Odds and ends about Jakarta

Even though we spent 3 days in Jakarta, we didn't end up seeing very much of it. At the end of the bus adventure post I mentioned the roach-infested hotel of our first night. In the evening when Jen took the lift down to the front desk, a very conservatively dressed Muslim man (white robes, ash) who also happened to be in the lift asked her first: "married?" nodding approvingly when Jen said she was, and then: "Muslim? Christian?" I thought it plausible that he was trying to make as much friendly conversation as he was able, but it is kind of disturbing (though not surprising) to think that these two questions are the most important ones for him. Saddening, really. (Though I suppose he might think the same thing of us, who are apparently so dismissive of the two things which constitute the meaning of his life).

For our next two nights, we booked in the more upscale Ibis Hotel which was probably the nicest hotel we've yet stayed in on our trip. The economic inequality in Jakarta was striking. This was the view from the stairway of our nice hotel:

Only a few blocks away were the run-down neighborhoods with open sewers. We saw on the news that a week before we came there had been a large fire in the north of the city which burned down almost 6000 family units, leaving virtually all the former residents homeless. A few blocks away in the other direction is far and away the fanciest mall Jen and I have ever been in. Stanford mall isn't even on the same scale, and Jen says it was far fancier than anything in Las Vegas. It was even fancier than the very expensive mall attached to the twin towers in the KLCC in Kuala Lumpur. Security to get in to the mall appeared pretty tight--metal detectors and a search. Presumably this is because of the bombings of other such buildings of western luxury.

Since we were feeling a little overwhelmed after all our difficult travel, and by the whole atmosphere of the city, we mostly stayed in the room, the coffee shop in the mall across the street, and the occasional walk down a nearby street famous for its street food.

Another detail that struck us, however, was the movie posters in the mall across the street from the Ibis.

In case you can't tell, this is a hand-painted movie advertisement. It was very surprising.

All in all, we decided that Indonesia was starting to overpower us, and that maybe it would be best to go early to Chiang Mai in Thailand. Our next stop would have been Sumatra, but they had just suffered a devastating earth quake. There were so many unanswered questions about how things would go for us there, and our recent trip had just about exhausted our desires for difficult adventurous travelling, so we booked our plane flight and were off.

We flew back to our old friend, the low-cost carrier airport in Kuala Lumpur, arriving at 11:30pm, and stayed the night there to catch our 7:30am flight to Chiang Mai the next morning. Let me tell you: the KL airport is a happening place. From midnight straight through to the morning, it was teeming with people and all the shops remained open. It was pretty awesome.