On My Own Again

Well...sort of. If you don't count the nanny, the maid, the gardener, the driver, the security guard and the many other random people that stop by during the day to do some "work" or drop off something or mainly just hang out in my garage and socialize with the household staff, then I am own my own again to care for the kids, the house, Justin and our new lives in Jakarta. Yes, Debbie left today which marks the end of a very long run of having very helpful family members around. It has been fun but now I guess it is time to return to a new state of normalcy.

So, did you catch the title of this blog? When I thought of it the song, "On the Road Again", played through my mind. Mentioning this gives me the perfect opportunity to talk about another aspect of Jakarta life, the music. Since I have spent a fair amount of time in the car, I have had the opportunity to listen to some of the local radio stations. Our driver tends to keep the radio tuned to an English speaking broadcast. And on this station they play an interesting mix of American music. The most notable thing isn't necessarily what songs they choose to play. It is the fact that many of them are remakes of popular American songs. Now, I know that we are all used to hearing remakes of songs now and then. But I would say that 75% of the songs they play are remakes and not any that you have heard before. It is almost like they got a group of people together, went to a recording studio and had them sing song after song after song until they had enough of a variety. With the popularity of karyoke around here, they could have just went to a karyoke bar and started recording what they heard. Don't get me wrong. The remakes aren't bad. It is just that I will hear a song coming on that I know and very rarely will I hear the original artist. You know another thought...pirating DVDs is a big business over here. So along the same lines, maybe they didn't want to pay for the copyright or whatever they need to have to play the originals over here so they changed them up to make it legal. Who knows.