drink and Tehbotol Sosro. Thank you very much Robin, for everything!

We took some more photos in the restaurant after we finished lunch, and hiked back to the hotel. From there, we caught some cabs to Hotel Melawai, near Blok M. Tried to check in, but we were told that all rooms were fully booked. Haris, Zaihas, and Muhairi walked for about 15 minutes to Hotel Losari, only to find Negation already there. We were told that there was a short cut from Hotel Losari to Hotel Melawai which only took 5 minutes on foot. Zaihas got whacked by Haris and Muhairi for attempting to bring them keliling padang (around the field)!

We walked back to Hotel Melawai to alert the rest of the people about Losari having vacancies, and suddenly we were told that there were rooms to check in. Things just got lucky, so we all checked in. Torture will be leaving for Malaysia that night, Negation and Wynken Delirium were due to leave on 10-Sept, and Damokis was to go back to Malaysia on 11-Sept.

We took a little bit of rest in our respective hotel rooms, and met up at Blok M Plaza to do some shopping. There were lots of good stuff around, too bad we did not have much money to spend :( Wynken Delirium completed the shopping session that afternoon by having a good afternoon meal of Pecel Lele at a stall nearby.

Robin let us know that he would be bringing us out for dinner at about 8.00 pm. So we went back to the hotel at about 7.00 pm, bathed, prayed, and rested a little bit. By 8.00 pm, almost everyone was down at the hotel lobby, and Robin was already waiting for us. We walked a little bit to the stall which we ate dinner when we first arrived. It was a welcome return, with Bob Damokis the vocalist resuming his duty of forwarding numerous song requests to our favorite busker there. We swore that he completed at least 2 albums worth of Ebiet G Ade's songs!

Ajax who earlier had grunted loudly about not being able to have Bakso Urat was finally silenced by 2 bowls of delicious Bakso Urat. He did comment that the meatballs were not too big like he wanted them to be, but he swallowed all the bowls' content anyways. Negation and Haris had a good talk on serious issues. Zaihas could only chip in once in a while as he had lost most of his voice. Poor fellow.

We headed back to our hotel room at about midnight. Wynken Delirium had a good funny-tribal-pillow-and-mattress-hit-by-drumsticks jamming session before going to sleep. Some good audio tracks were recorded and hopefully snippets of the jam will be mixed together as part of the upcoming debut album.

Day 4 blog coming up soon.