Highlights: planned the remainder of my trips. Lots of traveling & not much time! Frustrated that the tax return which was supposedly sent out on 30 March hasn’t hit my account yet. And while on the subject of money, the Marine Corps has reimbursed me for less than half of what I’ve paid out so far on all my trips, and I’m running up debt here- so I’m trying to figure that out. Friends from the Betawi wedding last weekend invited me to hang out with them, so I visited the zoo for a couple hours, and then rode the public van to block M, talking with a Betawi ankot driver and his friends about how life is for them here in Jakarta. Interesting insights on thug rackets. He has to pay 5 different groups of thugs 1,000 Rupiah every day to keep from getting beat up, or his van smashed by iron pipe-weilding city thugs. I was in the front seat as he made 3 drive-by payments. At Blok M, his friends run a snack shop. He has to make “security payments” to different groups on a daily, weekly & monthly basis. All of these are payments for the same thing: protection from the organizations you’re paying.

As I was chatting with my friend Destri on-line, we figured out my blogger problem: it won’t let me access blogger from my Indonesia server. Huh!