Lacks of Entertainments

In case of pleasure, Tegal is lacking it. Like on Saturdays, for example, when the office closes at 6 in the evening, the teachers and staffs of EF, most of who come from the other cities all around Java and Sumatra, always have such a hard time to decide what to do. There are seriously not so many options for it. There are no clubs here, no café’s, not even book stores. So where can I get some books to read if an outing is not really a choice? Pam said that to purchase books she usually had to go to Cirebon, the nearest bigger city in West Java, which takes about 1.5 hour journey.

It’s already quite good that it has 4 malls, though. I’m not a big fan of malls, but here, better than nothing. Inside the office/apartment, however, modern facilities are quite complete. There are an internet connection, computers and the children games (I’m interested in installing some of my own games, or even Adobe Photoshop, but I’m not sure if I can do that in one of them. But I’ll try asking), DVD players, big TV, refrigerator etc. But we surely can’t keep being home all the time, right? We work and live in the building. We need to get out!

So last weekend we decided to go to a karaoke place. Ernie and Pam were happy when they knew that I liked karaoke, too. They finally managed one of the front desk girls, Nisa, to join us.

I didn’t know where they’d take us until we arrived at Plaza Hotel. Oh-oh… Must be expensive. After a quite long argument with the becak drivers about the price we paid (we already agreed before taking their becaks that we would pay Rp 4,000 for each becak to get to Plaza hotel and now they were pretending that they didn’t agree; then they asked for 10,000). But we left them anyway with Rp 5,000 each and got inside the quite luxurious hotel. Warnings in my head! Money money money…

It cost us Rp 60,000 an hour to rent a karaoke room. Dang! In Surabaya it costs only Rp 17,500 per hour for a small room in the non-busy days. But we decided to give it a shot anyway. Just curious.

There is only one kind of karaoke room. No small, big, or VIP rooms there. Basically it’s just like a hotel room, which of course is very nice and comfy, but it’s equipped with a quite big TV and audio system. But then again, we, coming from Jakarta and Surabaya, were a bit disappointed to see that there was no computer there to list our chosen songs. We had to use the traditional way, which was, we had to read the big catalogue of songs (there was only ONE catalogue) and press the number of the song opted from the remote control. I felt like being brought back to the 1980s. hehe…

Well anyway, we had fun. We didn’t stay longer than an hour, though, for it was hell too expensive (I mean in a small town like Tegal, you don’t really expect that, do you?), so we made plans to do the karaoke at our own place, with the DVD player and some pirated karaoke CDs.

When I was home, I felt like having my computer sent here. It’s gonna be so much better when I have my computer here. I can continue my new website’s skin design, I can play a lot of computer games, I can retouch my pictures… I can just basically do a LOT with a computer. MY OWN computer.

*sigh*