Luxuries of the Big City

Being in Southeast Asia has resulted in me becoming somewhat addicted to massages.  It is a habit that I am afraid will be difficult to fund when I return to the US, so I am thankful that won’t be happening anytime soon.

Yesterday afternoon I found a pleasant café (which I rode a kopaja to without incident!), and settled in for a long afternoon of working on graduate school application essays.  Feeling satisfied with my work but a little in the neck after peering over a laptop for too long, I decided to treat myself to a massage.

This was my first massage in Jakarta, yes I had gone a whole month and a half without, and it definitely was a different experience from the massages I used to get in Jambi.  To begin with, it was $11 for the hour compared to the $2.50 in Jambi (as a bule I paid $.50 extra since I was larger than Indonesians).  Additionally, the massage was conducted on a real massage table, in a well-established salon and I had a nice thick towel to cover me.  I found this quite disimilar to the thin carpet on the floor of a neighbor’s living room where I would be wrapped in one of the woman’s floral sarongs.  The woman at Bersih Sehat was also very professional and sensitive to my needs, even using some aromatherapy, which further contrasted with the women in Jambi who would massage the same area over and over until I contorted in pain, all the while releasing a continuum of grunts and even burps from their physical exertion.  So it was a pleasant but pricier experience; for me, a little Jakarta culture shock all over again.