JMP was successfully delivered yesterday afternoon to JISMF, the Jakarta International Summer Music Festival at which she will be teaching for the next couple of weeks.  It is located in Tangerang, a satellite city that is roughly to Jakarta as Queens is to Manhattan.  The voyage there is long: it was about an hour and a half drive there, a bit quicker on the way home.  Fortunately JISMF has a driver, who picked us up.  Driving that far out from central Jakarta really allowed us to see just how phenomenally big the Jakarta metro area is.  It just keeps going and going.

JISMF is in a very neat place, from what I saw of it before returning back.  The building is on the newish side, and is being expanded further as we speak.  It has a bunch of pianos and things, along with nice practice areas and performance spaces.  It is located near a new development called BSD City, which stands for Bumi Serpong Damai, which means something along the lines of Peaceful Serpong Land or something impenetrable like that. 

(Incidentally, BSD is all over the news trying to bill itself as the hip new place for Jakarta’s nouveaux riches to live.  The development has things like a water park, biking trails, fancy malls, office parks, its own water treatment plant, and all those things that a swanky new development should have.  The ads on the TV close with someone climbing into a helicopter, which raises the possibility to me that Jakarta will turn into Sao Paulo, where everyone who’s anyone travels via helicopter rather than sitting in traffic.)

At any rate, JMP does not have internet access right now, but she reports that she had a nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant last night and that she is sharing a room with another faculty member, a young woman from Poland.  The have a staff meeting over lunch and their program starts at 4:30, so we will keep you posted on how things go.  My schedule is less exciting, but I am meeting a colleague at central Jakarta’s swankiest mall for what will probably be a very nice lunch.