30 THINGS I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT INDONESIA IN (NEARLY) 30 DAYS

1.  Indonesian vehicles have steering wheels on the right side and they drive on the left side of the street.

2.  Traffic is absolutely atrocious, and it can take an hour to travel just a few miles in Jakarta, no matter what time of day. The only time I haven’t seen congestion on the highway is about 3AM or so. When we were going to the other Jakarta campus for induction, our daily commutes used to take about an hour, even though we were only going 4 or 5 miles. When it gets really bad, you might creep along for half a mile during half an hour. Part of the problem is an inefficient highway system. There are crazy one-way stretches and weird configurations so that you often have to backtrack or loop around or go out of your way to get where you are going.

3.  Also on the subject of traffic, driving through the near-constant rush hour can be scary because cars, taxis, motor bikes, and pedestrians all go at the same time. It’s a free-for-all with no rules and no right of way. Everybody squeezes by at the same time at very close proximity and usually honks their horns while doing so. How to drive in Indonesia: NEVER back down: go right on ahead, and if you have three inches of room to squeeze by, that’s plenty.

4.  Modes of transportation include: taxis, SUVs, questionable looking mini-vans and mini-buses, a big bus called the TransJakarta, and motor scooters, which are everywhere. I’m surprised by how few compact cars I see. The taxis are all compact cars, but people mostly drive SUVs or large cars for their personal vehicles. Maybe it’s a status symbol? Doesn’t make much sense given the tight roads and bad traffic.

5.  A layer of smog lays over the city at all times. If you look straight up, the sky might be blue, but if you look out, it’s only hazy gray. Each morning, when Lynsey and I walk to the elevator, we look out the big window there and see a dense layer of gray smog cloaking the city skyline. It’s depressing every single time. We call it “pixie dust,” although that doesn’t lessen how gross it is. I do worry about breathing sometimes.

6.  Homeless people live under the highway underpasses. There are small groups of people sleeping and hanging around there. At night it looks almost surreal in those dirty, shadowy places, sometimes dimly lit with a single florescent bulb on a movable street cart. The street carts are ubiquitous in the city and sell food, water, household goods, medicine, and other things on the street and at corners.

7.  Medicine is very accessible. No prescription needed to get your hands on it. You just get it from the store or street seller. They were handing out anti-diarrhea medicine like candy at Puncak. (Puncak will be its own blog entry; there’s plenty there.)

8.  National dish: nasi goreng, or fried rice. The majority of my vocab at this point consists of food words. “Nasi” means rice, “goreng” means “fried.” As a fun activity on the first day of school I asked the students to move to one corner of the room if they agreed with a given statement. When the question was “What would you choose if you could only have one food for the rest of your life?” there were about 6 boys who chose nasi goreng, a handful of girls who flocked to the sushi corner, and a few pizza and KFC loyalists.

   9. On the topic of KFC, it’s very popular here. Probably the most popular American fast food chain around.

   10. Also very popular in Jakarta: Angry Birds, SpongeBob, Korean pop music (K-Pop), nori-seaweed flavored Lay's, and Bintang beer. Cannot emphasize enough: ANGRY BIRDS IS EVERYWHERE!!!!!!!!!

   11.  Call to prayers happens regularly, but also for unexpectedly long stretches too. There are mosques everywhere, like churches and bars in small American towns, except that it’s a city of more than 10 million, so there are simply tons of them. We can’t hear it from our apartment because we face traffic and that drowns out everything else. But there are several mosques near our school. The loudspeakers point out in all directions from the minarets, making listening unavoidable. The other day I swear someone was reciting the entire Koran through a fuzzy microphone, because the chanting lasted the entire day at school – from before 7 am to 3 in the afternoon or so.

12. All Indonesian toilets (in modern buildings) come with a water hose or built-in jet to wash yourself (which is done instead of or in addition to wiping.) Lynsey and I couldn’t figure out why there was what looks like a very long kitchen sink hose next to our toilet in our apartment. We thought it might be for cleaning the bathroom; turns out it’s for cleaning yourself. The first time I used a public toilet here, there was a little diagram on the back of the lid showing how to use the water jet, by turning a knob on the side of the toilet bowl. I bent over the toilet, thinking I would test it to see what it was all about, and subsequently got a lovely, high-pressure spray of water all over my shirt, the floor, and all the walls of the bathroom stall. I wiped it all up as best as I could with t.p., but was still left with a big wet spot on my shirt. The cleaning lady who was standing there when I opened the door just laughed to herself as I emerged from the stall.

13. Toilet paper comes in tiny roles. When you take it out of the package, it looks more than half used already.

14. You can’t flush toilet paper; you throw it away instead. There is a wastepaper basket next to the toilet for this purpose… IF you are in a modern building. If you are not in a modern building, but say, a roadside warung waiting out a 4 ½ hour traffic jam, you needn’t worry about what to do with the toilet paper: there is none. After you have relieved yourself in the pit in the ground, you take some water from the bucket next to the toilet and use this to wash yourself. This is always done with the left hand. That’s why you do everything else with your right hand.

15. There are no tampons for sale in Indonesia. Fortunately, they do sell them in Singapore, which is where I will need to go soon to renew my visa.

16. The majority of health and beauty products for your skin (lotion, face wash, sunscreen, body wash, etc.) come in skin-whitening versions. Having light skin is sought after, just like having tan skin is sought after in the West. But since I don’t know what sort of chemicals are in those, and I don’t really want to be any whiter than I already am, I carefully avoid them.

17. Having maids, nannies, and drivers is the norm. Our apartment has a tiny maid’s quarters (just big enough for a bed and there’s a tiny bathroom with a pit toilet and bucket for water.) We use the area for storage, but we wish we had larger bedrooms or living area instead of the maid’s area.

18. Few people speak English fluently. Many have some key vocab they can use, but most don’t speak English well, which gives me an excellent opportunity to practice speaking Indonesian.

19. We usually just call Indonesian “Bahasa” because “Bahasa Indonesia” is what you call Indonesian in Indonesian. “Bahasa” means language. “Bahasa Ingriss” = English.

20. How you greet people depends on the time of day. Not so very different from other places, but there isn’t really a generic “hello” that you use all the time. “Selamat pagi” is good morning; “Selamat siang,” is good afternoon, “Selamat sore,” is good late afternoon / early evening, and “Selamat malam,” is good evening / night.

21. The word for “water” in Indonesian is “air.” Bizarre.

22. The Dutch colonized Indonesia, and when they got here, they did what they did back home: build canals. Consequently, Jakarta is filled with canals. And those canals are filled with rubbish. They are absolutely disgusting. “Cesspool” is probably a better way to describe them.

23. Indonesia has a large Chinese population, but is not always well received. Apparently some Chinese did dirty work for colonizers in the past, leading to grudges and mistrust. Also, Communism was ferociously shunned in the past and as a result, Chinese language and culture were banned. A whole generation of Chinese Indonesians grew up with Indonesian names, and were/are unable to speak their ancestral language. Part of Bina Bangsa’s mission is to reteach Chinese language and culture to kids. The Chinese business class is very wealthy and circulates most of the money in Jakarta. And most of the money circulating in Jakarta represents the majority of money circulating in Indonesia.

24. The slums are very slummy. The fancy areas very fancy. There is no in-between, or at least not very much. 

25. There is no avoiding litter on the ground or pollution in the air. The worst air is probably in the parking garage. It’s a little less noxious out in the open. We sometimes wash underwear or socks by hand and hang them out to try on the tiny little balcony; when we bring them back in they have a scent we have dubbed “Jakarta Fresh.” It’s not so bad.

26. Going out to eat is very cheap. I will probably have trouble readjusting to US prices, when you can get a heaping plate of fried noodles and beef, a bottle of water, and a bottle of tea for 33,000 rupiah (about $3.30 USD) as I did just the other day.

27. When you’re out to eat with friends at a restaurant, don’t expect the food to come all at once. All the meals come one at a time and it’s often a long wait for the last one to arrive, so you can’t really wait until everyone has their food to start eating.

28. Smoking in restaurants is a-ok. It’s okay indoors and there are no smoking and non-smoking sections. The best advice is to avoid a table where people are chain smoking Marlboros.

29. Service is cheap. Gratuity is included in restaurant bills. At buildings there are lots of guards. In stores there are tons people waiting to help you. We get our laundry washed for 6000 rupiah per kilo. I got two weeks' worth of laundry washed for the equivalent of $1.25. It comes back wrapped in plastic and labeled with your name on a small tag on each piece of clothing. At our school, we employ two people all the time to run the copy and laminating machine. Because you don’t do something if you could hire someone to do it for you. It’s frustrating at first, and it’s still frustrating later, but it helps to remember that there are a ton of people living here and they all need jobs.

30. Last but not least: Just stop expecting things to make sense, and you'll have a much better time of things.