Jakarta

(from Saturday)

For some reason, before my arrival, I was really nervous about coming to Jakarta. I’m seldom nervous about arriving someplace new, even if I’ve not done too much research about it. Maybe it was that I didn’t speak the language. Maybe it was that it was a city of 20 million people. Or maybe it was just that I had a bad feeling that something untoward might happen. But so far, everything has gone quite smoothly. While it’s a sprawling city with occasionally horrible traffic (I spent just under two hours in a cab yesterday to go maybe 15 kilometers), it doesn’t feel oppressive, and just about everyone who I’ve met has been friendly without being overly friendly. Indonesians are friendly with their eyes, and they—or at least the ones in Jakarta—pass the stranger smile test, where they nod or smile back when I smile or say “hello”.

I’m developing a belief that the friendliest people—outside of perhaps Mormons in Salt Lake City and anyone from Minnesota—are Moslems in Moslem countries. If I look back upon all my travels, it just seems that I’ve been consistently so much better received in places such as Kurdish Iraq, Turkey, Tanzania, Northern Mozambique, and now in the grand-daddy of them all, Indonesia (the only place that didn’t work out so well for me was Morocco, but I’m hoping to give it a second chance later this year as I was sick as a dog the first time around).

In light of this, it’s a small wonder to me that I know so little about Islam, and rather exotify it regularly. I try to fit it into tidy boxes so that I can easily make it work in my mind. Seems like I’ve met enough Moslems in my life that I shouldn’t try to oversimplify them. But I do. Last night, I went to photograph a Jakarta independent radio station where they had an outdoor Valentine’s Day concert with a handful of live performers. I expected the concert to be melodic and quite staid, being the most populous Moslem country, after all, and nothing could have been further from the truth. Hip performers rapped, crooned, covered Elvis and Brittney (the latter thankfully as a joke), and all the while, twenty somethings in the audience screamed with glee and swooned, regardless of whether they were wearing fitted t-shirts or head scarves. Not quite what I expected and most delightfully so.