Go Indonesia! Life in Jakarta: Motorbikes, Roof-top Bars and Everything in Batter

In 2018, Go Mobile opened an office in Indonesia. Since then, we managed to get the first customers, move and completely renew the team.

For the last years in response to “we have an office in Indonesia” we have been constantly asked two questions:

• Why Indonesia?
• How is it going there?

We decided to write several articles to answer these questions, and in this article, we are going to tell you about life in Jakarta.

The city is not for everybody, so to speak. It is a large metropolis with a high population density. People come to Jakarta from all regions of the country. And the former capital of Indonesia Yogyakarta is famous for a large number of theaters and museums.

Skyscrapers

Not so long ago, investments flooded into the country, and everyone started to build skyscrapers for themselves in the capital. Everyone has them — banks, mobile operators, former government officials.

Fun fact: a skyscraper “pays off” within 50 years on average. Therefore, everyone who built them made long-term investments within the country.

Pedestrians

It is impossible to walk around Jakarta. Its entire infrastructure has been created for transport, ideally for motorbikes. Do you need to get to a building that’s just across the street? Be prepared to spend ~ 20 minutes there.

There are no sidewalks at all or they are very narrow and/or wrecked. You can only walk around the shopping malls. But locals prefer to do it inside them.

There is a small walking path in the old part of the city. It is very small.

Transport

Everyone talks about traffic jams and not without reason. However, traffic is highly dependent on the time of the day and the direction of travel. On average, a resident of Jakarta gets from home to work in an hour and a half.

But, you can always quickly get around Jakarta. Most people use motorbikes or motorbike taxis. It’s fast, cheap and you are rarely stuck in traffic.

Metro is the newest addition to the transporting network of the city. Jakarta authorities promised to open it in 2019 … and they did! So far there is only one line, but this is already a big thing.

There are also buses, and it is quite possible to travel short (proven) distances on them. They drive on a dedicated lane, but it doesn’t exist everywhere, so there is a risk of getting stuck in traffic.

If you want to leave the city center

The capital is united with the four nearest cities: Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, Bekasi. Together they make up one big agglomeration JaBoDeTaBek.

The neighborhoods are strikingly different. The center and nearby districts are a business area filled with skyscrapers. The south is rather an artsy area, the north is commercial and Chinese, while the east and west cannot boast of the wealth of residents and developed infrastructure.

In one of these areas, the phone of our head of media buying was snatched away by pickpockets passing by on a motorbike. We immediately used the “Find My iPhone” function and went after them. Although the location was determined quite accurately, when we got into the crowd, it became impossible to find the phone.

We had to go to the local police station. Surprisingly, after a couple of days, the phone was returned. To express our gratitude, we even presented the policeman with a bottle of vodka brought from Russia. But he did not accept money as a reward, he said that it was just his job.

Climate

The temperature is incredibly stable: + 32–33 degrees during the day, + 27–28 at night. All-year-round.

The rainy season is hardly felt. Locals say that it used to rain around the clock for a month. Now the rains are still heavy, but short. They have almost no effect on the life of an office worker.

Air and water are heavily polluted. Therefore, in addition to the motorbike, the starter pack of a capital resident also includes a mask.

It is almost impossible to sunburn in Jakarta. A dense layer of pollution protects from the tropical sun.

Food

The daily Indonesian cuisine is not very diverse. Everyone eats rice, instant noodles, chicken, and tons of chili. In most cases, the food is very spicy. This is not just spiciness. It is a trembling pain in the knees. If you see a word like “sambal” or “pedas” in the name of a dish, run and don’t turn around.

Indonesians also love to combine cheese and chocolate in desserts and have everything in batter: bananas, eggs, Oreo cookies, ice cream. Literally everything that is possible and impossible.

Prices

The Indonesian currency is called Rupiah (Rp or IDR). And it’s not cheap here. There are two reasons for it: high taxes on all imports and few production plants of international companies.

Prices for local products and items are low. But if you don’t want to meet sambal, you have to fork out.

Language

The local language is called Bahasa. The grammar is pretty primitive: there are no tenses or even plural forms of nouns.

If the number of objects is known, Indonesians name a number and a noun. To say that there are infinitely many objects, they simply pronounce the noun twice. But here should be a bold asterisk about the exceptions to this rule.

More difficulties arise at the phonetic level. The combinations of sounds are unusual. For example, “head” is kepala, and “coconut” is kelapa.

Indonesians very often abbreviate words while texting and use ellipses all the time. Here is an example from correspondence with partners: Tp lg gw minta bbrp psg di bio…

English

Office workers understand and speak English well. It is quite normal for a digital marketing meetup to be entirely in English.

In the capital, not everyone even speaks basic English. Therefore, we had to learn some basics of Bahasa. Only this way you can communicate in shops, taxis or on the street.

In remote regions, almost no one speaks English, so if you have a desire to visit a place outside Jakarta, do not forget to take Google Translate with you.

Housing

The difference in living standards is crazy. There are people who constantly sleep on the floor and people who own huge castles.

We are somewhere just above the average in this system. We live in apartments with a small gym, swimming pool, and parking. Locals usually don’t rent such places. For example, a room with Wi-Fi, a minimum of furniture, and without hot water can be rented for 2 million Rupiahs (less than 160$). The lack of hot water is perceived by everyone as something completely normal, so no one cares about it.

It is also interesting that in 95% of cases there is no hot water in the sinks, which is very unusual. But, it doesn’t feel like you are rubbing ice into your face, so everything is ok:)

Attitude towards foreigners

Indonesians in Jakarta are not very used to seeing white people. A common situation: you stand and wait for a taxi, and people on motorbikes drive by and shout “Hello, mister”.

People from all over the country flock to Jakarta, almost none of them have met Europeans in their hometowns. The situation is completely different when you are communicating with people of the middle+ class and with those who have already lived in the capital for some time. They are most likely to be indifferent to you.

You may be asked to be photographed. Once we were photographed at the local Comic-Сon, and we were not even in costumes…

Attitude towards singing

In Indonesia, everyone is constantly singing: at the office, in a public toilet, in a traffic jam, at a meeting. Once there was a situation when a passport control officer turned on the music and began to sing at the customs, because their system was frozen. He did it perfectly though. All types of karaoke are extremely popular. People like to sing pop songs: American/local/Chinese/Japanese, etc.

Religion

Indonesia is the first country in the world in terms of the Muslim population, they make up approximately 90% of the total population. Religion is a full-fledged state institution: for example, religion is recorded in the passport.

Being religious involves the performance of religious rituals: Muslims perform namaz on schedule (and there are even special rooms for prayers in offices), and Christians go to church on Sundays. Almost the entire country fasts during Ramadan. Working hours might be changed for this period.

Indonesia can easily be described as a country of positive Muslims. The state is quite secular and Islam, on average, is not very strict.

In 2019, a new criminal code was about to come into force, which partially copied Sharia law. It included prison sentences for abortion, sex outside of marriage, and insulting the head of state. But the code was sent back for revision due to numerous protests.

Interestingly enough, communist ideology and symbols are criminally punished in the country.

Entertainment

The main entertainment of Jakarta residents is shopping malls. There are a lot of them, and they are huge. Moreover, restaurants occupy up to a third of the entire building.

There are many restaurants in the capital: almost all Asian cuisines are represented. Italian restaurants are also easy to find.

Rooftop bars are quite popular. There are many skyscrapers in the city, and the top floors are almost always occupied by bars or nightclubs with panoramic views of the city. By the way, alcohol is very expensive, so only rich people can afford bars as regular entertainment.

There is simply nowhere to walk in Jakarta. There are almost no parks here: only 3–4 in the entire capital. They are quite small and always overcrowded.

Travel

A huge advantage of living in Indonesia is an opportunity to travel through this unusual, different, and very large country. Indonesia is located in 4 time zones and consists of almost 18 thousand islands.

The nearest islands are 1.5 hours away by water transport. It only takes 2 hours to fly to Bali. It should be said that domestic flights are not as popular, so flying to a neighboring island is more expensive than, for example, to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.

In June, the whole country celebrates Eid al-Fitr for a whole week. Trying to work at this time is pointless. Last year we decided to use this time to hitchhike from Jakarta to Bali. The journey took 2 days. We left on Friday evening and Sunday afternoon we were already there.

There are no hitchhiking traditions here at all. All locals who heard this story called us crazy. But it was an amazing experience for us.

During this journey, we met a bunch of amazing people. For example, here is the photo of Andy with his wife Helina. We are still in touch and we are visiting each other regularly :)

Next time, we are going to discuss the mistakes we made when we started to work in Indonesia. However, we managed to fix them: more on this in the next article.