Weeks 11 and 12: A Tale of Two Cities

After living in Jakarta for three months I can attest that it is a city of extremes. It is almost as if there are two separate Jakartas; one dirty, cogested, full of noise, people and pollusion; the other empty, sanitised and strangely characterless.

The area I live in, Tebet, falls firmly into the first category. Primarily a residential area, it is comprised of a dense labyrinth of streets with back-to-back houses and a few makeshift shops, their proprietors lounging outside enjoying a game of chess or an afternoon snooze. The main street is a different story. Walking out onto it you are hit by a wave of noise, pollution and general chaos. The traffic is perenially static except for those cars brave enough to negotiate into the paking spaces haphazardly placed at the side of the road. Designated attendants do their best to control the traffic, their shouts and whistles adding to the immense noise. You have to be constantly on guard for motorcyclists weaving in and out of the traffic, some of whom get impatient and drive along the pavement. Sometimes the pavement is so damaged that walking on the rubble is actually more dangerous than walking in the road and some stretches of road simply have no pavement at all. Even negotiating the short walk back to my boarding house sometimes feels like an enormous effort.

The most striking thing about the scene is the sheer density of people. In Tebet there are people everywhere. Visitors flock to the main street each evening to frequent the area's numerous restaurents and cafes and impromptu stalls spring up selling cheap food and pirate DVDs. A number of beggars roam the streets and children playing miniture guitars busk for diners whether they like it or not (in Indonesia you pay buskers to go away rather than to express your appreciation for their playing). It is this aspect of the environment that I find most difficult; the constant stream of bodies pressing into you, the complete absence of personal space. Although the locals have become familiar with us, the attention we engender as foreigners has not abated. Whenever I venture out into the streets I am greeted by constant stares and comments. I understand that the comments are jovial and innocuous, that it is inevitable that I will be the object of curiosity to the locals, but I continue to find the attention both imposing and irritating. It frustrates me that I am unable to move beyond what is in essence a culturally conditioned aversion to attention from strangers, but I cannot.

Thankfully, there is a way to escape the chaos. Central Jakarta, just a short taxi ride from Tebet, is a million miles away in cultural and economic terms. Central Jakarta, for me, will always be defined by what it is not. The first thing you notice is the absence of crowds and the distance between you and other people, which seems vast, even comically so, exaggerated by the contrast with everyday life. Central Jakarta is a few square miles of unadulterated, unapologetic capitalist enterprise; an impressive collection of designer shopping malls, expensive restaurents and luxury apartment blocks. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these spaces is that when you are inside them you could be anywhere. The other day I was in one of the malls when I realised that all I could see were British shops: Topshop, Debenhams, Marks and Spencer. However, it would be wrong to dismiss these spaces as acultural or non-Indonesian. Last weekend we ended up doing a grand tour of shopping malls, visiting 5 in 2 days, and afterwards we joked that we were finally acting like native Jakartans. Other cities have museums, galleries, temples and palaces; Jakarta has shopping malls. However, you can't help but be aware that the places you are visiting are accessible only to the wealthy minority and are hardly representative of how most Indonesian people spend their leisure time.


The incongruence between the two Jakartas suddenly dawned on me the other day when I realised I had taken to showering at the gym almost every day. I had good reason: the gym has a power shower, hot water and - joy of joys! - a hairdryer whilst my room at home has only a bucket, a cold tap and a hole in the floor. However, there was something about this set up - the contrast between the austerity of my living accommodation and my luxury gym membership - that struck me as absurd. And, indeed it is absurd, an absurdity symptomatic of living between two parallel cities. At home the concept of value is relatively straightforward; there is a consistant and fairly predictable scale of value associated with various commodities. But when you have a situation where vastly different scales of value co-exist, things are not quite so predictable. In this context it becomes entirely rational to spend on a night out what you normally spend on food for the week; the costs simply aren't directly comparable because they derive from different systems of value.


Living in a foreign economy, where different goods are defined as luxury, can be confusing. For instance, at home eating out is an occastional treat, but here I have to buy every meal. I might be an extreme case given that I cannot so much as boil a kettle in my boarding house, but eating out does seem to be the norm. My trips to the supermarket reveal that it is possible to eat out for less than it would cost to buy the ingredients yourself and cook from scratch. At the same time, however, it is possible to spend rather a lot on food and drink, particularly if you have Western tastes. In Jakarta, a coffee at Starbucks is a weekend treat (yes, I realise how weird it is to start drinking coffee in a tropical climnate) and a 'Western' breakfast an occasional extravagance (I have yet to find a good fry up but, at the danger of sounding disloyal, American style pancakes are even better). I often find myself justifying purchases - say 30,000R for a coffee - on the grounds that this amount would cover two meals in Tebet. I am aware that some of my choices would seem irrational or inconsistant to an outsider, or to someone who resides exclusively in one or other of the Jakartas. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if you live like I do, negotiating between the two Jakartas, then there is no cohesive system of value with which to assess the relative expense of each purchase. The only way to make any sense of it seems to be to pick a weekly or monthly budget and consider each purchase as a proportion of that amount. Alternatively, you could bury your head in the sand, throw all caution to the wind and refuse to check your bank balance (not that I've done this, you understand . . . . )