Jakarta: a life Experience

Holy Crap.  I have never experienced such a dramatic change in culture and basically everything (except climate) in just a 90 minute flight.  First of all, couchsurfing is amazing.  Nico and I are so lucky to have had the change to really experience how people live in Jakarta and learn so much about it.  We stayed with a 24 year old math teacher named Rheden, who lives with his family in a modest little house in South Jakarta.  His whole family were amazing hosts as they were so happy to see us and talk to us and constantly feed us new Indonesian foods.  About the only thing that was normal to me was rice.  For them it is not a meal unless it includes rice (breakfast, lunch and dinner).  But everything that goes with it and how it was prepared was different and equally new and delicious every time.  They believe that when they have guests they really take care of them.  They made every meal (and lots of snacks) for us when we were around and would not let us clean up at all even though we tried every single time.

This is Rheden's family at 6am on the day we left.  Rheden is in the picture below.

Jakarta is not much of a tourist city.  This has made for some totally unique experiences here, especially having locals as hosts.  First off, when we first took a bus into the middle of town, we were constantly surprised by the people.  It seemed that they all wanted to sell us stuff cause we were foreigners.  But once we actually listened to what they were saying, the ones that have some broken english are all trying to help us get to where we need to go by pointing out directions.  And everyone else just wants to say “Hi Mister!”  That's it... not begging, or selling crap, they just want to say hi.

The second day that we were here, Nico and I went with Rheden's Mom and Sister to go pick up his 6 yr old nephew from school.  Now in this small school, most of the kids had never seen a white person before, but it is part of their curriculum to learn some english.  We kinda walk in and all the kids are just looking at us, and following with some distance.  Apparently they all love photos...  I take out my camera and say “foto!” and they all get super excited and pose, and then I get in there with them.  Then they all want to talk in English with us.  Next thing we know, a path is cleared and the teachers are ushering us to the front of a classroom with 40 super excited 9 year olds.  So here we are trying to teach some english words.  We'd say something and then they would all repeat it.  I have never seen so much excitement in a classroom.  Then after a few minutes we tried to leave, but then every single kid wanted to shake our hands.  They also do this thing where they bring your hand to their forehead and sometimes kiss it to show respect to elders.  I felt like some celebrity being there with everyone doing this to us.  Crazy that it is all just because of the color of my skin.  Then we were ushered into the headmasters office to meet with the people running the school and sign their visitors book.  This morning was an experience that I will remember for the rest of my life for sure.

Later that day Nico went into the middle of the city and went to the national monument (Monas) and to  Masjid Istiqlal which is the third largest mosque in the world.  This city is something different.  To continue with the craziness of being white from before... Wherever we went people would want to take their picture with us.  About 10 times that day we took photos with strangers, probably so many times cause I have a really hard time ignoring people.  I am constantly saying “halo” to people on the side of the road.  The bus system here is also very different.  The buses have no set stops.  You just wave one down as it goes by and then tap the ceiling when you want to get off.  The driver will stop (or just roll slowly) in the middle of the road; not even necessarily on the side of the road – so you wander through traffic to the relative safety of the sidewalk.  The doors are always open and there is a guy who hangs out the door hustling people to get on the bus and collecting money.  Then when we stop at a traffic light people with guitars get on and play a song or two, collect some money and then hop off and wait for the next bus.

It is a really good thing that Nico and I studied a little bit of bahasa indonesia before we came here.  Unless they deal with tourists, which is not many people, very few people speak any english.  Our broken Indonesian has saved our butts a couple times especially when we first got to where we were to meet Rheden for the first time and we borrowed someone's phone to send him a text saying we made it.

Now we are on a train (this will probably be posted sometime later...) to Jogja.  It was an amazing experience being in Jakarta, but also very tiring.  You always need to be “on” and paying attention.  Also Jakarta has awful air quality.  There is smog from the tons of cars and motorbikes and traffic that does not end even in the middle of the day.  And everyone smokes all the time.  So I am happy to be moving on, although I am not sure what we are moving on to.  We hear that it is kind of the cultural center of Java, and there is a big Buddhist temple nearby.  We might have to actually spend the $30 for a lonely planet travel guide, cause there is so much in this country and we are only allowed 30 days here.

getting a tour in Istiqlal

I think that is it for now, I feel like I could write pages about all we've seen in just these past few days, but maybe I'll save some for later. Phew.