Hello Mr.

Hello Java Jazz festival! Thank you, thank you! screeches the American singer.

It’s so good to be here!

Your city is so beautiful!

The last comment is met by a bemused silence from the Indonesians and handful of westerners in the audience.
She clearly hasn’t looked around the place at all, someone nearby says.
Probably thinks she’s in Bali, someone else jokes.

Jakarta is a disgusting place; it’s polluted and noisy. Overcrowded with people, rats, motorbikes. A browner-than-brown river of shit parades through the middle of the city. There are few pavements; instead at the side of the road is rubble, mud, tar and mystifying puddles that stay there when there is no rain. You could easily slip into the open, frothy sewers and in fact doing so seems to be a right of passage for new teachers (I haven’t yet). Everything seems half-built or half-demolished except the conspicuous giant shopping malls, like numerous palaces in a dark swampland.

And I absolutely love it. I already have a deep-set, illogical love for Jakarta.

Within three hours of my plane touching down in Indonesia I was backstage at a gig talking to a band and ended up going to their house/mansion for a jam and some beers. Also met an amazing girl who works for a magazine and she gave me and some other teachers free tickets to Java Jazz festival the following weekend. An instant social group on my first day. The band invited me back to their place any time to use their personal recording studio.
I think I might be in the right place!

I’m living in Kalimalang which is in east Jakarta and there’s not really a lot here. A main road runs past the school and it’s the most mental road I’ve ever seen. It tops anything I saw in Thailand. The most amazing thing about the traffic in Jakarta is the mutual understanding between all the idiots who are driving. A car pulls straight out into a stream of oncoming traffic and the mass of vehicles just somehow slot around it without any fuss. Moses wannabes in plain clothes stand in the middle of the road with whistles, flapping their arms and shouting, escorting vans out from the side roads, graciously and smoothly accepting tips from wound down windows of moving vehicles, one fluid motion of bribery. And as a pedestrian crossing the road, you simply walk out into the traffic with your arm out, palm outstretched as if you’re pushing the traffic back one-handed and sure enough everything will probably stop at the last second rather than run you over.

Travelling around can take anything from forty minutes to three hours. Jakarta is such a big place that sometimes even when the traffic is good it can take nearly two hours on the motorway to get to where you’re going, like driving from one city to another in England.
The options for public transport are taxi, onkot (kind of like a small blue van that everyone crams into the back of) or ojek (a motorbike taxi). I haven’t seen any buses and I don’t think there’s any kind of train line (there’s a half-finished bridge system which was abandoned due to corruption). The best thing to do is make friends with someone with a car, and have lots of patience.

My job is so different from my previous one that I almost keep laughing to myself. Little things, like being allowed to use a photocopier whenever you feel like it, not having to fill in request slips with all the book names, page numbers etc two days before each lesson. No one scrutinises your lesson plans unless you want some help and ideas. It doesn’t matter if a lesson starts a minute or two late (in fact it’s kind of expected because Indonesians are always late anyway). And no ridiculous amounts of paperwork thanks to the computer system where you record all attendance and quiz/test scores. The teaching syllabus follows the school's own course books, but teachers don’t have to use them religiously. The books are there as a guide of what you should be covering and some of it’s pretty dull so you have to jazz each lesson up quite a lot, but it’s great that there’s something substantial to work from in the first place. The main point of the lessons anyway is to have fun, and the older learners in particular are happiest if they can just have a big chat and debate about something in English for the last few minutes of the lesson. It’s so much easier than my job in Thailand and at the same time I feel like I’m teaching a lot more. It helps that the students are all respectful and sensible enough to just get on with what you tell them to do without any stupid battles. I don’t understand why it’s so different here but I’m not going to question it! If I could swap any of my students here for ones that I had in Thailand I would do nothing, change nothing.

The people in general I feel a great connection with. They have a good sense of humour, great taste in music, understanding of other cultures and huge pride in their own. In Thailand people would point, laugh and overuse the word “farang!” The Indonesian word for Westerners is “bule” but so far I’ve not had anyone shouting it at my face, instead they say “Good evening!” or something a bit more human like that. Kids chase me down the street just to say “Hello Mr!” And at a park in nearby Bogor we had to stop a couple of times so that some overexcited teenagers could have photos taken with me and my friend Will.

What a bizarre place. You can be walking home in the early hours, near-full moon overhead, large bats flapping around and the spooky noise of several mosques battling with their calls to prayer over the loud tannoys – close, meandering melodies. Rats scurrying, street dogs howling, that quality of dawn light you can only get when you’re this close to the equator.

It’s so good to be here.
Your city is so beautiful.