Our Jakarta Anniversary with Michael Jackson and Obama

Posted by Danielle

June 25, 2009 will be remembered the world over as the day that Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, passed away. We learned about Jackson’s death on Friday morning Jakarta time, when we tuned into BBC headline news while eating our breakfast. It was the only story that the BBC covered for over two hours.

Given the 14-hour time difference between California and Jakarta, the June 25 that we experienced actually preceded the sad news about Michael Jackson. Rather, we spent the day marking our fourth wedding anniversary. This week also happens to be the 482nd anniversary of Jakarta’s founding, so the city itself is in a celebratory mood. I managed to finish my research in the 95-degree archives on Wednesday, so I took the day off work so that we could spend some time exploring Jakarta.

Not that we had a particularly long list of places we wanted to see. In contrast to most world capitals, Jakarta does not have much to attract tourists other than its vast shopping malls. We had already managed to take in most of the prominent historical sites when we visited the city in April, and the heat, pollution, and lack of pedestrian-friendly sidewalks does not make Jakarta a particularly pleasant place for strolling.

So we went on a mission searching for a site associated with one of Jakarta’s most famous residents…Barack Obama’s elementary school. I’d learned from a friend that the school had actually posted a plaque on its front gate. We spent some time searching for an address, and we found it (see photo to the right). Most schools are on their two-week summer vacation before starting the next school year in July (Indonesian children go to school six days a week year round with vacations each season), so there was not much activity at the school. (It certainly was not the “madrassa” that people spoke about during the presidential campaign.) One teacher walking in asked us (in English) what are names were and where we were from. When we answered that we were from the United States, she smiled and said, “Just like Barry,” pointing to the Obama plaque. My friend Herlily—who had told me about the plaque—joked that Indonesians like to take credit for Obama’s victory—that something about his four years in Jakarta as a child gave him that extra edge to become the US president.

After photographing the school, we continued our walk through the neighborhood and found that we were in a rather different Jakarta—lush green trees offered shade and fresher air than we’ve found elsewhere in the city. The sidewalks were clear of vendors and motorcycles. We were in the diplomatic district, passing embassies left and right. Clearly this is the best place to take a walk in the Indonesian capital. John described it as the “Georgetown of Jakarta.”

We ultimately made our way to an impressive monument on Proclamation Street that marks the spot where Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence on August 17, 1945. The monument (see photo) is in a quiet shaded park on territory that had once been Sukarno’s home. After such a pleasant walk to a nice, quiet spot, we might have forgotten we were in Jakarta if it weren’t for the man urinating on a tree next to the monument.

In a last attempt at escapism, in the evening we headed to an upscale restaurant specializing in traditional Javanese cuisine where we gorged ourselves on tempeh sate, tofu stuffed with bean sprouts and mushrooms, coconut rice, and numerous other vegetarian delights that have eluded me on our trips to Indonesian-fast food outlets. We could not get over the irony that the two glasses of wine we ordered—at $9 a glass—covered half the cost of our bill. Although the excellent food was very affordable, the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu was $50. The California Mondavi wine we buy in our Berkeley grocery store for about $12 a bottle was priced at over $60. Clearly this is an economy-of-scale issue in a Muslim-majority country where alcohol consumption is avoided by about 90 percent of the population.

While the ambience of the restaurant was delightful, our own mood was lowered by the presence of a rat that scurried across our field of vision at least four times over the course of the meal, including one close call behind my chair. No matter how hard we may try to escape the less pleasant aspects of Indonesian city life, they seem to find us.

Tomorrow we leave Java for Sumatra, Indonesia’s second-largest island. We will be in Medan, capital of North Sumatra and Indonesia’s third-largest city, for the next five weeks. The region has a reputation for being more rough-and-tumble than Java, so maybe the visit from a little furry friend during our anniversary dinner was just a warning of more to come.