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Jakarta Expat 3–17 August 2011
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JAKARTA
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Indonesia’s Largest Expatriate Readership | 49th Edition | 3–17 August 2011 |
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New in Town by Graham Strauss
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ewcomers to Jakarta may find their brains synapses frying, popping and generally overloading as they struggle to readjust to its often frustrating flows. For this is a city of positives and negatives, blacks and whites, yins and yangs if you will. On the one hand, it can be a hellishly hot and hectic urban swamp, a malarial floodplain sinking under the weight of its own demographic density, a lawless, dog eat dog interzone in which corrupters dance down their own primrose paths of graft and sleaze, walled off in housing complexes whilst those at the bottom of the social ladder try to make the best of a creaking infrastructure that seems to be inimical, if not actually the antithesis of human health and prosperity (pauses for breath). And yet, despite the toxic boulevards that don’t come off too well in comparison with other Southeast Asian cities, Jakarta is actually the second most expensive city to live in in the region, after Singapore. Well, I hope I haven’t sent you scuttling back to the airport before you’ve even unpacked your suitcase. Not all is doom and gloom here I should stress because, despite all of this, or maybe even because of it, Jakarta remains a fascinatingly vibrant place that will have anyone from the fastidiously ordered West gasping for breath. Why do people love Jakarta, warts and all, with its many trials and tribulations? Perhaps for the same reason that people like to watch disaster movies. Folks don’t sit there in the front row of the cinema chomping popcorn because they are scared, but rather because, at some unconscious level, they all crave an injection of madness into life’s pedestrian, humdrum routines.
“Welcome to Jakarta!” by Catherine Parent
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