Indonesia: Life In The Islands

Jakarta: the journey here

I've been in Jakarta, Indonesia for almost exactly a month now. The trip over here took three days, from NY to San Fran, San Fran to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Singapore, a night in a five star hotel, and then the one hour flight from Singapore to Jakarta on the third day of traveling.
Along the way I met up with the seventeen other English Teaching Assistants, or ETAs. We had never met before, so mostly I just approached people who looked like they were around 20-30 years old and asked if they were going to Indonesia. By the time we stayed in the hotel in Singapore, we had all met up.
The US government is not wasting any money when it comes to our accomodations! We were picked up at the Soekarno Airport in Jakarta by our coordinator, Nelly, and taken to the very nice Hotel Aryaduta in downtown Jakarta. We had all assumed we would have roommates, but no--for the entire month of August, we each get our own room in a five star hotel. Most of us had expected to be roughing it here, so that was even more of a shock than bad conditions would have been!
Jakarta is so different than any city I've ever been in--the majority of people who live here are Muslim, and there are five calls to prayer a day. Mosques throughout the city broadcast prayers and singing on speakers. You'll be walking down the street when suddenly the air will be filled with songs and the crackle of the microphones. It actually sounds very beautiful. The first call to prayer is at 4:30 am. It woke me up for the first week, but now I can sleep through it. The other calls are at noon (siang), 3 pm, 6 pm, and 7pm.
The people here have been overwhelmingly friendly so far. We're obviously foreigners with our light skin, so when we walk on the road people yell "Mister, mister" and any other English words they know. I always speak back, but "How are you?" is pretty much the extent of most people's vocabulary and then they just smile at me. The people at the hotel know a little more English, and they are always eager to talk to us and try to improve. They're all very nice and memorize our names and places where we go a lot, so that's been really fun.
Jakarta is very cheap compared to the US. They use the rupiah here, and there are about 9,500 rp per $1USD. A ten minute cab ride will usually cost about 12,000 rp, or just a little over a dollar. Split between four people, that isn't too bad! And it's a good thing taxis are cheap, because the traffic here is atrocious. The city was designed with series of one way streets with no turnabouts, so to get to an address on the other side of the road you have to travel all the way around a city block. The traffic from about 3 pm through 8 pm is slowed to a crawl everyday, and a ten minute taxi ride in the morning can take as long as 45 minutes in the afternoon.

posted by Caitlin @ 1:06 AM