Jakarta Indonesia, a city im sure that is not on many peoples ideal travel list. The traffic here is the worst in the world, the constant pity beggars on the street, the overfilled polluted sewage that stinks up the city and the inability to wear tank tops and shorts in the hot murky weather because of the culture, is enough to make any single person never want to touch foot in this city. The corruption is a pity and the stray cats make you want to pick them up and care for all of them a nice idea but not realistic. As well as the lack of function anywhere you go from the washrooms with their squatting toilets to their traffic lanes that nobody follows anyway.
I just so happened to follow a man here. Of all the places in the world I could not have followed anyone to a worse place were my primary thoughts. Don’t get me wrong im adventurous and love to travel. However it took weeks of breakdowns, where I thought my lungs were going die on me because of all the pollution and the cigarettes that every single Indonesian was accustomed to smoking. I thought my stomach was going to shrivel up and never work for me again because of the unsanitary water and street food that my body was not used to. I thought my ear drums were going to burst from the constant noise pollution be it the constant honking of horns, the 5 hours of pray interjected on the speaker everyday, or kids screaming something that any self respecting Jakartan would not admit was even a real thing, just a fictionist detail that the bule made up to complain even more.
One day about 3 weeks into my visit something happened. Something I cannot fully explain even to this day. I had just came back from Singapore and got stuck at customs due to the fault of the airline and not my own. The immigrations officer would not let me through and there was no way of figuring it out without the help of my countries embassy. Nobody was there to help they all lied about having internet at the airport even though I saw one of the women on face book and they all looked at me like I was crazy because I had nowhere to go for 4 hours while my country tried to figure it out. Thing about this moment was I wasn’t upset, I wasn’t frustrated, and I wasn’t in tears as I normally would have been in this kind of situation. Perhaps I just didn’t care if they never let me back into their country again, perhaps its because I was in a air conditioned building with nowhere to be, or perhaps I was to tired to care. Regardless something changed in me that day, I acquired a skill called patience.
Now when I walk down the streets of Jakarta I embrace the smell of the city. I slow down and smile at the friendly people that grace the streets who may not have a lot but they are some of the friendliest people in the world. When im in a taxi or on a bus for 2 hours I get a chance to catch up on some dreams im conjuring up in my head. When I use the squatting toilets I see it as a chance to work out my leg muscles. When the internet is slow I use it as a chance to read or spend time socializing with people I care about. Im not saying come to Jakarta for your next vacation, im saying that sometimes in developing countries that are in contrast to our own we learn virtues and skills that are not possible to learn in a functioning country.
-Jypsie Shore
