The Jakarta Skyline

My fiancee asked me why I only talked about Jakarta's dirty alleys and decrepit trucks, and I did not mention the skyscrapers, the elegant houses and mansions and apartment complexes.

I can say that those are the things one expects to find in nearly any metropolis of the world, while rusty trucks sporting fearsome bumpers are rather unique.

Yet, it is true that Jakarta has a rather impressive skyline. There are several tall and shiny skyscrapers - I do not know their names, they are not as famous as the ones in New York or even the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur, but they are buildings of a respectable size and built with modern techniques.

Many shopping malls, from big to huge, dot Jakarta and attract vast crowds. Anything can be found there, from the most modern and trendy restaurants to luxury stores, from shops selling the traditional batik fabrics to small and crowded auto parts stores (want a Daihatsu transmission shaft? it was just hanging from the wall in a store).

But the city is not just about skyscrapers and malls: many streets (I cannot recall which area) are lined with beautiful houses and villas and imponent trees growing in the gardens - but only little of the houses can be seen behind the high walls and fences around them. I have been in some of them and been quite impressed by the vast salons and tiled floors and frequent fish ponds.

And to end... well, the apartments in the recent condos are not bad at all too. I have spent a few days in one, at the twelfth floor of a 30-story tower, one the four built around a square where a garden and a big pool and and another pool snaking around the garden take place.

Scenes from Jakarta

An alley between two row of houses, which I cannot tell whether it's a public way or an extension of private houses: the alley has a roof - of disparate materials- and there are seats and sinks, people washing their stuff and one old lady preparing some sort of food. Between one house door and the other, a tiny hairdressing salon. Deeper into the alley, a woman sits behind a little stall, selling top-up cards for mobile phones, and at the same time talking to a stark-naked, chubby kid of about 10 years. The people there don't pay much attention to the rare white guy among them; what makes me stand out the most are probably my trainers, in a world where 90% of the people wear sandals or flip-flops - or no footwear at all. Except security guards on duty, proud of their black and white boots.

On the streets, a number of trucks, from mid-size to 18-wheeled monsters. The majority of them old and worn, roaring aloud, dented and eaten by corrosion, patched up with layers and layers of caulk and paint, rough arc weldings, iron wire, and whatever material was handy at the moment. Yet, in a display of what seems to be a deeply ingrained aesthetical sense, a number of these trucks and trailers are painted in combinations of bright colours, and often decorated with elaborate paintings and fancy-shaped protection grilles. The rear of trucks and minibuses often carry funny or irriverent writings too, painted or stitched.

A market somewhere in the town, a concrete building, floors and pilalrs and ceilings covered in crud. Tiny passageways separate stalls loaded with any kind of stuff: food, knives, strange fruits, kitchen utensils, handicrafts, tools, enormous stone mortars, traditional medicines, coffee. Small eateries diffuse the smell of frying oil and spices: we sit at a bench in one of these to have a meatball soup and a dish of steamed chicken, stir-fried mushrooms and noodles. It tasted good and produced no ill side-effects. The market takes its electricity from a precarious, inestricable tangle of wires atteched to the roof and pillars. In another area, a gutter full of putrid water emits an unbearable stench. At the margins of the market, stray cats wander around, while a guy stands in the middle of a rubbish skip, sorting plastic waste from the rest - with his bare hands.

Along another road, a young boy is propelling forward a waste cardboard cart: it obviously is a metal box fitted with two bicycle wheels and joined to the frame of a mountain bike. In the cargo, another young boy is enjoying the the ride listening to music from a portable player.

Love Is a Holiday

Tomorrow in the morning I'll be off to the warm tropical lands. A couple of weeks away from worries. Needless to say, posting will be sporadic.

However, Merry Christmas greetings for my readers!

Impressions of Jakarta, Part 3

The Flood
I arrived there just in time to experience firsthand the worst flood (banjir) in years. Water was up to 4 meters deep in some parts of the city. The hotel was effected marginally, too: for the first two days, satellite TV was restricted to a local channel and Al-Jazira (argh!) and Internet was not available (no big deal; I intentionally left my laptop home). Then the hotel pools had to be emptied due to a shortage of clean water and for one day shower water had to be rationed. But it's nothing compared to the several tens of thousand people who had to be evacuated and saw their properties severely damaged. At some point, I began worrying that riots or disturbances of some sort may break out with all the evacuees in precarious conditions, but nothing happened. The Italian embassy - which had been flooded too - had no particular recommendations. Travelling around was even more difficult than usual, and my friend could not go to work. But we spent more time together, and we're more-than-friends now... Waste collection was disrupted, and a pile of rubbish will be really nasty after a few days in the tropical climate, trust me.

People tried to make the most of the situation, so it was not uncommon to see fishermen with rods or the throwing nets typical of SE Asia trying to pull some fish out of the flood water. However, most of the water were gone by Friday, and on Saturday morning I even had a brief swim in the pool.

The Security
Every hotel, mall and many business buildings are protected by checkpoints where security guards check the trunk and underside of incoming vehicles for explosive or other nasty devices. It feels awkward initially, but I got used to it. Many malls also have security personnell checking bags and backpacks at the entrance.

Cops over there do not normally carry firearms, but a long truncheon and a taser/stun gun (my lady told me that cash is required not to be tasered...). In fact, the only openly armed person was a non-uniformed guy walking across the mall with a 12 ga. semiauto slung over his shoulder. Apparently, in Indonesia it is sufficient to pay a rather hefty fee to obtain a firearm carry license, but I don't know the details.

The Food
Food in Jakarta is of the general Asian variety: stir-fried and deep-fried stuff; rice, noodles, vegs - but with local variations. First of all, over there they just love chillies and put inordinate amounts of them everywhere. They also eat loads of seafood; probably the most typical dish is fried rice with seafood (and chillies). Boiled meat, beef and chicken, is also very popular, including oxtail, tripes and brains. Eggs are boiled in a fashion that renders them brown on the outside, so I needed some times to understand what those smooth and brown globes were. Another specialty is cow skin; I'm not sure how it is cooked but it tastes rather nice - as long as you don't think about what it actually is.

We went to an excellent seafood restaurant where I had a fish covered in an aromatic paste, then wrapped in palm leaves and finally grilled: delicious. And another fish, cut open and then deep-fried whole, so it assumed a sort of butterfly shape. That one was delicious too, and my lady assured me I could eat also fins and even bones, but I wasn't interested. The meat was enough.

The curious thing is that bread is common in Indonesia, and you can even find butter-fried bread sweets. Bread & butter aren't Asian things, so I suppose it must be a leftover of the Dutch colonization. Which lasted quite a long while, and the Indonesians shook off with the force of arms.

Read Part 2

Impressions of Jakarta, Part 2

The Traffic
I already mentioned it, but traffic in Jakarta has to be seen to be believed. It is heavy, but also utterly chaotic. Drivers are supposed to keep the left hand side, but on the backroads they seem to keep whatever side of the road is more convenient. Motorbikes (hojek) - often with two or three people on them - pop up from everywhere, trying to enter the road, overteke or switch lanes at anytime from all sides. Cars and those terrible three-wheeled taxis do more or less the same. The honk is your best friend over there. Passenger buses ride with no front and rear doors (I dare to guess that it's the only ventilation system they have) and not just seldom passengers perform incredible stunts to hop on and off moving buses with their luggage. Pedestrians have to be quick and sharp while crossing roads - but you can see many happily walking up and down the side of expressways. Or maybe it was just because the flood made things even worse than usual. A lot of vehicles are old and battered; I thought the traffic in Italy (at least the North) was bad, but Jakarta is a couple orders of magnitude worse.

Islam
It had to be coming, Indonesia being the most populous Islamic country. But let's start with a clarification: as far as I know, Indonesia is a federal republic in which the constituent states (or provinces; you get it) have rather large autonomy. The constitution of the Indonesia is a secular one.
The kind of Islam I've seen in Jakarta seems pretty easygoing. There are many mosques, but also a number of Christian churches. I haven't seen a single burqa - while I have seen many in London: most Indonesian women seem content with wearing a hair-covering veil over modest but western-style clothes; ankles and forearms are often exposed. A few women wear also long vests, but that's about all. Alcohol can be bought almost everywhere, and pork products are just a bit less common. It was close to the Chinese New Year, and this being the year of the Pig, many shops were openly selling pig toys and other pig-themed items. Edgware Road, London, looks much more Islamic (and Arabic) than Jakarta. Of course, I know that Indonesia has its own set of radicals and jihadis. One episode I witnessed was...

The Disturbing Souvenir
I went to this huge shopping mall, Taman Anggrek, and in there some shops also have smaller stalls on the mall's inner concourse. One of these stalls sold souvenirs - small flags, statues, fridge magnets and all that. I noticed a souvenir that was a reproduction of the WTC in New York complete of the first plane slamming into the tower and a big, golden, grinning Bin Laden's face beside the Twin Towers. I muttered "That's sick" and walked away. The sick souvenir just lied casually among US flags, Leaning Towers of Pisa and many other innocuous items: I do not know whether I should be more or less disturbed by that. I did not try to engage the girl at the stall in conversation for various reasons: Most people over there do not speak enough English for an abstract conversation; she was in all likelihood just a worker with little if any say in the matter - and first of all, it is not exactly wise to rock the boat when you're alone in a foreign and even Islamic country.

Read Part 1
Read Part 3

Impressions of Jakarta, Part 1

The Air
Indonesia is a tropical country, so I naturally expected the climate to be hot and humid. But how hot and humid, I could not figure out before experiencing it. And I can say, a lot - every second there is like a hot and particularly humid summer day in Italy; one of those days when the smallest movement gets you drenched in sweat. Though my host told me those days of flood were very humid even for Indonesia. But the air in Jakarta isn't clean, not at all. The haze you can see over the city is not just water vapour, and the backroads are full of the smell of two-stroke exhaust, overused frying oil, stagnant putrid water, the occasional whiff of actual rotting rubbish and maybe durian, the most infamous fruit in the world. And this brings us to...

Durian
It's a cantaloupe-sized fruit, but with a spiky, spiny outside. Its most distinctive property is the strong smell, a curious combination of rotten, putrid notes and fruity ones. Some estabilshments in Jakarta, such as the hotel where I stayed, do not allow durian on their premises and define its odour "offensive". Still, many locals just love it - my host does, and so do some girls from the Philipines who work at my village's bar in Italy. I tasted durian, of course, but did not like it. It is like a sweet, creamy pulp with a weak taste much like the fruit's odour - I could bear eating it in an emergency, but not for pleasure.

The Streets
Many streets of Jakarta are like endless markets, lined with stalls selling food - a lot of fried (goreng) stuff - stuffed balls, pasty squares with some unidentified filling; the omnipresent rice and noodles with seafood or chicken. And stalls selling soft drinks, cigarettes, Chinese medicines, and lot of items I did not have occasion to examine closely. The rithm of life is more relaxed than in the West, and many people just gather to chat and kill some time at road junctions, under bridges and other structures - especially during the frequent squalls of heavy rain. But I admit, as an imperialist western male I did not spend a lot of time going native; I preferred the comfort of my hotel or at least shopping malls. However, adults seemed to barely notice my obvious diversity; only some small children did actually stare at the alien in front of them.

The Language
I gather that the local language, bahasa Indonesia, has been in part "designed" by the ideologues of Indonesian indipendence and nationalism, taking Malay as the starting point. Indonesian appears to have a rather simple structure with some curious features - in many cases, the same words appear to be used as nouns and adjectives (as in the bahasa indonesia expression itself). But the most evident characteristic of this language is the staggering number of borrowed words: polisi, kartu, mal, taksi, monumen, konsierse, teroris and many many more. I can only recognize words borrowed from English (Inngris) and european languages, but there are also ones which may be borrowed from Chinese and Arabic (selamat comes to mind). There are also tricky words: air over there means water, in fact...

Read Part 2

From The Flood

I'm still in Jakarta, safe and sound. Probably you know that the city has been hit by a severe flood that killed nearly 60 people and made 200 000 homeless. I've seen the flood with my own eyes, but the biggest incoveniences I suffered are longer taxi rides and closure of the hotel's pool. Only one day I and my friend almost had to wade through a flooded stretch of road, but in the end we rode to the hotel on the back of two motorbikes - a local favourite among transports. Swimming in the muddy floodwaters like some kids here do may be more real, but it's not my thing, terima kasih.

Regular blogging will probably resume at some point next week.