Seven Years in Indonesia

Everyone likes to hear about a success story. Even though, most of the time they don’t really know what it’s like and how it feels before the curtain is lifted and the story goes on to the bright light.

Because behind every success story, there is always difficulties, obstacles and tears.

Ours is not really a success story – it is just a story that tells how we got here today. Because I don’t consider that our life is a success – not yet, we’re still working our way up.

But it is indeed a story that tells you that if you work hard and you persist, against all odds, you can make it. Anywhere. Including in the jungle of Jakarta.

J and I arrived in Jakarta seven years ago. On a heavy, humid afternoon, the clock stroke 3, exactly on Thursday, 19 January 2006, we landed in the Big Durian.

Feeling half confident and half scared, excited in welcoming a new life, a big change for both of us, we stepped off the Qatar Airways and into the heat of the Soekarno-Hatta lane.

This is a long story. It started way back when and it still goes on and on, today, tomorrow and in the future.

We had nothing. Barely a thousand and three hundred Euros, farewell-and-good-luck gift from J’s father. And off we went into the unknown, like we had a clue, we started our first company.

Unofficially, J and I had been working on our personal projects for over a year already. We were such a compatible couple: a geeky programmer and a boho graphic designer. We teamed up making a couple of projects and we thought we could make it off easily in Jakarta, so that was what we did: we started a SoHo-type of business.

Before we got married, the office was my old bedroom in the parents’ house. My parents were not taking us seriously even though they believed in us.

After we got married, the office moved to our newly rented house. The newlyweds started their business with meager clients, ones that are neither generous nor creative, and most often they didn’t pay us enough neither did they pay us in time – that, if they did pay. My parents were still not taking us seriously – and obviously neither did the clients.

And we lived for the day.

Soon, we started another website that would become our first startup venture that would live until today (and is now thriving). The website was all about party and nightlife and so were we: we’d sleep the day off and out the night away. Boy, did we party.

The money that we got from J’s father was entirely spent on our first workmachines: a local-brand laptop for J and a desktop PC for me, as well as a cellphone for mister.

So of course, we lived for the day.

We’d get small projects here and there, then we’ll survive a month or two, but money was, more often than not, lacking in our household. It was tight.

Often we had nothing left in our bank account – if you ask me the reason I never left BCA, today I’d perhaps answer you it’s because I’m too used to it, but the second truth is that it is the only bank that allows you to withdraw until the very last drop: it’s fine to have a zero balance there.

So, because I was still very naïve and had no experience, often we didn’t get paid in time or not at all by these clients and it left us with very little money to live. Often we only had Rp 50K (less than 5 Euros) to survive for a week or two.

Luckily, whenever I needed them, my parents were always there to support us. Even though they still didn’t believe in us that much. Just like the rest of my family and my extended family, who were always wondering and asking why were we so persistent in the www business? It couldn’t possibly make any money right? Unlike “real” stuff my cousins all do: dentists, med doctors, bankers, accountants and whatnots.

But we believed in us. We knew, somehow, it would work.

But days quickly turned into weeks and weeks into months and months into years. Before we realized it, we were already living for 3 years in Indonesia, still doing our small-time business and not making any more money than what we were spending, barely saving anything.

These so-called finance gurus and spending coaches that would tell you to save up, using their pretty formulas and scaring you off with their theory that, in order to be safe, a married couple must have at least 12 times their monthly expense budget saved up in a deposit account? You know, the ones that bitch about “What do you want in life and do you seriously want it??” I said (and I still say so now), screw them all. We were such a mess and I believe that those charlatans just didn’t make any reality checks around them. We were not alone, obviously. And at that time, more often than not, we were still depending on a single source of income: the clients who almost never paid in time.

So, one day, the unavoidable arrived: a wake-up call. My father passed away, and the company he used to forge J a visa, could no longer be used. For a year, we did fine with Socio-Cultural Visa – it’s a form of visa for jobless people, basically for foreigners who want to try their luck in this country. It’s no way secure and it’s a ticket to laziness – easy to get, cheap and you can still work without paying any taxes. Schweet, right? Well, not so much.

The country needs taxpayers badly. Especially foreigners. Indonesia says, if you foreigners can’t benefit our country by paying taxes then screw you, go home, we don’t need you here. I used to disagree with that, but now I totally agree. If you are a foreigner who intends to stay and work here, you MUST pay your dues. Your taxes. By having your company make you a KITAS. But that’s another story for another post.

At the end of 2008, J could no longer extend his Socio-Cultural Visa lest he got a new permanent office job. We didn’t like leaving the comfort of our SOHO but a choice and a decision must be made. Fast. J found a job within two weeks and it was one he liked. He wasn’t paid much, but he could stay. It was enough for us.

For about seven months, the company lasted. But it was bleeding like hell. The operational director screwed the investors, corrupting money left and right and made a big hole in the financial sector. A project that could be done in a week extended over months, making it impossible to cash in invoices on time, increasing the budget and decreasing the profit margin. The company was on the brink of collapsing. The verge of bankruptcy.

But it had such huge potentials. So one day, the owner, our angel investor (bless her), Mrs F, sought to see us – she told us we could run the company and she only wanted to get her money back, afterward the company would be ours. She saw the leadership in J and I and decided she wanted to put a bet on us. Her last card. She gave it to us because she believed in us. I still thank her to this day and beyond for her trust in us two. For letting us have the company, the best idea we’ve ever come across.

The Good Idea

It was August 2009. We started the emergency CPR to the company, giving it a new breath and resurrect it into life. We didn’t do much miracles, but the company survived. I closed several deals, profitable ones, the projects I signed were of good prices (at that time) if not astronomical.

The company started living again. Not prospering yet but it was on the right path.

And then, no longer after the company started resurrecting, our angel and benefactor, Mrs F, came to us and told us, “I’m done with the company. Just pay me a little money for it and I’ll leave everything to you guys. Just please make it live.”

We were afraid she would want a high selling price, but it turned out she didn’t. She asked for a decent sum, exactly the half of what we had in our savings. So we said yes and took the card we were dealt. Blindly high with conviction, but halfway afraid we did something wrong.

We started the company with very little amount of money. No investors. All bootstrapped. We bought everything ourselves and renewed the hardware ourselves. No investment. Only us and a little help from my parents.

So it was the good idea. The two first years were not easy, we were too emotional, too forgiving, too buttery soft. Every time someone quit, I would be so emotionally hurt – I would feel betrayed. But actually, hey, that’s the way things are, right? People are always bound to find a better place. No hard feelings. So, over time, I learnt to deal with people parting ways with our company. It’s OK. It’s just a change. And the once-bitter us now have nothing against people resigning – we even greet our employees who resign with a good luck hug and well-wishes in and with their new endeavors.

The tough cookie only toughens up when it’s baked on a high degree and that was how we learnt. Through difficulties.

I often melted with stress at the beginning. Asking myself if we did the right choice? All that moments of doubts, J never ever had a single weakness of questioning if what we did was right or wrong. He just always had the biggest of conviction it would work. That things would, somehow, fall into places. I always admire his courage and conviction in insisting that we were on the right path.

However, the two first years, we had a lot of problem with a lot of things – management, finance, well, a lot of things. The employees were not that excellent, not loyal and they didn’t respect us. I know, respect is earned not bought, and I didn’t blame them – at that time, we had a shitty small office and uninteresting projects. But hey, you gotta start somewhere, right? Better start small and climb your way up rather than waiting to start big and then never starting at all.

The two first years, we often had problems with cash flow. But gradually it begins to be better and better and at the end of the second year, we were already doing great. We no longer had to find projects – projects come to us without any effort. Because the name we’ve been building since 2009 finally started to pay off. We started charging decent amounts to our invoices and cashing all of them in the proper time.

But with the arrival of the projects, came another thing – expected thing actually. It’s work. A lot of it.

We work seven days a week, for endless months we didn’t spend our weekends elsewhere but at the office. The old shitty office – that people always made fun of, but the one that had sheltered us in the process, the one so small and stank of stale – but where it all started. I’ll always be thankful to that space, forever.

And I tell you something, if you have a business or intending to start one: think properly. Are you ready? The word “becoming my own boss” might sound cool, but nothing of all the “I do nothing and just boss around” rings true – in fact, if it’s your own business, you’ll most probably end up working so much more than you would if you were just an employee.

Now if people tell me, “Lo sih enak, kan kantor sendiri, perusahaan sendiri, bisa ngapain aja!” (“You’ve got it easy, it’s your own company, your own business, so you can do whatever you want!”) I grin and say, “Tell me about it.”

Today

Fast-forward seven years after the day we arrived in Indonesia, the fourth year of our company just started. It’s now living and thriving, still small but we already have a solid base of clientèle and we love working with them all. We have built four other ventures – three still living and one defunct (You can’t just all make it work! One has to fail eventually) and now occupy a big office space with all the things I ever wished to have, including a bunch of team members who are simply great.

My mother, the only parent I have left, along with our aunt, takes care of Louis, our baby boy, and she, like the rest of my family and my extended family, now believes in us. They finally see that indeed, the digital domain we work in, can eventually make real cash. And a hefty amount of it if you do it right.

Aside from the digital agency, we also work on several other projects – help friends make concerts, do the digital marketing for high profile events and so on and so on. We want to open a bar someday – in a few years perhaps. A cupcake store. A lot of things. But everything in its own rightful time.

Mrs F stayed in touch with us after all these years. I still love and respect her and will never forget what she did for us. The good idea she gifted us with.

Seven years of living in Jakarta, I’d say that the journey has been an exciting roller-coaster ride – a lot of downs in the beginning but now it’s only ups. Well, not exactly roller-coaster then – perhaps a boat is a better analogy. It used to rain cats and dogs and the sea was not quiet. But now we’ve nearing the shore, the weather is nice and the wind breezy, softly driving us toward the coast.

And the journey has not ended yet

How I Met Your Father – Season Finale, Episode 14: The Happy Ending

The kiss had officially declared what we were feeling for each other. And although we were at first unsure of the future, and the next-day felt so hard because we had to say goodbye on Monday, it was a beginning of all things wonderful in our life.

Eddie was the happiest of all when I told him about what happened. He was amazed and slightly bemused because he didn’t believe that two people eventually met and got together for real over internet – I couldn’t be more thankful to him than I already was.

Our story was even published on Yahoo – about true love found on their Meetic.

It all happened so fast…

After that first visit, came more visits, and more trips for me back to Paris. It was a long-distance relationship, and as we celebrated our two months being together, J already asked to come with me to Jakarta, to visit and meet my family. He had already asked me to meet his too, at Christmas.

And on his 22nd birthday in November, that we celebrated together in Bonn at the Tacos, a hip Mexican bar in the Zentrum, he told me he wanted to move to Germany to be near to me.

“You can’t possibly want to leave everything behind in Paris?” I asked, half-hoping that he was serious.

“I do. I really do. I want to start over new with you.”

(We would have the similar conversation twice – once before Germany and once before Indonesia)

“You don’t speak German,” I said. Now that was a real obstacle.

“I’ll learn, I promise.”

He really did. In fact, less than six months after we met, he moved to Germany.

A week after arriving in Germany, we went to Indonesia, the first time ever J had stepped outside Europe – and in a country so far away he never dreamed once before that he would go.

He loved Indonesia the very moment he arrived in this country. I brought him as my Plus One at my cousin’s wedding – I finally somehow managed to do so.

He also fell in love so much with life in Indonesia that, on our way back to Germany, in the airport, he told me we should never leave, that we should just live there. It didn’t happen that year, but the year after, and we have been living and working here since.

It’s love

It’s strange how love could make you do things you never thought you would. Like switching all your life to match your significant one’s life.

J had switched his life, turned it upside down so that he could be with me. Because he loved me. And I loved him so much for that, too (aside his sense of humor, his smile, his small habits and a gazillion more things in his persona). It isn’t easy changing job and country, let alone changing everything in your life altogether at the same time.

J always thought that he’d spend the rest of his life working and living in Paris, marry a girl there and pay mortgages for a flat in the nice Parisian banlieue.

Instead, we took our chance, moved to Germany and then to Indonesia. He married me, someone completely stranger, that just happened to cross his path one fine Sunday, the 1st of August 2004.

We were married 18 months after we met.

I always thought I would not get married until much much later – at 32 maybe? Or even 35. Instead I was married before I was 24.

Of course we had taken a wild, crazy bet by getting married that early and things could have not worked between us. Fortunately after the newlyweds’ dramaful adjustment phase, we just bonded closer and closer.

Today, we have been married for six years, six full years of love, commitment, trust, honesty and faith, but also six full years of understanding, adjusting, adapting, compromises. As we grow older and wiser together, our priorities changed and our goals in life, too.

Louis, you were born seven years after we met, five years after we were married, and you are the most important milestone we have reached together so far.

And I’m looking forward to more, much much more years to come, more milestones. Because the efforts of being married doesn’t stop the day you say “I do” – it is in your everyday, your whole life. It takes so much things to make a marriage work and we are still, always, making everything work.

Now you know, Louis, how I met your father. One day, on your wedding day, I hope we will be there to tell these stories. And one day, you will be able to pass on these wonderful memories to your own children.

This was how I met your father.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 13: Sealed with a Kiss

In the morning after having caught the train back to Bonn, we woke up at 10 AM. At Angie’s apartment – she lent me her room.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” I let myself in the living room where J was sleeping on the sofabed. He smiled and gave me kisses on the cheeks, again, which felt like another electrocution.

I looked at him – stylishly wearing a grey Von Dutch tee with the then-famous Von Dutch logo in green emblazoned on it, and faded blue jeans. He put on a dark green Levi’s sweater and I thought: is this to enhance his green eyes? How did he know I couldn’t resist them?

“I’m hungry,” J said.

“Let’s hit the city,” I was already fully awake at 8 AM and fully dressed, fully prepared.

We caught a bus to the Zentrum. It was sunny at first, we walked hand in hand again, wandering the city. It was a Saturday and not a busy one.

Bonn is a quiet and very friendly city to live in. It only has a Zentrum the size of a Jakartan mall, but every corner was so familiar to me, so homey. I invited J to dig into my daily life living there.

We walked around the Zentrum and J liked it so much even though it was a village when compared to Paris. It was his first time ever in Germany.

Not so far from the Hbf, we found a small toy shop and got in. J bought a velcro animal for his newborn nephew who lived in London (the same nephew, who, at birth, looked like a dead ringer for you, Louis).

I thought it was too sweet and thoughtful of him. I told him that he’d be a good father one day. He just laughed. He said that the day he’d become a dad was too far beyond. (7 years minus 16 days from that day to be exact)

We got into an Italian cafe-resto and shared a pizza and a bottle of red wine together.

We still talked. And talked. I wondered how did we manage to talk so much considering we just met. (Come to think of it, we still do talk so much. About anything and everything. And living back in Jakarta, we talk to each other in French so it’s like belonging to a secret society – the secret society of just us two. We don’t talk in codes when we don’t want anyone else to listen – afterall nobody speaks French here)

When we got back to the apartment I saw that one of Angie’s flatmates decided to stay in and had her friends around. They were a bunch of noisy blond girls – and they were having a dinner party in the living room.

So we stayed in the room instead, lazying around, listening to Hed Kandi’s Black Water Music. J had brought some Hed Kandi CDs from London when he had visited her sister and her newborn son in June.

We still talked. And talked. Effortlessly. There was not any single moment when we lacked of conversation topic. It was like talking to a person you had known your whole life. Whereas I just knew him 3 weeks prior and had just seen him for the past 24 hours.

At 8 PM we were hungry again and went out to the city to the same Italian restaurant we had lunch. And shared another pizza, another bottle of wine. And two margaritas. Peach ones.

We got back to the apartment feeling even giddier with happiness than the morning before. We sensed that something meaningful, something crucial in our life, was about to happen.

At the apartment, the all-blondes dinner party were still ongoing on full-force. So we got back to the room and put the CD back on at the desktop computer. We listened to another round of Hed Kandi, with all the lights turned off so the only lights were coming from the computer screen.

Naturally, as all computers do, the lights dimmed off after ten minutes, and went completely off after half an hour.

And in the dark of the accomplice night, we sealed it with a kiss.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 12: That Look In Your Eyes

A quarter before 10 PM and the maroon red Thalys came to a halt. The passengers took off one by one, and there I was, waiting.

“Find me in the crowd,” I said in one of my text messages.

“I will.” He responded.

And there he was. Lean and clean-shaven, his dark hair was cut short, carrying a small black luggage, wearing jeans, sneakers and khaki-colored summer jacket. I stood breathless. As he made his way to find me in the crowd, I stood breathless.

“There you are,” he said. “Come here so I can kiss you.” Being truly French that he was, we kissed in the cheeks. There was nothing romantic – French do it all the time – but these kisses felt like electrocution.

He had that look in his eyes – I must have had that look in my eyes, too.

I could smell his Chanel Allure perfume, swayed by the summer wind. I smiled. And I just knew that we liked each other. Instantly. We just clicked – we just did.

We left the luggage at a locker in the Hauptbahnhof and headed off to explore Cologne, it was a breezy albeit warm summer night, the sun had just set in the horizon.

We had a Caipirinha at the All Bar One, the most delicious one ever – and then we walked along the riverbanks of the Rhine, hand in hand.

We talked. And talked. And talked. The night was an accomplice, it seemed endless. We went through Köln, wandered to the other side of the river. We talked about anything and everything.

I remember sitting down on a wooden bench, and he showed me his Palm PDA, with Spongebob the Squarepants cartoon in it. He still nurtured his inner child. He made me laugh.

I never felt that way before. He never did, too.

Months later he would tell me that the moments we spent sitting on the bench, he was thinking if he should kiss me, but he was afraid I would slap him.

I wouldn’t have.

We caught a train back to Bonn at half past five in the morning, giddy with happiness that slowly seeped into our hearts.

I will never forget that night.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 11: Köln-Hauptbahnhof

As I had said a few times previously on this blog, I loved living and commuting between Bonn and Köln so much. I still consider both cities as homes away from home. I lived my university days and the essential beginning of my young adult life there.

Before I went to Germany, I knew nothing about household chores. I didn’t know how to cook, clean up neither did I know how to do laundry. I never even had any sense of weekly expense or anything, I never so much as did any grocery shopping. That changed the day I set foot in Deutschland. I had to learn to take care of myself and took some responsibility. I had to live on my own, away from home – which would sound perfectly normal for any Europeans or Americans above 18, but believe me, at mere 19 years old, it was considered such a big leap for Indonesians. Many of my friends still live at home even until now, at the dawn of our 30th birthday.

I liked train stations. I caught a morning train everyday (as you previously read about Train Bloke) and returned home in the afternoons or evenings with the same train. So naturally, I liked the stations.

Bonn-Hauptbahnhof, shortly Bonn-Hbf, was small but easy to be reached. It was an old, classic German red brick building from the end of Industrial Revolution around the second half of the 19th century, located at the Zentrum – there was a small cafe and a newsstand on the left wing lobby, a travel center on the right side.

While I always felt relieved whenever I reached Bonn-Hbf (it meant that I was home), the Köln-Hauptbahnhof clearly was the one I preferred.

Its majestuous construction dated back from around the same time as the Bonn-Hbf – perhaps about a few years earlier or so – and it was immense. It was gray, with super high ceilings and about a zillion shops inside. The Central Station was directly connected to the Köln-Innenstadt and Zentrum, overlooking the ancient Gothic Kölner Dom.

Why would I consider a train station so important? Well, because it was where I first met AsHeardOnRadio in person. On Gleis 8 / Quay 8 to be exact (How do we women manage to remember ALL THIS, almost eight years after, while men didn’t even remember any details? I still remember what clothes I wore, which shoes I had, what clothes and shoes he had and what kind of luggage!!).

By some sort of luck, the Köln-Hbf is directly linked with Paris Gare du Nord by the red maroon Thalys trains that arrived every two hours or so everyday, bringing people from Paris to Amsterdam via Lille, Brussels, Aachen (French call it Aix-la-Chapelle) and Köln.

So, AsHeardOnRadio booked return tickets Paris Nord-Köln-Hbf about two weeks prior to the date he was scheduled to meet me. He, in fact, booked the tickets before I even said yes (He was so confidently convinced I would say yes! Well, to his credit, I did say yes).

That night, a merry summer Friday, I arrived at the Köln-Hbf 20 minutes too early, at 9:25 PM. As minutes went by, I started getting even more nervous.

My phone, the old pink Nokia 3650, said “Ping.” I received a text message.

Je suis dans le train

And so came the One, at precisely 9:45 PM, on Friday, 20 August 2004.

I really want to go back to Köln one day in summer, just to reminisce all this.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 10: What’s in a Name?

What’s in a Name?

A lot, actually.

I, for instance, like my name a lot. My parents couldn’t have named me better.

J’s surname is somewhat very, very Spanish-like. Like all names ending with -ez, actually: Sanchez, Rodriguez, Gonzalez – he assured me that it was indeed a true French name, coming from the Jura mountains that was once claimed by Spanish regime sometime in the Middle Age thus the reason it ended in -ez.

And his first name sounded English – well, technically it’s a Hebrew name but widely used by Brits.

Like all girls in love, I liked doodling my first name followed by his name on bits of paper. With small hearts as dots in each i. Such a childish thing to do, but who hasn’t done it, seriously?

Then it struck me like a lightning: combine my first name and his last name, you get a total Spanish-sounding name. And it sounded really, really cool.

So as I told Eddie about this new finding, he just laughed at me and told me to get over it already.

“You always tell me to go out and meet people,” I said reproachfully.

“Well, real people, not over internet,” he laughed again. “Are you seriously going to meet this AsHeardOnRadio guy? He sounds weird!”

“No, he is not weird.” I pulled a face.

“What kind of guy stays online all day long,” Eddie said.

“I stay online all day long, too! Besides, we also speak on the phone.”

It had become a ritual for us to call each other at least 3 times a day and sms-texting all day long (my phone bill started bloating a lot).

“Well, too bad I won’t be here when he’s here.” Eddie was going back to Brazil for two weeks and he would leave exactly a day before AsHeardOnRadio’s arrival in Köln.

“I do hope that this is the One you’ve been waiting for, my dear, but to be honest, don’t over-expect, okay? We know nothing just yet about him. He could be the next psycho or a complete loser or simply married or not single – I would hate to see you get hurt.”

Actually, I didn’t expect anything at first, but naturally, as Day D drew nearer and nearer, I got more and more anxious.

Who knows that one day I’ll be signing papers with that combined name I used to doodle, long ago?

And that was how you got that classy full name, Louis.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 9: The Plan to Meet

As we came back home from Ibiza, I received an electronic email – that was sent about five days prior – just before I went for holiday. The message stamp read 8th of August, 2004. In it was a simple single message:

“Can we meet soon?”

My heart started racing. And pounding. And I looked at my tiny coed room: it was TOO SMALL!

I emailed my best friend Angie, asking her to lend me her apartment. She was away to Indonesia for about two months already and wouldn’t be returning until end September. Fortunately she agreed – she lived with two flatmates but one was away on summer job and the other was there, but I was good friends with her so it would be OK.

“When?” My reply also contained one single phrase. I clickedsend. The reply came immediately. As if he had been waiting for mine on the other end.

“20-23 August?” That was a week away. I figured out I’d need time to arrange things and be prepared.

“Deal,” I sent back a reply.

“Deal. Can’t wait to meet you.”

I made a quick run to IKEA in Godorf the next day to buy some important stuff like new bedsheets, vanilla-scented candles and towels, and then to downtown Köln the afternoon after, to buy some new clothes.

As Day D was looming near, I couldn’t help but feeling worried sick.

It turned out I didn’t have nothing to worry about.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 8: The Ancient Gypsy Fortune-Teller

If there is one thing that I would remember from Ibiza, it was my encounter with an ancient Gypsy fortune teller.

As the fourth day drew to an end, Eddie already partied non-stop through the three nights we were there.

We would spend daytime lounging by the pool or strolling around the hotel’s neighborhood, eating the world’s most delicious seafood paella with fresh scallops and lobster endorsed by crushed sun tomato-yellow paprika salsa sauce.

Then at around 5 PM, I would tell him I needed to go back to the hotel because I needed to do a siesta.

“Yeah, right,siesta,” He would pull a face and pinch my nose and then repeatedly singing Kevin Lyttle’s song refrain, “AsHeardOnRadio turn me on, turn me on, oooohhh…”

I would blush and tell him off. The truth is he was right. I didn’t go back to the hotel for some siesta, I would instead turn my laptop on and since he was off work at 5, it kinda gave me time to prepare. How lame I was, come to think of it now! Where had the seduction lessons go?? I should have made him wait, shouldn’t I? But all the politics of seduction, all the lessons went nowhere. There isn’t any exact science about flirting, is it?

So, while I was cocooned inside the hotel room chatting with someone at the other end of Europe, Eddie would go out and leave me alone to my business – or to his business more likely. He would be out all night and went back in at around six in the morning, leaving me to chat the night away. We’d talk through the night.

And every night, the conversation topics with AsHeardOnRadio became deeper and more intense. We talked about everything from my life to his life, our families, even things outside our world like movies and politics. About Indonesia and France. I felt like I had known him for a lifetime. And I knew the feeling was mutual.

The Salty Margarita Party

On the fourth day, however, Eddie was annoyed that I didn’t want to go with him to the Salty Margarita Party. He told me if I was just to let him roam in the island all by himself, I should have just stayed in Bonn. I gave up and changed myself into a black lace dress, let my hair down and followed him outside.

The blaring sun was all up on 6 PM. The Salty Margarita Party was held in Bora-Bora, one of the hippest spots in Playa d’en Bossa. And after something like six tall glass of lemon margaritas bottoms-upped in something like two hours, I found myself alone and on my own. Ed was nowhere to be spotted and I felt a bit nauseated. Which was normal, considering that the margaritas were: a) extra-triple-sec-spiked and naturally much more alcohol-infused than normal margaritas at All Bar One, b) served in tall glasses rather than the usual margarita glasses so obviously it was each a bigger dose, c) drop-dead delicious and I downed a lot too much in such a short time.

The queue at the toilet revealed to be gigantic and my head turned around. I had to puke. And the entryway was jammed by more and more people coming in for the party.

I looked around for an exit and thought that there must be an emergency exit somewhere – which I luckily located at the back, behind the bar – I hurriedly exited there, found the right spot to do the deed and slumped down on the sandy beach after my stomach was emptied.

“You alright?” Asked a woman in her early forties all of a sudden. She was standing a few meters away from me, outside a small tent, one that resembled a circus tent in mini. She asked in English with a very heavy accent.

“I’m fine,” I replied.

“Here,” she handed me a plastic cup of water from a small fountain nearby.

“Thanks,” I drank from the cup and immediately felt better. The wonders and the magic of pure water.

And just then I had the chance to observe her closer. She looked like a Gitan – in fact she was positively one. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress that was a bit like German dirndl – nothing sexy like the one kind girls would wear in Munich for Oktoberfest, but an old-fashioned, long one. She had bright blue eyes and dark olive complexion with long golden braid.

I heard Ed’s warning ringing inside my head: Be careful of Gypsies – they’d steal something from you. There were quite a lot of the Gitans, Romani people of Catalonia and Spain living in Ibiza and earning money from tourists by performing mobile circus or acrobatic attractions during the summer, and the previous year in the very same island on a very similar summer holiday, Ed lost his wallet in the crowd while watching a Gitan mini-circus – he was convinced some Gitans must have stolen it while he was watching them perform.

But it seemed so rude to think that all Gypsies were thieves – this woman, after all, looked so very nice and she just gave me a cup of water while she could’ve just ignored this drunk girl who had just puked her eyes out (Which was, oh, so unlady-like of me. I swore I’d never drink again).

“My name is Aitana,” she said. “Would you like to meet my mother? She will tell your future.”

Oh, great, a fortune-teller, I thought. I never liked fortune-tellers but it would be rude to refuse, so I agreed and she showed me into the small burgundy tent.

“This is my mother, Carmen the Great,” she nodded to a woman so very ancient sitting behind a table inside the tent.

Carmen the Great

Carmen? Coincidentally, we share the same name. Well, the same name root, anyway.

Carmen the Great must have been somewhere between eighty five and a hundred years old. She looked very, very, very old. Her face was very wrinkled, what must have been a fair olive skin over half a century ago was now etched with deep lines from the years she had passed, her long hair was as white as threads of spider web. She reminded me of the giant Sequoia trees in Sequoia Park, trees so old and so tall they had started life way before the land was even claimed by the European conquerors, way back before it was called California.

But her eyes! Her eyes were shining with wisdom from within the ancient face. If her daughter’s blue eyes were as the sky was blue, Carmen the Great had eyes as deep and as blue as the ocean was blue, with shades of green around the iris.

She gestured me to sit and so I did. I gave her both my hands and let her see my palm, half-anxious, half-worried. I hope she isn’t going to give any bad news or predict a gloomy future.

I sighed when she sighed. For what must have been like a minute or two in reality but to me seemed like forever, she stared at my palms, touching the lines and looked, really looked, as if she had been reading something from there. As if she had been reading a book. I started sweating and feeling uncomfortable. What is she seeing? What is she reading? What is going to happen to ME??

Then her gaze shifted. She looked at me with her piercing blue eyes, my hands still in hers and whispered, “Lamoressaprop.”

“Sorry? What did you say? I don’t speak Spanish,” I panicked. Is she foreseeing something bad??

“L’amor, Love. Amor,” her daughter translated. “She said, l’amor és a prop, which means, love is near. It’s Catalan.”

Carmen the Great put a tiny white coral into my palm, a coral of a perfect white color and a perfect oval shape, which I quickly transferred to my skirt pocket. I handed her daughter a twenty-euro bill and left, thoughts flowing in my head.

I still keep the tiny coral somewhere in our home until today.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 7: Ibiza

So, on Saturday morning, on the 7th of August, 2004, at precisely 11 in the morning, we landed in theAeroport d’Eivissa. The flight with Air Berlin took a bit more than 3 hours without any stopover, we stepped off the plane and were greeted by a glaring sun that required our sunnies be put immediately, and by the salty smell of seawater that invited us to dive into the water.

“But Ibiza ain’t an island to swim, honey,” Eddie who was already in his umpteenth visit to Ibiza, acted as my professional guide. We took a cab to our hotel, the Fiesta, which was located right in the heart of the Playa d’en Bossa.

“It’s the island of party!” He winked at me as we arrived on the road where the hotel was located. Rows and rows of cafes and bars and everywhere we looked, men and women totally tanned and looking radiantly happy in their holiday-and-party mood scattering around the beach and the hotels.

Ibiza is to Brits as Majorca is to Germans. All Germans I know have been in Majorca at least once in their life. Most Brits I meet have been to Ibiza. Their presence is so significant that you will never make any effort to speak Spanish as little as it would take you, because everyone, simply everyone, speaks English. Ibiza is to Spain perhaps a little bit like Bali is to Indonesia. It’s different and special in its own way that it doesn’t reflect Spain as a whole. You’ve been to Ibiza doesn’t mean you’ve been to Spain. But if you’ve been to Madrid, yes, you have been to Spain.

And boy, is Ibiza the Party Mecca! You will find just about every big name in the nightlife industry on a summer in Ibiza.

But that was way way way before we started our nightlife startup website, and at that time, David Guetta, Paul van Dyk or Armin van Buuren meant nothing to me. They were just a bunch of nobodies without any meaning and didn’t exist in my 21-year-old student world. “Who the heck are they?” I would’ve asked you back if you had had asked me what I thought about spending a week in summer in Ibiza and if I saw their gigs in Space, Amnesia or whatever.

Our rooms were next to each other. As I entered it, I was so relieved to see that there is a telephone line! It means that there must be internet. I was willing to put up with dial-up internet – as long as I could still talk to AsHeardOnRadio, which was all I could think of all the way from the dusty lanes of Köln Bonn Airport to the blues of Islas Baleares.

I switched on my brand-new Asus laptop (That I had just bought so that I could still stay connected to the internet in my holiday, after Powerbook G4 died off on me), called the hotel front desk to get the internet connection username and password, went online and left a message for AsHeardOnRadio:

“Arrived in Ibiza! Time to party! Chat with you later xxx.”

The truth is that I didn’t party at all – for the next five days I would stay glued onto the laptop in my room, much to Ed’s chagrin.

Sometimes I wonder if internet is a blessing or a curse. Because you want to stay connected with people online, but you often forget that there are people around you as well. (Like nowadays, you will find pairs of couples, parents-and-children, brothers-and-sisters or simply friends who sit together in a restaurant table, each immersed in his/her own technology and virtual world through BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone or Android devices and chat with some other people on the other line or in another corner of the world far far away, while actual people are sitting in front of them, who are material and real and can be talked to or communicate with much much easier, are being completely and utterly ignored)

Although, in my case, it did help. Your father and I, Louis, we were a pair made in digital heaven. In the online world.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 6: The Parisian Guy

“So who’s this AsHeardOnRadio guy?”

I must be so obviously not myself – Mathilda, the six-foot tall Kenyan girl in my class, one of the good friends I had in university, inquired with interest because I seemed unusually so very unlike me (Months later, she’d told me that I looked strangely happy – could I have been living the Savage Garden Song “I knew I loved you before I met you” moment? She also said I didn’t talk about anything else but AsHeardOnRadio).

Eddie was away at his mother’s in Düsseldorf and Laurie was in London for the summer so I hadn’t had the chance to tell them yet. Mathilda and I met for coffee in downtown Cologne, at Monday afternoon following my first encounter with AsHeardOnRadio, whose real name was J.

“Well, he lives in Paris and he works in web industry.”

And he has a blog! I added to myself. Mathilda wasn’t very internet as a person so she wouldn’t understand the importance about having a blog as much as I wasn’t a tresses person (I obviously didn’t understand why she’d spend 8 hours every Sunday to redo her African tresses).

But yes, AsHeardOnRadio, that I fondly called “The Parisian Guy”, lived in the 18th Arondissement in Paris in his own flat with a roommate called Rudy. Gosh, looking back, I feel like a stalker. But his blog had pretty much the information I needed. A little bit TMI, actually. He talked a lot about his life, his job, his family and way before I met the people in his stories in real life, I already knew all about them.

He was the fourth of five children, from the Jurassian St.-Claude, south-east of France. His dad had a ranch with milk cows and his mother worked in a psychiatric hospital, he had a sister living in London and a brother living in Strasburg, another brother living in Gex, in the French-Swiss borders and the little brother who was still in high school. Himself had lived since 2000 in Paris.

His blog address proudly bore his own surname (That would be your surname, Louis, one day, but one story at a time, okay?). That kinda impressed me. Back then, I knew people could buy domains, but owning your own family name as a domain, oh wow, how cool could that be? Beyond. (Everyone was also saying that in 2004: “How cool could that be?” “Beyond!!!”)

He works as a web mobile developer for a company called Index Europe. So the blog was a part of his own personal résumé website. I was so bad at programming at school that I was also über-impressed by the small script he put on his website, a script called Mosaïc which went like this: you have a blank box, on which you have to click and then small boxes in gray would appear in tiles, big and small, then the small gray boxes went around their canvas before disappearing, over and over again. Wow. I. Was. Impressed. (Years from that day, we do the more advanced version of this small animation in each and every web product we deliver to our clients – I guess Mosaïc was the primitive version of JQuery?)

The blog, of course, also has his photograph. In black and white sepia. He looked serious, bold, but there was some fun sparkling in his eyes and most importantly, he was handsome. He had green eyes (That you will inherit, Louis), with deep dimples etched in his cheeks when he smiled (The dimples you will inherit too), dark hair and most important of all, he was funny.

After he said hello, we kinda talked for like, five hours straight and then he called me. I liked his voice with a strong French accent (At that time, Louis, I no longer spoke French so your father made an effort to talk in English).

I was asking myself, “What is this? Why would I be talking to a stranger I don’t even know for real? Am I getting desperate? That desperate so I’d talk to just anyone?” But he was so entertaining I couldn’t stop talking to him.

At that time, Yahoo! was booming. (So sad that it’s declining today) And Yahoo! Messenger was fun! Such a great instant chat messenger. I no longer use Yahoo! Products except Flickr – kinda miss those days. And by then, we could have a main Yahoo nickname that serves as our email address, but in addition to this main nickname, we could have endless multiple nicknames.

AsHeardOnRadio’s main email nickname was Mainate. It meant Black Myna Bird in English.

Strange thing was, we were strangers, right? But we talked for hours and as we talked and talked, everything felt so familiar. Like we knew each other for real, and for years. People say, that’s how you know you find your soulmate. For me, it was because he was interesting.

Do you know where Indonesia is, Mister?

“Where are you from?” AsHeardOnRadio asked me.

“Indonesia. Do you have any idea where it is?” I responded. I was sure he didn’t know where it was.

“Of course I do,” he knew where it was even if he had not a single clue how the country could be like. I was the first Indonesian AsHeardOnRadio had ever met in his entire life. (There were a lot of Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese in Paris, but Indonesian? He had never met one before)

Of course, at that time, he had no idea he would end up marrying this very Indonesian and so far has spent 20% of his life in the country, where his son was born, too.

The Parisian Guy. That I ended up marrying and became the father of my baby son. Funny how life goes around making things fall into places, eh?

I would spend my whole first week of August, right before I flew to Ibiza with Ed, talking on Yahoo! Messenger with AsHeardOnRadio.

And by the time I had to fly to Ibiza, he had me under his spell.