Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • JISMF

    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.

  • Greetings from Jakarta Again

    We’re back (JMP and TP) in Jakarta and will be updating almost daily for the next five weeks or so.  We are blogging currently from the Sheraton Bandara, the only true airport hotel in Jakarta.  It is stunningly nice for an airport hotel–almost like a resort and way nicer than the place we stayed at JFK which cost quite a bit more money.  TP is here for more research, while JMP (the former JM) is here to teach at the Jakarta International Summer Music Festival.  We will be dropping her off there shortly, after which TP will return to central Jakarta.

    We flew Cathay Pacific.  It is not as nice as Singapore Airlines, but the seats are more roomy (although less comfortable).  The service was not as good either.  The food was about as good, and the entertainment on demand is great.  The music selection was quite expansive, and while it was not as good as Qatar Airways in the rock and pop department, the classical music selection exists (which made JMP quite happy).

    A few quick initial observations:

    1.  We arrived at 8:00 PM and slept from 10:00 PM till about 8:00 AM without much trouble.  For anyone who travels regularly, you know how hard this is.  Arriving at 8:00 PM is infinitely superior than arriving at 10:00 AM.

    2. It is also infinitely better to travel with a companion than to travel alone.

    3.  JMP agrees that Jakarta seems cleaner and more lively than it did when we first started traveling about 4 years ago.

    4.  The exception is the pollution.  It’s really smoggy here today, and we believe this is probably due to forest fires in Sumatra and Borneo.  One thing that keeps us amazed is that while Jakarta is really polluted, our friends who know both Jakarta and Beijing assure us that Beijing is unambiguously far worse in the pollution department than Jakarta.  We just can’t imagine what that must be like.  Jakarta is already dirty enough that you can’t dry your clothes outside without them getting dirty again.