Ask me which is the lowest-rated of a city I have been to, and I’d say Jakarta for 2/10
I went to the busiest city in Indonesia in the early second week of 2024. The city that never sleeps. I went on a mission to learn how to use public transportation and looking on how to live in the city called ‘city of fortune-seekers’.
Yes, I got a chance to take my fortune there, even tho maybe I won’t stay there for long but still, I gotta live there to take my chance.
Living in that city is quite stressful for some people. Just arrive at that city I directly faced with the dust and the very unfriendly weather and noises people make from the streets. People are honking does not usually happen in my hometown. Town that is known as ‘humble people’ who never honking no matter how bad the traffic is. First culture shock.
The moment I stepped my foot in there, the first word came outta my mouth is “how can people live in this city?!”
I learn how to get to my prospective-workplace from my bro in law’s place. I walk. Take the bridge. Buy a card to pay bus. Get on the bus. Arrive at the stop. Take another walk. Go to another stop. Get on another bus. Stop. Walk again. arrives
It’s like 24 hours of your life is spent on the street going places you head off.
I see lot of people are in hurry, people crash each other. Competing with other passenger to get on bus first so you don’t have to wait for another bus. People busy for something they dunno what that’s about. People are after the job that doesn’t give them pair credits but just use their sweat.
And that could be me in the future. next month is my on-boarding schedule. And some people I mentioned before; who walk in hurry, looking for early bus, get to the train with air pods and mask. I could be one of them.
I see people who just begin their work life in Jakarta are like the chapter three of George Orwell’s famous poverty novel Down and Out in Paris and London.
In that chapter the ‘I’ that Orwell didn’t tell the name is, telling the story of his beginning of facing poverty in Paris. There are a lot of sentences that relate to what Jakarta life I saw yesterday.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
The sentence that has brought my sight to the moment when I was in Jakrta and seeing people and thinking “this is what I’m gonna face everyday in the next month.”
Like Orwell said in that chapter: “you are telling lies, and expensive lies.” Now I understand why people in that city are struggling but they look like a wealthy people.
And the lesson I learnt from Jakarta also written in this chapter. “You discover what it is like to be hungry.” I discover what it is like to live the real world. “Welcome to the real worlddd, it sucks. You gonna love it.” Monica voice popped up in my head.
And what I do when I’m back to my hometown? Yap, prepare for Jakarta life. I do research of how to manage money, time, and my mentally. And seeing that I’m not gonna be paid enough I start to look how I can live with that money for a month. Then comes one sentence from Orwell: “you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how.” Close enough with that I can live with that money if I know how.
The sentence so relates to me. Now I think and write down how to live with that money I’ll get in that city. And another lesson: “that the less money you have, the less you worry.” That the closing sentence from this chapter that makes me calmer and worry less of my future life.
I give you massive thanks Orwell.
