Jakarta's nightlife is one of the best-kept secrets in Asia, and the thumping heart of all this darkness is the clubbing and entertainment scene in the city's northern reaches, knows as Kota. By day it masquerades as Chinatown's bustling commercial district. When night falls, the place transforms into a wild nocturnal playground, and little of what goes on there is particularly legal. Monster clubs like Stadium, Millennium, Sydney 2000, Raja Mas and 1001 are one-stop dens of unbridled pleasure.
Kota clubs typically comprise a few floors, each offering a different sort of vice. Ravers drown in heaving techno beats in cavernous, pitch-dark central dance halls. This is also where drugs - mostly ecstasy pills - are consumed en mass. The club management doesn't deal drugs directly, but allows outside dealers to operate wihin the venues so that someone is accountable if things go wrong. Management receives at least around $20,000 per month just for 'leasing ' its turf to the dealer. Pills purchased inside - where waiters and bathroom janitors act as 'runners' cost about $15. Besides the main dance hall, clubs usually house a karaoke floor comprising private singing rooms where male clientele are accompanied by hostesses who double as strippers; a live music floor, where a mama-san introduces glassy-eyed guests to giggle bar girls; and the natural extension of all that - a 'love hotel' floor, where guests and their bar girls grab rooms by the hour to get better acquainted.
Stadium, which depending on who you're talking to is alternately described as heaven or hell, is surely the most legendary of the bunch. So unrelenting is the weekend action there that from Friday through Monday morning it never actually shuts. The busiest time on its psychedelic dance floor is Sunday at about 9AM, when most clubbers are winding down from an all-night 'trip' and others are just arriving after waking from their beauty sleep.
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