Jakarta Stories

It IS a filthy city. Not even the most patriotic Indonesian is likely to disagree with you on this point. Driving in from the airport is always enough to highlight my favorite thing about KL, which is, the KLIA express. The high speed train takes you into KL non-stop in 28 minutes. If you go by cab, you'll move faster than the cab in Jakarta, but it'll take you the same amount of time to reach the city center from either airport. No less than an hour and a half. Driving in from KLIA you see lots of green, lots of palm oil plantations, not a whole else. From Jakarta... lots and lots of cars, trucks, motorcycles, beca, and a whole lot of urban sprawl. But, last night as I was riding in, the moon was hanging over the city, but there was still enough daylight that the entire city was bathed in this yellowish pink light, and for about 5 minutes, despite the haze and the sprawl, it was quite beautiful.

Since arriving I've been able to use my Indonesian plenty. In fact, the one time I didn't, I called down the the front desk to ask that an adaptor plug be sent up to my room, as my computer and phone were quickly running out of juice. 15 minutes later I get a call back from the local doctor wanting to know what my was illness. Needless to say, she was very confused when I explained that I couldn't plug in any of my electric devices and was running out of battery power. ;-) But here, my bahasa failed me too because I'd forgotten the Indonesian word for electric which is listrik and instead used the Malaysian word lampu.

I had an interesting chat today with the head of the Gus Dur Institute, another think tank here in Jakarta that promotes tolerant pluralist Islam that is compatible with democracy. Then I spent the afternoon in the library of the Nahdlatul Ulama (Indonesia's largest Muslim organization) headquarters looking through old documents related to the time period I'm writing my thesis on. The great thing about interviews is that they add reality to what could otherwise be considered nothing more than academic speculation. I am continually surprised at just how differently I interpret events than do those who wereinvolved. That doesn't necessarily make me wrong, but when you add in these stories, entirely different ideas emerge. I guess no matter what the medium, better input will always mean better output. The other good part is that they help you see where you might have made some hasty conclusions in your research. That of course creates some problems of it's own, such as, oh %&*$ now I have to rewrite the entire 2nd chapter! DOH!