Greater Jakarta or Jakarta (10 mill), Bogor, Tangerang, Bekasi and Depok consist of 28 million people (2nd largest urban area in the world) – this place is big, unstructured and very complex to figure out.
Jakarta has 8 million motorcycles and 4 million cars registered – the town does not have a monorail or any other efficient rail systems. We do not have a structured bus system; the roads are in general in very bad shape…. In other words the public transport system is at best in chaos. Traffic here is hell and you can sometimes spend several hours going 5 kilometers.
This also means that you cannot predict when you are going to be at a certain location. So Jakarta inhabitants in general live by “rubber time”, which means meetings cannot be arranged unless you have at least half an hour of buffer time.
Jakarta on the other hand can offer almost anything you can dream of: 5 star hotels, swanky bars, night clubs, high end shopping malls, local markets with local flavors, student communities, sports events, concerts etc. - it is a lot easier to tell what Jakarta cannot offer, which is: Pedestrian streets even pavements are rare, parks with solitude and silence, high end museums (you have some, but they are not great), libraries or other public service facilities – in other words tax payer money are not spent on making the city facilities nicer in Jakarta.
The quality of living in Jakarta depends a lot about WHERE you are located. We have slum neighborhoods that make even the most hard core traveller feel bad, opulent neighborhoods where every house is a castle, but most of the neighborhoods here are a mixture of big houses, small houses, nice shops, the guy selling directly on the street, people living in the street etc. Jakarta is diverse and it is impossible to define one distinct mode here.
Jakarta is humid and the temperature is typically around 28-30 degrees Celsius all year.
Jakarta
