Category: General

We don’t understand much about Jakarta, and one thing that we have really come to realize is that we completely don’t understand Jakarta traffic.  Traffic is usually better on the weekends, which kind of makes sense.  The other thing that we can count on is that it’s hard to find a taxi when it’s raining.  Other than that, we’re clueless–and we’ve had some experience with strange traffic patterns around New York, LA, and Boston.  Sometimes there will be dozens upon dozens of taxis waiting outside of our apartment to catch fares.  Sometimes there aren’t.  This morning, for no reason at all, the first 10 taxis we saw didn’t want to pick us up.  They just drove right past us, and then stopped and waited for something.  Just now, TP took a taxi across town that took forever for no discernable reason.  This morning, SBY (the president) drove past us, so we had lots of traffic then.  Sometimes there will be cops around "directing traffic," and sometimes at the same intersection there won’t be, and in either situation the traffic is the same: bad.  Sometimes our commute home is worse early in the afternoon than during rush hour.  Some morning at 8:20 the Catholic/Chinese school near us is full of parents dropping off kids, sometimes it isn’t.  We almost always travel the exact same route here and back every day, and it never takes a predictable amount of time.  We’ve had 8 minutes, we’ve had 45.

In other travel-related news, we’ve been stressing out for the past two weeks trying to figure out how to change our plane tickets from February 18 to February 15.  This is hard: the tickets are from Jakarta to Singapore on Thai Airways, then from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur on Malaysian Airlines.  Both of the tickets are parts of round-trip tickets, and both of them are paper tickets, and we bought them both in Madison, WI, and we bought them through a travel agent, a student ticket service for which our cards have now, conveniently, expired.  Not an easy process.  Then yesterday JM looked at the tickets–it turns out that we forgot that the tickets already fly on February 15.  D’oh.

Well it’s hard to believe, but we’re leaving Indonesia for Malaysia just about three weeks.  We went to the Malaysian Embassy this morning to begin the next round of our favorite activity, fun with visas.

Luckily, the Embassy is located only a 20 minute walk from our apartment so we don’t have to sit in traffic driving all over town trying to find the office.  TP had gone once already around Christmas to see if we had all the necessary papers and to check how long the process would take.  We needed an additional letter that was more specific, so we got that and tried again today.  I (JM) couldn’t help but compare this place to the Indonesia immigration office that we spent so much time at.  It’s actually a nice building which is not falling apart, it’s calm and organized, there are no huge stacks of passports, and there is  air conditioning and no smoking.  Also, the people actually tell you where to go and what is going on- for example, the guy said "I’m going to go check about this, wait here I’ll be right back"  instead of "Go over there!" which we heard a lot of at immigration.   However, as with so many things we try to do in Indonesia, our efforts were futile.  They told us that because we need a study visa we’ll just have to show up in Malaysia, get a regular three month visa on arrival, and then contact Tom’s sponser and immigration to change it to a multiple-entry six-month visa.  Fun.

So here’s what we want to know.  Even though we were technically on Malaysian soil inside the embassy,  was the fact that we are physically in Indonesia still enough to make things go wrong for us again?