Jakarta Experience, part 1

While in Jakarta I stayed at two different places, my brother's house in the center of Jakarta, and my aunt/cousin's house in Serpong, a suburb west of Jakarta. Take into account the traffic, they are far apart. I stayed in Jakarta, then Serpong, back to Jakarta and then Serpong again before flying to Surabaya, East of Java (1 hour flight).

My brother's house is small, less than 400 sq-ft. He has his wife, a son, and our mom live with him. It's typical in Jakarta, high housing cost due to high demand, and most houses have been built to maximize profit for any given lot available. Perhaps Americans, including myself, are spoiled by having big spaces. New houses have been built aggresively everywhere, just about any open lot available. As a result there is not enough land to absorb water during rainy season. Flood comes on annual basis, during rainy season. There was an article I read from a newspaper about an effort to make 10% of the land available to absorb water to ease flood season. Speaking about flood, the goverment should clean the sewers and rivers up. All open sewers I saw were clogged and hardly moved. I didn't see any cleaning effort. The rivers looked like sewers, black, filled with garbage, and unbearable smell. When flood comes (I was told) all of those nasty stuff go everywhere. I don't even want to think about it, glad didn't happen when I was there.... pheww....

Jakarta is a city that offers the best opportunity in Indonesia. It is not surprising that I have many friends and relatives live there. Even though it was virtually impossible to see them all (due to driving hassle but can be used as a good excuse) but I still had a great time with many of them.

Comparing to those four cities I visited (Siantar, Medan, Jakarta, and Surabaya), another bright side of Jakarta is the people are more racially tolerant from listening to my friends and relatives. Perhaps big influx of people coming from all over the country has made this city a melting pot. Outside Jakarta I heard a lot of comments from my friends and relatives despising indiginous people. I advised them not to think that way. When you look at them, most of them are honest, humble, and nice people who happen to be poor.