Jakarta

Ah, chillin' in a hotel lobby at 10pm with my computer... I feel like a true consultant once again, especially with the ubiquitous piano lounge music that I always found a bit bittersweet when traveling for work.  But this is Jakarta, where the number of karaoke bars rivals that of the Philippines, and an innocuous hotel piano turns into a spontaneous karaoke party with some Whitney Houston.

It's all a bit silly, but hey, a gal's gotta work.  Instead of paying a ridiculous amount of money for internet in my room, I go downstairs to the bar and ask for the (free) internet code.  The waitress asks what I want to drink and I say "water".  This, apparently, is not allowed in the bar.  So she hands me a coupon for a free drink, along with my coupon for free internet.  I smile and nicely return the coupon, saying I'm only going to be here for five minutes to send out an email.  She leaves, only to return with a glass of champagne, saying it's a "welcome drink."  If this is not peer pressure, I'm not sure what is... and hey, who can turn down a glass of champagne?  Half an hour later, it seems as good a time as any to blog...

They say you never fully appreciate where you are until you've gone.  What's been fascinating over the last few weeks since we've left India is seeing Indian influences across the region (well, okay, Burma and Indonesia).  With modern pundits constantly debating about the amount of Indian influence in current foreign affairs, it's easy to forget just how influential India has been in history.  We saw this everywhere in Burma, from the Burmese alphabet to the Buddhist temples with Brahman influences, and I'm now seeing this in Indonesia as well.

The Indonesian currency is the "rupiah" (which, at $1 approximating Rp 10,000 is weirdly difficult to navigate, as I have two versions (an old and new) each of Rp 100,000; 10,000; and 1,000 currency in my wallet, making everyday transactions take much longer than they should).  The majority of our meetings here have been conducted in Bahasa (with only a few actually having translations), but it's funny picking up some Hindi, as Bahasa was heavily influenced by Sanskrit.  

As I've come to learn, Bahasa is actually quite a fascinating language.  A trading language, it's picked up Sanskrit, Tagalog, and others along the trade routes, with some Dutch thrown in (though architectural remnants of the former colonizer seem few and far between, even in Jakarta).  I was in Yogyakarta (in Java) earlier this week for meetings, and an hour away lies one of Asia's holiest Buddhist temples (Borobudur, the 7th wonder of the world!), strongly influenced by India, with an immense Hindu temple nearby.

Of course, this makes it sound like Indonesia lacks originality in its culture, which of course is the furthest from the truth.  An archipelago of over 17,000 islands (more than the Philippines!), Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country, with 86% of its 238 million people practicing Islam.  Our meetings began with a prayer to Allah (similar to meetings in the Philippines starting with a prayer to the father), only this time a gong followed.

Compared to another Muslim country like Bangladesh, it's quite easy to get alcohol here, although a bottle of wine will cost you about $40! (Beer is much cheaper, at about $2 a can at your local convenience store).  Cigarettes are ubiquitous, with one health delegate saying it is the most heavily consumed good across Indonesia, after rice (in fact, until the country recently began growing it themselves, cloves to Indonesia for smoking were Madagascar's largest export!)  Contrary to what you might think I may be doing here based on these newly-acquired facts, I'm actually inside conference rooms all day and this is the stuff that gets talked about at breaks...

And on that note, I think it's time for bed!  Off to brave the Jakarta traffic tomorrow morning...