Our Week in Pictures – Week Seventeen, Jakarta
Our least favourite aspect of travelling is the actual travelling. Planes are the main culprit. In the beggar class we get to watch as the richer lot recline their spacious seats to a flat position, while we try to defy gravity and sleep sitting upright. Most of the time we are suffocated by the person in front who immediately slams his seat back as far as it can go – robbing you of what little space you initially had.
If I could travel by train everywhere, I would do it in a heart beat. The scenery you can see sitting on a train can be amazing sometimes.
We arrived in Jakarta at night, accompanied by a new friend, Jeremy. He was also an EPIK teacher who just finished a two-year stint in Korea. He was struggling to find a place to stay so the guys at Six Degrees hostel, where we had booked, agreed to let him sleep on our floor.
The next day the three of us hiked through the intense heat in search of places of interest in Jakarta. If I had to describe Jakarta in one word it would be ‘lively’. The streets are intensely busy and the colours are as vivid as I’ve experienced. The people are quick to smile back at you once you show some friendliness.
Person after person wanted to have their picture taken with us. It was an unusual experience.
In the next week I’ll go into more detail about some of the more interesting events so far, and how our Indonesian is coming along.
A view from an airplane window
We crossed the train tracks to take a picture of this
Jakarta Kota train station
I don't know what this street performance was about
Lots of old colonial Dutch buildings
The safest bank in the world
taman fatahillah - a busy square in Indonesia
Boats at the Sunda Kelapa port
