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.