Jakarthartic

Here in Singapore, September 1st was a national holiday: Election Day. And since I write this from a civilized country, everyone has the day off from work and school. It’s a lot easier to get people to vote if they don’t have to work it into their already busy days. Maybe certain countries should take a page out of Singapore’s book. This year, September 1st happened to fall on a Friday, so we had a three-day weekend. And since none of my suitemates were eligible to vote, we decided we might as well have ourselves a little trip.

Let me introduce you to my suitemates real quick so you have an idea of who “we” is.

From left to right:

• Jakub, Yale University via Poland
• Will, Australia National University via China
• Zev, American University via the United States (aka me, in case you somehow stumbled across this blog without knowing me)
• Jerry, Australia National University via Australia
• Dan, fellow American University student via the United States
• Petar, Sciences Po via Bulgaria

Why are we posed like this? You’ll find out soon enough.

You might be asking yourself: “Wait a second, this is only the second blog post and he’s already leaving Singapore?” You would be correct. But you know what? This is my blog, and I make the rules. So frankly, you can pound sand. But first, you should read on and hear about my three-day excursion to Southeast Asia’s largest city: Jakarta.

We booked outgoing tickets for Thursday at midnight, so we could wake up Friday morning in Jakarta. But when we arrived at the airport in Singapore, we discovered a bit of a snafu. We thought we had all booked tickets for the same flight, but we realized that Jerry accidentally booked his ticket for the following night.

To compound the situation, Jerry is the only one out of the six of us who speaks a lick of Bahasa Indonesian (which is apparently taught in Australian high schools just like how Spanish is taught in the US… pretty cool). But luckily Jerry was able to rebook a flight for the morning, and we overcame the language barrier and managed to get a cab from the airport to our Airbnb at 2:30 AM.

This is an exciting time to be in Jakarta. For one thing, ASEAN (a UN-like organization of Southeast Asian nations) is having its annual summit in Jakarta.

And on a more interesting (to me) note, FIBA is also staging many of the Basketball World Cup games right here in a brand-new arena in Jakarta. While I would have loved to watch Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his squad of Canadians take on Rudy Gobert and the French, ticket prices were a little steep for me. As a consolation prize, watch SGA drop 27 to lead the Canucks to victory and then report back to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cZAL67UIXc&ab_channel=FIBA-TheBasketballChannel.

We decided to start at the National Monument, which looks kind of similar to another monument that I’m pretty familiar with at this point. Long-time readers of my adventures may remember that I visited this very location when I was in Jakarta in December 2016.

You can even see some basketball courts from the top of the monument – oh and I guess the city and stuff, although the incessant pollution makes visibility not the best. From there, we grabbed some tuk tuks and proceeded to Masjid Istiqlal, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia.

As you can see, I acquired a hat at the mosque that I’m quite a fan of. It’s a traditional hat for Muslim men in Indonesia, so locals got a kick out of seeing a very pale Jew walking around with it on. I was greeted with many friendly “assalamu alaikum”s, to which I responded “wa alaikum assalam.”

We learned that at capacity, the masjid can accommodate 200,000 worshippers. For context, the largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere, Michigan’s Big House, has a maximum capacity of about 110,000 and looks like this:

Right across the street from the mosque is the appropriately named Jakarta Cathedral.

A hand soap dispenser for holy water is a great innovation.

Right next to the cathedral is a giant park where I observed some kids shooting hoops. And by “observed” I mean “played some 3 on 3 and got spanked by kids who might have been tweens.”

If you look closely at the court and backboard, it looks like this court was constructed for, or at least updated for the FIBA Cup. But anyway, these kids could flat-out play. On offense, they moved the ball and had a variety of shifty pump fakes that had me jumping for joy. On defense, they terrorized my dribbling and fought me for rebounds and loose balls. The kid in the gray shirt must have splashed at least 3 three-pointers from the top of the key right in my face. In my defense, it was hard to hoop in Tevas. But I still got mine. I hit at least one midrange jumper, got a floater to fall, and added some rebounds and putbacks and a block or two. I also set a screen for the kid kneeling in the above photo, and rolled to the hoop where he found me for the tough right-handed layup on the left side of the hoop (I can barely use a utensil with my left hand, let alone lay the ball off the glass). Regardless of the outcome, I was so happy to see kids playing basketball, especially in a country that produces some of the shortest people in the world (ironic that Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch, the tallest nation in the world).

For dinner, we returned to the mosque to hit some of the food stalls set up nearby.

I had bakso, a type of meatball soup and I added some homemade sambal as well. These little kids kept following us around and were very intent on getting some pictures with us.

Another day we walked around Chinatown.

One night we had drinks on the rooftop of the Park Hyatt, where we all felt underdressed but also like Bond villains as we sipped cocktails overlooking the night skyline.

This was followed by some dirt-cheap chicken and fried onions at Ayam Afrika (ayam means chicken in Bahasa and afrika… yikes, not sure about that name). But the chicken hit the spot after a few drinks.

Some night market sate and shrimp, and some sort of rice and coconut dessert that was good but I forgot the name of.

I had to duck in for some nasi padang at a random local spot.

The best-dressed men at Indonesian Popeyes for some ayam goreng.

For a modest price (a few dollars), you can use GoJek (an Uber-style vehicle summoning app) to enlist a motorbike to take you to your destination. Not only is it cheaper than getting a car, but it’s quicker: in Jakarta’s crazy traffic, mopeds can squeeze through the congestion in ways you wouldn’t thought were possible.

Some other random photos from an action-packed weekend.

I’ll see you all soon. I’m going to try and get another blog about just about daily life on campus for me, but I’m pretty busy with, you guessed it, school. I’m also planning another trip so stay tuned for that…

P.S.: This excursion was rather expensive, so if you want to buy me a bowl of noodles or something you can donate to me (a worthy cause, no doubt). My Venmo is @Zev-Green and my CashApp is $ZevGreen. Appreciate it!