The strange things

What is this place for, with rows of empty plastic seats facing a large projector screen with index numbers of some sorts, plenty of laptops around and a wine-bar lookalike reception counter on one side? Guessing from its name, e-Capital, it is probably a place for people to come in and check movement of the likes of stocks and funds.

But it is weird. How is the service charged and what kinds of service are actually available? Are they stockbrokers, or simply a place no different from an ordinary internet cafe? And what is really peculiar about it is that this is not New York, London, Tokyo or Hong Kong, where the money markets of highest value of capitalization are, but in a "motor mall" in Jakarta town - a mall with major car showrooms on the ground floor and restaurants on the second. e-Captial is among the restaurants.

Perhaps the rationale for this place rests on the patrons of this motor mall, who are mainly white-collars from the office buildings around, including our Stock Exchange Building. I didn't bother to walk in and make my enquiries of research. There are few visitors, if not entirely desserted.

Suddenly, I am secretly amazed at the idiosyncrasies and nuances observed from foreign places which may not readily fit into one's common sense developed from home, eg, the prevalent local scene of a family of four commuting on an ordinary motor-bike, with kids and babies squeezed between parents and no one wearing helmet.

Other interesting things also came back to my mind - the Mumbai taxi with the meter situated outside rather than within the vehicle, like a side mirror; the Korean roadblock policeman who asked me to breathe into a paper cup for him to smell and check on drink-driving; the Canadian pedestrains who scold and bang on cars daringly driven to cross the pavement to get on to the road, although there is no other way for a car to get out from a building or car park to reach the road, not unless it can fly...these things are as marvelous to me as, no doubt, the chicken-feet-sucking Chinese to the Westerners!