This city practically thrums with life. It’s wild, incoherent, boisterous, smelly, surprisingly green - filled with kind people with curious eyes, swerving traffic, and an ingrained chaos that somehow always gets where it’s going.
Day to day life here leaves us discombobulated, eye-stinging, eager to adjust. From our current apartment the call to prayer echoes out, loudspeaker-ed and melodic, 5 times a day -- most noticeably when it shakes you from sleep at 4:30 am, and mingles over the din of the passing train station. The city is never silent, never dim, never resting.
As we adjust to our drastically changed location Jakarta is slipping in between seasons, dry to rainy. We’re on the edge of monsoon season and thunderstorms crackle into life as rain pours down in sheets and the wind carries a refreshing freshness through the windows and doorways of open edged cafes. The next day the sun mingled with the city’s air pollution, bathing the high ceiling and open windows and uncomfortable couch with a diffused, directional light.
I’m settling into a routine of cafes, harrowing, nerve tingling motorcycle taxi rides, grocery shopping in glass-domed malls, and the casual smog and bustle of living in a city of 13 million residents.
At night, the city (already busy) doubles its potential for activity. Minutes before dinner and while the last rays of daylight fade, tents and street cafes expand from nowhere, silhouetting the undiminished traffic with a range of colors sounds, and smells. The endless symphony of car and motorcycle horns weave in and out through the sizzle of satays on beds of coals, ordered shouts, trickled music, the braying youtube videos, the sounds of music dancing from alleyways. It’s a total sensory experience, at once delightful and repellant, the odors of still cooking street food playing olfactory tour guide one moment, only to be swiftly traded with the stench of sewage echoing from a plastic-choked waterway or a whelping, thin, street kitten slinking across your path. The nights are awash in contradiction, plumbable and immersive.
Add to it all the incredulity of tropic heat, the rich greenness that sneaks up upon you, and the usual broken teeth smiles of street vendors and following stairs of children with bigger heads and eyes than can be imaginable as they point and say “bule” (foreigner) to their parents. We’re still spinning, but landing mostly on our feet.
As anywhere, there comes with new territory a re-evaluation of goals. The nearest surf break is 4 hours away as the crow flies, so with the level of transportation available, not quite inaccessible but certainly not convenient. The traffic and licensing laws make buying a motorcycle foolish if not utterly impossible. I’ve found myself in open air cafes, air conditioned malls, and wifi-less street stands reading voraciously and trying to reimagine a written rhythm. It’s been a while since I’ve stepped wholly into this realm of written word, pursuing poetry and essays and stories as a primary focus instead of something relegated to the side. It’s like trying on an old coat or a well-worn, favorite pair of jeans. Comfortable, but needing some slight adjustment.
As with everything big, there’s a grace period in transition, a prescribed few weeks to begin to make changes, to establish a routine, learn basic greetings, get to know the colors and patterns of a new location. We’ve firmly embraced it, and maybe eagerly peeking around the corner to see what’s next.
Till later,
MM
