"Where you going?!"

Most common first question from strangers: “Hello Mister! Where you going?!”
For a long time (well, still, sometimes) I answered that question, not always delighted to have to share my daily plans with random people. But then I discovered it wasn’t actually a question at all. It’s just a translation of “Mau ke mana?” (lit: “To where you want?”), the local version of “How’s it going?” or “What’s de situation?” Answering “mau ke mana?” literally is a little bit like newcomers to the U.S. answering the tireless “How are you?” questions literally (or the fake-smiled supermarket version, “How are you today?”), only to then discover no one actually cares. I heard of an Indonesian reporting that that Americans aren’t very friendly. People on the street kept asking her how she’s doing, but they never asked her about her job or life or where she’s going….

This week’s “exploration” has been in a radius of about a 5 minute walk from my kost, where I’ve been toiling in front of my screen (I love human subjects board applications!). It turns out there’s quite a bit to be found in a 5 minute radius. Going in the opposite direction of the “gado gado restaurant” I’ve found a whole maze of tiny alleys in the local kampong (kind of urban village, for lack of a better translation), beside a not-so-clean little canal. It’s clearly very poor, but it’s generally well kept and most people don’t seem miserable in any sense. At night everyone is out by the mosque, teenagers are flirting away and things seem pretty happy.

Just down the road is “Benhil” (Bendungan Hilir) street, which gives its name to the neighborhood too and has wide variety of local restaurants of the type I was missing. I now officially have a favorite “rumah makan” (food house), serving mostly Padang food, where lunch is far better and cheaper than any western style place. Benhil is also a neighborhood that was completely flooded last year, and this week’s rains make it pretty apparent how that could happen. I don’t think I was ever afraid of thunder as a kid, but this is a different kind of thunder and I’m feeling it now…. I’m also glad I live on the second floor. I doubt the kampong is a very happy place when the floods come.

But in true “capital of huge poor country” fashion, right besides the flooded kampong, I can easily continue with most things I would (?) do elsewhere. Yesterday I was hunched over excel spreadsheets at Starbucks, in the mall just 10 minutes away. A couple of weeks ago I was at a club featuring famous Austrian DJ Peter Kruder (I know, how exciting!) and attended the “JakJazz” festival featuring Spyro Gyra (didn’t actually see them in the end, though). And tonight I’m actually headed to light Hanukah candles with a contingency of Hebrew speakers living in Jakarta. They’re everywhere, these people.

Unrelated:

“It's not clear to me that the poor people are entirely the problem."
- Overheard in Bali at the UNFCCC (the global climate convention; finder’s fee owed to D)

Completely unrelated, yet somewhat disturbing:

Without knowledge of the position they play, women consistently rate the faces of goalkeepers and strikers as more attractive than their teammates.
- (from BPS Research Digest)