Today we toured Jakarta, and sitting in a car has never been so tiring. It’s almost midnight as I’m writing this now, and still I can hear the traffic outside. Lucky for us, one of my cousins guided us through the city, took us to some of the smaller corners of the city you might quickly pass by, including places where my dad had grown up.

Stuck in a Moment

As you drive through the city, it’s almost as if you’ve gone into a time warp. The cars and motorcycles are all fairly modern, but the whole infrastructure of the city feels like it has just sat here over all these years, picking up dirt and dust, slowly being worn away.

Architecture seems to span several generations, but most of the buildings in and throughout the main areas of Jakarta all call back to times fifty or sixty years ago or more. You start to notice the number of buildings that have been vacated, slowly going to shambles, and just never touched. From what my cousin, Robin, was telling us, it sounds like in many cases the owner simply leaves and doesn’t sell the building, or either isn’t able to afford or not willing, to renovate or rebuild on the same plot of land. You see it almost everywhere – a building that looks like it suffered a major fire, or a building that is just old with planks of wood boarding off the windows and entrances. The original owners, though, have often moved on and either built another place in another part of town or another part of the world.

Out with the Old (but not really) & In with the New

This seems to reflect the general approach to maintenance and growth in the city – rather than re-investing into existing buildings and infrastructure, the tendency is to leave the old where it is, move on to somewhere else, and start new there. This is in contrast to staying fixed in a location and then keeping it up, rebuilding there on the spot, carrying out renovations, or updating buildings. To me it’s the difference in mindset where the thought seems to be, “We’ll deal with this later, let’s just go do what we need to do now, wherever we can.” rather than, “When something needs doing, do it right away.”

A Land of Contrasts

The contrast of the old neighbourhoods a stone’s throw away from the new posh developments is the epitome of the contrast in the country between the rich and the poor. It was almost the same in Hong Kong – there are rich people, and there are poor people. And sometimes it seems as if the whole system is set up to keep people in their respective groups. I suppose this is one of the differences you’d notice coming from a country run by the middle class. For me, it’s certainly something to get used to – to have a driver, people all over the streets pedaling food, guys standing in the driveways directing cars into and out of parking spots, security guards, an overabundance of staff doing seemingly make-work tasks. The one thing I’ll say, is it all creates jobs for people, and there are a lot of people here to create jobs for.