Jakarta!

This is how I explain my amazement to the people I meet: I have never been to New York City. I have been to Washington, DC, several times, and Atlanta hundreds of times. Chicago, Houston, Dallas, and Detroit at least once each. But at 43, I gotta say, the largest urban place I have ever visited in this lifetime is nowhere in America. It's definitely Jakarta, Indonesia. Imagine urban skyscrapers and apartment blocks extending all the way to the horizon over miles of flat land in every direction! Even in NYC, there's some direction in which you can turn and see countryside, but not in Jakarta.

There are cities within the city, and entire tribes living under the expressway between the airport and downtown. The traffic is intense and simply not to be believed. If you wait until it's clear to cross the street, you will just stand there and never cross. People quite literally pray and then step off of the curb into approaching waves of cars and motorbikes, trusting in God for protection and in the charity of their fellow human beings, who, they assume, really don't want to hit them. Or, they put up a hand as if directing traffic, look official, and about six times out of ten actually get others to agree not to run them over. In Atlanta, they'd all be dead. Here, not running you over is part of some "implied social contract," to borrow a stale political science term. Mark, who is braver, tried to teach me to cross the street. He was a patient teacher, but I was a poor student.







Mall Ambassador...more than five stories of every conceivable electronic device known to man for sale. Indonesians live and die by their cell phones - called handphones in the local international English. Everyone has one, and the most economical form of communication with anyone is always a text message. Most every mall in Indonesia is built several stories tall, not spread over a large tract of flat land, as in the USA.








Okay, there are some pictures that just have to be posted on the Internet, on pure principle. New friends and colleagues Megan and Jonthon...