When my alarm went off last Monday I sprang out of bed with joy, despite the fact that it was only 4am. We were leaving Hong Kong and heading to Indonesia! Beaches, good food, a place to stay for free…things could only improve from here.
We arrived and took a bus to meet Fiqy, a friend we met on CouchSurfing, (couchsurfing.org), who was hosting us in Jakarta. The traffic was crazy, with motorbikes speeding between makeshift lanes of cars, buses and rickshaws. Almost everyone in Indonesia has a motorbike, as they’re the cheapest and fastest transportation, and they stack children and parents together, with babies, sometimes two, squished in the middle. This seemed very scary and unsafe to us, but as fast as people drove, and as close as they came to each other, they all seemed to know what they were doing.
While we waited for Fiqy we were the center of attention, (this was not a touristy area). We were offered chairs, given strange looks, asked for money, and asked to pose for pictures with a shop owner. Luckily, Fiqy showed up soon in an actual car.
Fiqy lives with his family in a gorgeous house surrounded by flower gardens and palm trees, with high ceilings and big, open windows. Our room was upstairs, where we shared a large mattress, and the cute little lizards relaxing in the corners only shocked us for a few minutes.
We immediately fell in love with Fiqy’s parents and his adorable, bashful 14-year-old sister. His father used to work for the Indonesian government in the Ministry of Health, and now teaches at the university. His mother is a funny woman who delighted in showing us photos of all the foreign guests they’ve hosted, feeding us traditional Indonesian food and practicing her English.
We arrived in Jakarta during the last days of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting culminating in the holiday Eid ul-Fitr. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, so there were signs everywhere, almost the entire city was off work for the week and everyone was preparing for the celebration. Like most others, Fiqy’s family was fasting, so we broke fast with them at sunset with a delicious chilled fruit soup.
Staying with Fiqy and his family, we saw a side of Jakarta we probably wouldn’t have otherwise. He took us to the train station to buy our tickets to Yogyakarta, and we were glad to have him with us. Walking through dark, dirty streets on the way to the subway, poverty was very in your face. Stray cats dug through mounds of trash along the sidewalks and women sent their children up to us for money. (In busy streets children come up to your cab window and stare with their hand on the window. It is so sad I didn’t know what to do). The subway “station” was a little bench with creepy lighting that looked like it was in the middle of nowhere, and we looked glaringly out of place. If Fiqy wasn’t with us I don’t think we would have found it, and if we found it I think we would have run away. After getting to the train station and buying our tickets for the next night, we went to get Sete, an Indonesian specialty of chicken skewers in a peanut sauce, at a little street stand. Perching on plastic benches, Fiqy told us stories of growing up in Indonesia, how students attend school year-round, the beauty and diversity of the country’s many islands, (it’s the largest archipelago in the world), and how in general Indonesians love Obama. “Did you know his father was Indonesian? Did you know he went to primary school here?” Fiqy asked excitedly. Yes, and yes, and we’re glad you love him.
We met up with some of his friends at 7-11, which is apparently a hang out spot everywhere outside the US, but the 4am wake up call finally hit us so we went back to his house, where his mom warned us about mosquitos and sprayed our room with lemongrass spray.
A warning, we realized in the morning, was not enough to prepare us for the bites that covered our arms and ankles, and continued to grow as the day went on. Now I understand why my doctor was so concerned about malaria medication. “Indonesian mosquitos are worse than other mosquitos,” one of Fiqy’s friends told us later as we tried not to scratch. Thanks, we hadn’t noticed. We bought Soffel mosquito repellant the first chance we got. It’s supposed to work better than anything we have in the United States, and we didn’t get too many bites after that.
After a breakfast of bread with margarine and chocolate sprinkles, (strange, but good), we went to Jakarta’s traditional market. To get there, we took a bus/van/rickshaw…basically a beat up van with an open side that stops wherever you flag it down. You jump into the open area and try not to fall out if you hit a pothole or a motorbike cuts you off, but it’s only about 2000 Indonesian Rupiah. Translation: 20 cents. At the market, vegetable tables and fruit baskets sit alongside buckets of fish and dead, plucked chickens. Pushing through the narrow aisles, trying not to breath in the stench that came in waves, I wondered if I am spoiled, or just stuck up. Food sat very near the muddy floors, dogs and cats came in and out of stands and tiny bugs crawled over everything…’I would never shop here’ I thought. Yet, Indonesia is the fourth most populated country in the world, meaning millions of people shop and eat from places like this every day. Then we went down into the meat section, where various animals were chopped and hung…not liking meat in the first place, I stopped caring if I was spoiled or stuck up or both and I just had to leave.
Grocery stores, chilled eggs and milk, clean bathrooms, fair taxis and organization=Things we realized we took for granted in the US so far.
The rest of Tuesday was spent touring downtown Jakarta with Fiqy and his friend Enda, a talkative, friendly girl around our age. With bright flowers, lots of newer buildings and the national monument rising in the center, the downtown area is very pretty. We toured Istiqlall Mosque, the largest mosque in Asia, where people were already gathering for Eid ul-Fitr the next day. Our guide listed world leaders that have visited the mosque, including President Obama, and as we walked through the outdoor corridors, Enda told me again how much he is adored in Indonesia. “When he came here last year, everything was closed for miles,” she said. She and Fiqy told us on the day he visited, the streets were more crowded and the excitement higher than they had ever seen it. “He respects Muslim people,” Enda said. She told me they didn’t like Former President George Bush and therefore had a worse, and now she thinks skewed, vision of the United States. She, Fiqy and their friends think the Obama administration is helping the United States improve relations with the rest of the world as well as educating Americans about the importance of diversity in religion and culture. We talked about the debate over a mosque at Ground Zero, the upcoming tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and how she and so many others have been discriminated against since 2001. Pulled out of conversation by our guide who insisted we take pictures in front of the drum outside the mosque, we posed for a few then headed back to Fiqy’s.
His mother had made us a feast of rice boiled for hours in small baskets made of leaves until solid, chicken, and beef in a spicy sauce. There was also another chilled soup, this time with cucumbers and oranges.
After hugs and pictures, we said our goodbyes and went to catch our overnight train to Yogyakarta.
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