Knocking in the Middle of the Night

My roomate had left for India in the morning at about 10am, and I was left all alone in the apartment on a Saturday night. I was kind of tired and decided to turn in early for the night around 11:30pm Jakarta time (yes, early night for me). There was distant thunder heard and it looked like rain will fall soon. I locked the main door and closed my room door (which is becoming a habit here, because my roomate used to smoke in the living room) and I soon fell into a deep slumber.

I was woken up by loud knocking and it startled me. In my stupor, I was wondering what was causing the noise and was trying to make sense of it when I realised it came from my window. I decided to investigate and stumbled towards the window, drawing the blinds and peeped out into the rainy night. Holy shit! There was a man standing outside my window! I can’t tell you enough how stunned I was, but for a couple of seconds I could not make sense of the situation. I was just standing there, staring at the guy without my glasses and trying to decide what he wants. Then it finally hit me! It was one of my Thai colleagues! I opened the window and peered out, and he told me that my roomate was stuck outside my apartment door because I had it locked. I had turned off my mobile, and I probably could not hear the apartment phone ringing.

In my stunned state, I even forgot to ask the poor guy if he wanted to crawl into my apartment first. It was a dangerous thing to do, in the rain, climbing across from his own window ledge. I took a look at the clock and it was only 2am in the morning. I finally opened the main door and apologized to my roomate. I was really not expecting him to be back again. It turned out that he had missed his flight and he was stuck in traffic for about 7 hours on his way back. And he said he will be heading back to the airport again in about 2 hours time. Man, if I were him, I would have checked myself into the hotel at the airport and stayed there until the flight. When I woke up this morning, he was gone again.

Quite some adventure I had over the past 2 days, all because of the bad weather and poor drainage system in Jakarta. The next big experience will probably an earthquake for me, just to make it all complete