We, Belgians, have the reputation of being heartily diners. They will surely know that at the Batula restaurant, in Blok M, after a group of Belgians monopolized half of the downstairs restaurant for several hours last Friday. On the occasion of having a new Belgian ambassador, the Belgian consul and his wife organized a dinner party, inviting all the officially registered Belgians living in Indonesia, and guess what… I was invited too.
The dinner party was supposed to start at 7 PM so we left the apartment at 6 to be sure to be on time-after all it was Friday evening and the streets of Jakarta have the tendency to get stuck at every start of a weekend or holiday, because a lot of the Jakartans flee the city to spend the free time somewhere else. In less than an hour we arrived at Blok M, which was very fast for a Friday night.
Although it was almost 7, only a few people where there. The counselor and his wife greeted us and introduced us to the people that where already there: the ambassador’s secretary and her husband (who are going to leave to Hong-Kong next week), and three Belgium guys that arrived before us. The next hour, the invitees entered the restaurant little by little. At around 8, almost everybody had arrived and we where communicating with each other loudly. One of the late arrivals was… our new ambassador and his wife.
At 8 the counselor was starting to get nervous and urged us to sit down, so we could order. Especially for this occasion, a menu had been put together having 5 main courses from which we could choose. Three of the where with fish, one with mussels and the last one: “New-York sirloin steak and French fries”. It took about 15 minutes for everybody to find a seat (six tables with around ten people per table). I never saw so many Belgians together in one place in Jakarta. If you know that only about 400 Belgians are registered at the embassy and they are not all living in or near Jakarta, you can imagine that the attendance rate was very high.
Once seated the chatty American husband of the ambassadors’ secretary exclaimed that probably everybody would take the steak, because one of Belgian’s main dish is: steak with French fries. And he was almost right: 90% of the people ordered that dish. All by all, the dinner went very well and the food was more than OK and wine and beer where free flowing.
The Batula restaurant is actually quiet nice; it looks new and the manager is a western guy. The clientele also consist most of “bules” with their wives, girlfriends or one or more “kupu-kupu malam” they grabbed from the streets nearby… this is Blok M after all.
Although it was a pleasant dinner, everybody left before 10:30… so did we. At 11 (only half an hour later) the taxi dropped us at our apartment.

At last… I moved! I rented an apartment near the toll road in west Jakarta. Since the unit is on the 17th floor, and my windows are viewing central Jakarta, I cannot complain about the view. In the morning, I can see misty Jakarta, lit by the orange sun and in the evening, I can watch the city lights going on as the skyline disappears into the darkness of the night, and even at night, the city is nice to look at. At night, bright white lightning lights up Monas so that it is clearly visible during the day as well as at night. throughout the weekends, the white column lights are replaced by colored ones, alternatively lighting the column in different colors. There is always something to look at.

As I told you, I live on the 17th floor… at least that is what I thought. When I saw the apartment complex the first time, long before I even planned of moving out of Kedoya, I counted the number of floors and it was about 29. When I got in the lift the first time, I see that the top floor is 36. I was a little puzzled. Did I count the number of windows wrong? A few days after I moved into the apartment, I was going up in the lift, and watching the floor indicator, I noticed that it skipped numbers 13 and 14. Looking at the selector board, I see there is indeed no button for floors 13 and 14. I can imagine that in some apartments, there is no 13th floor, and since we all read “The DaVinci Code”, we all know why, but where is the 14th floor? And it gets even weirder. The next day, I was studying the selector board and noticed that there is no number 4 on the board… Floors number 4, 14, 24 and 34 are just not there. It’s not that perhaps the lift buttons with a 4 where out of stock when they installed the lift, because also the floor indicator nicely skips the floors that should contain a 4.

Knowing all this, I gathered some information and the explanation is actually very simple. There are a lot of Chinese Indonesian people in Jakarta. Some of them build apartments to rent or sell. According to Chinese tradition, number 4 means bad luck, just like 13 in western cultures.