Jakarta is a sea of densely populated and difficult to navigate low rise streets and kampungs, which has continuously expanded with no discernable order or purpose. There is no defined city centre or shopping district, just the occasional mall and food court in amongst the sprawl, with the Jakarta skyline always tantalisingly out of reach.
Jakarta is not an easy city to get to know, although I am starting to recognise the names of areas, but not yet how they are related to each other. It is also hard to say whether I actually enjoy living here; there are many aspects I do like, but the size and inscrutability of the place makes easy generalisation a difficult task. So, in place of a nuanced and insightful piece of writing on Jakarta in the 21st century, here are a couple of lists:
Things I like: the food, the seedy weirdness of some of the nightlife, friendly people, beautiful girls, the contrast between Jakarta at skyline and street level, strange transport options that aren’t especially good value or practical but are an immensely entertaining way of getting around, having picked up functional Indonesian fairly easily, the sensation that almost anything could happen at anytime, the service industry (it seems possible to get someone to do something for you 24 hours a day).
Things I dislike: lack of any real transport system, lack of green spaces, lack of pavements, lack of places to hang out that aren’t a mall, the mind numbing similarity of street level Jakarta, being unable to hold a conversation in Indonesian, Puri.
Puri is my area of Jakarta, it is an affluent Chinese dominated area in the far west of the city. Kelapa Gading in the NE is known as the head of the dragon because of the Chinese influence, and Puri is the tail of the dragon. It is a quiet, residential, and an essentially boring place to live. There is a decent variety of places to eat, and little else.
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