Em.'s In & Outs

The first sense of Jakarta I ever had was when I was about 10 and my aunt’s friend, who was very well-travelled, told me : ‘Jakarta is the city in which you get lost when you’re biking’. It’s strange how little details like that struck you, but it was only 11 years later that I could verify this stranger’s statement.

I flied to Jakarta the day after my last final exam at CUHK, without even having had time to put myself together and to say proper good-byes to my classmates. Everything indeed seemed to be going wrong as I had trouble with moneychangers, customs, immigration, everything, before leaving Hong Kong (a trend that I found out would continue each time I go to this airport), so in a sense my first trip to South-East Asia started on the wrong foot. I got to the Big Durian at night and was glad to meet up with Stian, a good friend from Toronto, who is currently undertaking his co-op placement with CARE Indonesia (whose office I visited with him, not without a thought of how different my own placement will be from his).

I did not immediately ‘feel ostracized as a white person’, as I’ve been warned (locals actually seemed to care that I didn’t get ran over by a bus!) but I rather had a quick sense that the rules of the game where quite different here than any other place I’ve been. Upon entering Indonesia, in contrast to Cuba’s ‘Welcome to the only free land in the Americas’, stand ‘Welcome to Indonesia. Death to drug traffickers’. Impressive. Jakarta was the most chaotic place my brain could conceive; lots of ink has been devoted to urban planning in the megapolis of the world’s fourth highest population. As a summary: the city has no clear centre but rather many points of convergence, the streets are too narrow to accommodate the flow of a) cabs and big SUVs in Kemang, the expat area, b) the tons of motorcycles and ojex (motorcycle taxis) that circulate around a) and c) all the other types of transportation. There is no such thing as a sidewalk or even street side, which makes going around quite hazardous, as it is usually wrecked, with numerous holes, unevenness and in close proximity to deep open air sewers. Vehicles often park where you would expect to be walking, and when by pure coincidence there seems to be a lane devoted to slower traffic, it gets crowded by impatient drivers. There is not really a system of mass transit adapted to the population density, but rather an abundance of mini-buses, which are often overpacked with people hanging off the door and provide live entertainment (musicians often hop on them to get some money), and which most outsiders would deem ‘extremely unsafe’, to the least.

So that was my first impression of the Big Durian, which was possibly influenced by everybody’s negative comments. In spite all of this, it was special to be in Batavia alias Betawi, especially while being impregnated by such anti- and post-colonial literature such as the Letters of a Javanese Princess and the Buru Quartet, a series by Toer, a most prominent Indonesian writer exposing the complexities and intersectionality of race, gender and language in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the twentieth century. It was great to collect new sights (veiled young women with their helmet on the motorbike), smells and tastes. I must admit Indonesian food did not please my stomach as much as Chinese food, but we had some fun dining experiences in small warungs (restaurants), in which I always crossed my fingers so I wouldn’t get sick (a fear which was justified, considering Stian got typhoid right after I got there!). In the couple of days I was there, I had the chance to experience Jakarta’s contrasts, by visiting some very posh cafes and malls and by having a night out drinking Barung (the national ale) with other foreigners, while also strolling across parallel streets and discovering a whole new world at the proximity of the urban jungle. My best memories are those of a little kampung (village encroached in the city) in which it was easier to interact with locals and where it was good to just hang out, drink some fresh juice and play with kids. Stian will soon move out of his cozy apartment to possibly move into a house in one of these small streets. Good luck with that dude!