A Kept Man's LIfe

When we decided to move to Jakarta,  there was a possibility that I was not going to be able to work. After all, we were moving here because of Gloria's job, and getting a work visa here is not an easy task. It takes over a month after you get all the approvals and sponsors. This is exactly the situation I find myself in. I am working with Accenture's Jakarta office to get everything in place to allow me to work in Indonesia, but it is taking some time.

In the interim, I am unemployed. But this is a good thing, because I get to be a kept man. Yep, I have a sugar mama. My wife brings home the bacon, and I, uh, hang out (I'm inclined to make a joke here about eating the bacon, but that seems somehow inappropriate). I even get an allowance which pretty much goes like this:

Brian: (opens wallet) I'm running out of cash.
Gloria: (opens wallet and pulls out 1 MEEELLION RUPIAH) Here.

Marriage is the best!

Awesome. So as of now I live the life of a kept man. I hang out at home, do my daily "honey do lists" from Gloria, and kind of do whatever I feel like. A sampling of the things I've been up to:

I've become very familiar with the layout and (sometimes lacking) selection of our local Hypermart (grocery store)

• Frustration with said grocery store led me to check out another nearby market, which turned out to be a great discovery. They sell much better quality items, and illy coffee! Speaking of coffee (on a bit of rant here), we live on the island of Java, and one of the other prominent islands of Indonesia is Sumatra. Those are two words synonymous with good coffee, yet there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of good coffee to be found here. This really has me scratching my head. Many people here have extolled the virtues of Indonesian coffee as being the best in the world, yet mostly what I've found so far is Nescafe style instant crap, or insanely bitter nasty Indonesian coffee. Are they exporting all the good stuff? Am I not looking in the right places? Clearly I'm missing something. Maybe I'm spoiled in the US, but I was very happy to find illy here. I'll keep looking for good Indonesian coffee though. It's gotta be here somewhere.

Where's my coffee named after you?!?!

I am free to go to the gym as much as I want. This has translated into a grand total of 3 trips to the gym. Sad, yes. Prior to the wedding both Gloria and I were very disciplined, and we both got in pretty good shape. I've regressed a bit, and I have to get back on this. I recently met with a personal trainer here (3 sessions came free with the gym membership). His name is Leonardo, so even if the training doesn't work out, I'll at least be on my way to becoming a ninja turtle. See what I did there? Leonardo...? Get it? It's funny. Meh...

Goals. It's good to have 'em.

Cleaning the apartment is part of the daily chores. One nice thing about our apartment is that it has tile floors, so it helps everything stay cooler. One not so nice thing is that those tiles are off-white, so every little thing on them shows. Also, we have a clothes washer, but no dryer, and no dishwasher. So, vacuuming the floors, washing dishes, doing laundry, etc. have all become pretty routine. Not that we didn't clean before, but it's definitely a more frequent occurrence when I'm not working. And did I mention Gloria's long, black hair? It's everywhere! White tile damn you!

Just like the locals and color coordinated too!

TV. My favorite part of being at home. I get to catch up on TV. And not local Jakarta of Asian TV (which can be vastly entertaining in it's own right). I'm talking good ol' American TV. We get The Voice (surprisingly entertaining), The Amazing Race, a bunch of other shows on Fox (yes we have a Fox channel here), HBO, Cinemax, and several other channels. So I'm pretty well caught up on a lot of shows. But the real kicker is sports. We actually get some live sports here. For example, when I wake up on Monday morning here, the Sunday night NFL game is on (we're 11 hours ahead of US Eastern Time). Likewise on Tuesday morning I can watch Monday Night Football. Even a game or two of the Sunday NFL programming is shown. Similarly all of the baseball playoffs were on TV live and on repeat (ultimately this was not a good thing for the Tigers fan in me). 

(this photo is for demonstrative purposes only. we don't actually watch these teams.)

But, the real cherry on top of all this is something I have because of Gloria: as a wedding gift she bought me a Belkin @TV box. For those who aren't familiar with it, this is a wonderful little device. It allows you to access the programming back home through the internet including live programming, or things recorded to the DVR. I can control a TV in the US from my couch here in Jakarta. The only requirement is that the box be hooked up to an active TV receiver.  So, before I left the US I hooked the box up at my parents' house in Muskegon, MI and since they have DirecTV we bought NFL Sunday Ticket to get all the games. Now, every week I record the Lions game for me, the Eagles game for Gloria, and whatever else I want to watch. For example, I've been able to watch all the Notre Dame football games. Go Irish! That said, there are a couple quirks with using it:

• It requires a pretty solid internet connection, which we don't always have here. So, the connection gets stuttered, and drops fairly frequently. Not a huge deal, but a bit of a bummer when it drops during the big play.
• Using the @TV takes over the TV. So even though this is hooked up on my parents' basement TV, occasionally they are watching it when I tune in. Which means I can't watch what I want. First world problems....uh, while living in a ...3rd world country. eeesh.

Other than that, it's a brilliant invention and I highly recommend it to anyone who's going to be away from home for an extended period of time. And it's all due to my awesome wife hooking me up with it. I'm a lucky man....

As long as I have wifi, I have football. All I need is no shirt and a beer.

In the coming weeks, I've got a few other things I'm going to be working on. One is trying get better at photography. There are a bunch of really cool photo opportunities here (buildings, neighborhoods, people, etc), and I'm going to go out on some photo treks to try my handiwork. I've only started shooting in manual mode a few months ago, and I've taken one photography class, so I know some basics. Time to practice, practice, practice. I also want to learn some post processing stuff with photoshop. I welcome tips, suggestions, tricks, etc. from my photographer friends. I'll also be working on my Bahasa Indonesia, which is the local language. Both Gloria and I are taking lessons, and we've definitely run up against quite a language barrier. We'll cover that in more detail in another post.

So there you have it: I buy groceries, I clean, I watch TV, and occasionally I get some exercise. I'm basically a 50's era wife, except I'm a dude. Other than that, it's exactly the same...give or take.

Until next time...

Seriously, these are my lists. Womp womp.