Wine is the only subject that I can’t handle as the “Grumpy French Man”. Wine is not only alcohol for me. It contains alcohol, nobody can deny this point, but it contains much more than that and it’s why I don’t drink beer or strong alcohol. Wine is a sharing drink that fills your mouth [...]

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If I had no sense of humour, I would long ago have committed suicide. ~ Mahatma Gandhi ~  Is there any real correlation between higher acquired intelligence (through education) and sense of humour? Research has it, there is. But maybe not really? Time and again, hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars in industrialized countries had [...]

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‘‘I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way’’.  I couldn’t agree more with this excerpt from the first verse of an 80’s hit song performed by the late Whitney Houston. In the urban areas of Indonesia, a growing middle class backed by rising incomes has increased the [...]

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We expatriates must admire the Indonesian ability of putting things in perspective and to talk things down, because it could have been so much worse. Just recently a friend told me about a worker in his garden who was building this brick wall. Suddenly a brick came smashing through the window, missing his 18 month [...]

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When writing about aid projects words like ‘uplifting’, ‘inspirational’ or ‘downright bloody fantastic’ rarely, if ever, enter the vocabulary of cynical development consultants. That maxim held true until I visited the East Bali Poverty Project (EBPP) located on the remote and inhospitable northeastern slopes of Mount Agung and Mount Abang in Bali. The project is [...]

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The Family at Lestari Sayang Anak Orphanage I think a lot of us, although we may not like to admit it, take things for granted, most importantly the love and support we have from our parents. Every child deserves to be loved unconditionally, even if not by their birth parents, and down a little alleyway [...]

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I told my Facebook friends that I was writing an article about New Year’s resolutions, and asked them for inspiration. (I don’t normally make resolutions; I tend to leave those to my ethnically German spouse who, true to type, likes setting goals.) I asked my friends what they thought about New Year’s resolutions and whether [...]

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If you plan on walking into a department store this week and dropping Rp 3.2 million on a six-foot tall fake Christmas tree, don’t read this story. But if Christmas tree haggling is something you pride yourself on, if you look at the whole thing more like Christmas tree hunting than shopping, by all means [...]

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Guys, I am back to my grumpy old self. In the last article, “Solution to the Global Crisis”, I tried to be serious and it was basically a disaster. So let’s get back to my basics, which means making you laugh with my grouchiness. Christmas is coming very soon. For many of you, it signifies [...]

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Criticising Jakarta’s shopping malls for their ostentatious Christmas displays is too easy. We can feel sickened by the crass commercialisation of religious holidays in a country where many people do not have enough to eat, or we can naively view the Christmas glitz as an effort to uphold Indonesia’s religious pluralism. Ultimately, it’s a mostly [...]

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