Where Are We? "Afgan"istan?

As you may know from my previous posts, my cousins from Melbourne are staying here until next week. I had to accompany them everywhere. I took them to the many malls Jakarta has to offer, have a nice meal together, and I even braved the typically-Indonesian crowd in Taman Safari a couple of weeks ago. Now, that really says "everywhere". This weekend, we headed to the Ancol beach, if you can still call it one. As usual, we stayed at Putri Duyung so that we can easily enjoy the facilities there, like the cable car, sailboat, and the much-hyped Police Academy Stunt Show, which reminds me of a wonderful childhood experience in Warner Bros Movie World, Gold Coast. But I'm not sacrificing my precious spare time to talk about that, although I could find many things to write about.

This time, it's about a new nascent talent and his booming hit song: Afgan and his "Terima Kasih Cinta". I heard this song like a thousand times in Ancol. First, I came at dinner time since I had to endure the torture of matriculation program during the day. We had a nice meal, accompanied by an aspiring singer who happily sang his rendition of "Terima Kasih Cinta". Then, he invited the dinner guests to come up to the stage and sing too. One man answered the call to fame, and sang. His song? "Terima Kasih Cinta". That's number two. Back to our cottage, there was a birthday party happening next door. I pity the guests, it was a night of awful singing. But fear not, for "Terima Kasih Cinta" was there too, albeit a little bit off. That would be number three. And I thought I heard another party quite farther away with, of course, a dose of "Terima Kasih Cinta".

The next day, it started out without the grace of Afgan, fortunately. But the peace didn't last long. We decided to have lunch at Bandar Jakarta, which serves excellent seafood dishes. As if the universe was conspiring against me, they had this live music show that, you guessed it, cheerfully served Afgan's hit to everyone at the restaurant. It's like number five or six, or even more; I didn't really count. As if the torture weren't enough, the vocalist invited guests to sing on the stage. A young kid went there, and sang something from some band that I don't really know. By the way, he could sing really surprisingly well. He deserved an applause...if he didn't keep on singing and, yeah, covered "Terima Kasih Cinta". Can you believe my luck?

What I wrote is just a small part of the whole Afgan experience. There must be some more "Terima Kasih Cinta" performances that I don't remember for sure. I'm not dissing Afgan in any way, but listening to his only hit to date over and over is just annoying. Hello, Indonesia, there are thousands of other songs in the great Indonesian songs book. Please pick something else. We're not living in "Afgan"istan.