New York van Java

My first week back in Jakarta.

Author’s Note: According to the Substack Editor, this post is too long for email. So readers are advised to read this directly on the web.

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Greetings from Jakarta,

It’s been about a week since I landed on Soekarno-Hatta International Airport and showed this neat part of the airport on Substack Notes:

As some of you might know, I have spent the last few months in the process of moving out of the United States and into Indonesia. Well, that move is finally completed. I must say it’s quite the culture shock, even though I had lived in Jakarta before, having spent about half of my childhood in the nation’s capital¹.

In the first week I’m here, I have to do the little things like setting up my bank account and such. But I was also able to get a good look at the places to go in the area. As I have said before, I have lived in Jakarta so this is not a completely new experience.

The place above is called Pasar Mayestik, or the Mayestik Market². It’s a traditional market where you can find various stands selling food, drinks, and snacks. If you don’t like what you see in the photos, you can always go to the streets.

I used to go to this place when I was a kid, and it had changed a lot since that time. Some things never change though, and by that I mean the stray cats³.

One thing to keep in mind about Jakarta is that it’s a hodgepodge of ethnic groups. People from all over Indonesia⁴ came here to make a living. It has been this way even before independence, as can be seen with the Betawi, the native people of the place; they themselves came about as the various peoples the Dutch brought in intermixed with one another. And while the Betawi have found themselves a minority in their own land, the process which brought about their ethnogenesis continues to this day.

This brings me to the title of the post: New York Van Java. Apparently, that’s one of the nicknames of Jakarta. Personally, I have never heard of the phrase until I ran across it on Wikipedia even though I lived in Jakarta for many years. Regardless, I found it to be a very fitting nickname.

I’m guessing the nickname was derived from Parijs van Java, or Paris of Java, the Dutch nickname for Bandung. If the capital of West Java has the glamour of Paris, then the soon-to-be former capital of Indonesia has the chaos, the economy and the traffic of New York City. Especially the traffic.

If there’s one thing I remember about Jakarta, it’s the traffic. You do not want to get stuck in Jakarta traffic. Of all the places I’m familiar with, it’s the worst by far. And I’ve had to deal with Beltway/DC Area traffic for years.

Below you can see the average day traffic. It’s not even rush hour yet.

As a side note, the picture on the left is the church where I was baptized. Can you imagine going to church with this traffic? I don’t have to, because I’ve done it before and I did it just a few days ago last Sunday⁵.

On the positive side, you can find all kinds of food here. I ate in this restaurant below last week:

This is a friend chicken place, though not at all like KFC.

And of course, how can I forget the mall?⁶ If there’s one thing more ubiquitous in Jakarta than stray cats, it’s malls. They’re everywhere. I don’t claim to be the most well-traveled American, but I don’t know any place in the US that has Jakarta’s high density of malls.

One mall was tragic, to say the least. Here’s Ratu Plaza. I remember going here with my brother many times to buy computer parts and games. Now, it’s practically a ghost town:

It's a cruel game, capitalism.

But while one childhood mall bites the dust⁷, another remains as robust as ever. Below is Plaza Senayan (PS for short), one of the two malls you can find in the Senayan area:

Yep, it’s pretty big. And it’s not the biggest mall in Jakarta, not by a long shot. It’s not even the biggest mall in Senayan, as right across the street is its younger brother, Senayan City. Even so, PS is still impressive in its own right.

There’s some interesting stuff I found there:

Yes, it’s Five Monkeys instead of Five Guys. And is that Mickey Mouse SpongeBob? I don’t even…

Let us move on!

I’m a sucker for city aesthetics, so when I got a good look at the view from PS, I just had to take some pictures:

So that’s the malls of Jakarta⁸. I might talk more about them in a future post, but for now I want to move on.

Remember the nickname New York Van Java? So far I’ve shown the New York part, that being the urban jungle. But now I’ll show the Java part, the actual jungle. As you might expect, Jakarta is hot and humid. Makes sense, it is a tropical place.

Welcome to the Jungle!

I took the picture above from my bedroom. Because of the trees in my neighborhood, it feels like I live in a jungle when I look out the window. Considering how the city is, I don’t mind.

So that’s Jakarta, the New York of Java. I’m still getting used to things here. There’s the heat and the traffic and many other things I don’t want to elaborate. But regardless, this place feels like home. Yes, it’s a mess. But this mess is my home.

Until next time,



Michael P. Marpaung

1. At least as of the writing of this post (April 30, 2024).

2. Yes, the place has an English Wikipedia entry. I’m shocked too.

3. You can see one in one of the pictures.

4. And elsewhere.

5. Not to the one pictured, though. This is protestant church, and I became a Catholic when I was in America. I touched upon it elsewhere in Indonesian and American and in this interview I did.

6. Is that a positive? I’ll let the readers decide the answer to that question.

7. Practically speaking.

8. The ones in the general area, at least.