I've been in Indonesia for about three weeks now. It's been an interesting experience, for sure, and I'm glad I knocked it off the bucket list.
I really don't think I have the right personality type for a place like Indonesia. Right now, I feel like Indonesia is a place that I feel is tailor made to be as incompatible with my personality type as it could possibly be.
I'll make a list:
1). It isn't quiet. Everywhere I go, no matter where I go, I am absolutely flattened by the sheer overwhelming noise of my surroundings. It doesn't matter if I'm in a mall, in a bar, in a gym, or walking down the road, the ambient noise levels are such that I can't even hear myself think, let alone hear some woman whose so physically tiny and whose voice is so soft I have bend over and nearly place my ear against her mouth to hear what's she's said after she's already repeated herself fifteen times. Depending on where you choose to live, Mosques will regularly wake you up at 4:45 in the morning. You'll need to start going to bed earlier to compensate for this. Mosques are loud enough to wake you up even if you're on the top floor of an apartment tower. You can't fix this without changing your location, or finding a residence with soundproofed windows.
If I were to remain in Indonesia forever, I would need to purchase a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and make them a part of my daily attire, for the rest of my life, until the day I die. Yes, it's really that bad.
2). It's not safe. I don't understand why sidewalks and crosswalks don't exist in Indonesia. Being a pedestrian in Indonesia is like being a lesbian Jew in Nazi Germany. There are almost no sidewalks, and the ones that do exist are frequently in terrible condition, crossing the street consists of picking a random spot to walk across the road, all while making eye contact with oncoming drivers in hopes they slow down.
3). It's not clean. To paraphrase Howard Beale, the air is unfit to breathe, the food is unfit to eat, the water is unfit to drink. You literally need to take medicine (activated charcoal) in order to protect yourself, unless you want to experience diarrhea and bronchitis, and then remember to rub lotion on your body to avoid being eaten alive by the mosquitoes. Pollution is so bad it'll shorten your life span.
4). It's not cool. Even the locals, who were born and raised here, tell me they can't stand it. You'd think warm temperatures would be a good thing, like sunny California, but nope. Not when it feels like you're being boiled alive. You end up needing to hide indoors during the middle of the day, and then even at night, the humidity has you sweating until your body is soaked from your face to your ass. If I remain in Indonesia, my days will probably consist of hiding in an air-conditioned apartment, commuting in an air-conditioned vehicle to an air-conditioned mall, so on and so forth. The heat is so oppressive it affects my ability to function. Sunscreen goes from being a recommendation to prevent premature skin aging to being a minimum requirement to avoid sunburn and cancer.
5). It isn't cultured. Firstly, the food in Indonesia isn't merely unhygienic, it's also bland and boring. If you're anything like me, it'll take you less than a month before you're tired of endless variations of "rice and chicken", forgoing the native cuisine in favor of far superior Korean and Japanese food. I'd rather eat McDonald's than eat this stuff, no offense.
Secondly, almost nothing in Indonesia is visually appealing. Dilapidated shacks, crumbling sidewalks, tangled power lines, and apartment towers that look like repurposed prisons. All of this exist alongside garish advertisements and soulless, glass and steel shopping malls. Everything feels improvised. The exception to all of this is the natural world, outside of the urban areas. Indonesia is like India; if you're looking at something you enjoy looking at, you're probably looking at something built by nature, not by humans.
The center of cultural life in Indonesia seems to revolve around the shopping malls, which are built on a scale and level of complexity that looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings. Public parks do technically exist, but if you enjoy such things in America, you'll feel deprived in Indonesia. You'll be living in a depressing jungle of steel and concrete. Even the locals complain that there's nothing to do besides going to the mall.
6). It isn't convenient. There's no Amazon, and the supposed equivalents like Tokopedia are honestly more similar to Temu than to Amazon. Whenever you buy the local Indonesia version of a product, it simply pales in comparison to the American version, unless you're buying something that was imported, in which case it'll be more expensive than it was in America, due to import taxes. If I continue living here, I'll need to do my shopping whenever I return home to America, then return with my new purchases in my luggage.
Traffic congestion, in particular, is so bad that it effectively turns an otherwise massive city into a collection of smaller cities that are all directly adjacent to each other. I wouldn't be surprised if the people with money in Jakarta started using personal helicopters to bypass traffic. This is not a joke. If traffic in Jakarta remains as bad as it if for the next 500 years, I could easily see a situation where the populations of the different areas of Jakarta become genetically distinct form one another.
Worse than the traffic congestion is the overcrowding. If you're commuting someplace, you can at least sit comfortably in the back of an air conditioned taxi, checking emails, answering texts, listening to music, et cetera. The moment you get out of that taxi, you're going to be completely swallowed by the crowd. Crowds in Indonesia are unlike anything in America, they're not just large, they're massive, and so densely packed that you can barely move your body in any direction. People in Indonesia have no concept of personal space, will stand directly behind you so closely you can feel their dick pressing against your ass, pass directly in front of you so closely you nearly collide, and walk so slowly that you feel as if your feet are submerged in molasses. If you're naturally a speed walker, you're going to feel as if you're in the ninth circle of hell.
If you're from the West, you simply have no frame of reference for understanding what this is like. If you need to cross from one end of the mall to the other, you're not merely going on a "walk", but traversing an obstacle course comprised of people completely devoid of proprioception. All of this while enduring the deafening noise of that same crowd, and then the droning of obnoxiously loud pop music being played by the stores's PA system that makes it impossible to actually think before making a purchasing decision....I could go on and on and on.
Every day, whether it's speaking to a barista in a coffee shop, a clerk in a hotel, or a woman on a dating app, you will be continuously reminded of the fact that you live in a country where the average IQ is 87.
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I need suggestions about geomaxx locations. I can't stand it here.
Right now, the only thing that could probably "save" a place like Jakarta for me, is if I could live in some sort of gentrified suburb, maybe one filled with other expats, where everything you need in life, like the grocery store, laundry, et cetera, is either concentrated within a giant residential compound, or can be easily be ordered in via a delivery service.
My understanding is that this is how the local Chinese Indonesian live there lives, huddled away in a sort of "Cloud District", an island of order, peace, quiet, and cleanliness in the ocean of chaos and insanity that is the city of Jakarta.
What should I do? Try searching for a nearby "Cloud District", or start looking at other countries altogether? I'm American, but my personality type less closely resembles that of the stereotypical American, and probably more closely resembles that of the stereotypical central European.
Taiwan perhaps?
I really don't think I have the right personality type for a place like Indonesia. Right now, I feel like Indonesia is a place that I feel is tailor made to be as incompatible with my personality type as it could possibly be.
I'll make a list:
1). It isn't quiet. Everywhere I go, no matter where I go, I am absolutely flattened by the sheer overwhelming noise of my surroundings. It doesn't matter if I'm in a mall, in a bar, in a gym, or walking down the road, the ambient noise levels are such that I can't even hear myself think, let alone hear some woman whose so physically tiny and whose voice is so soft I have bend over and nearly place my ear against her mouth to hear what's she's said after she's already repeated herself fifteen times. Depending on where you choose to live, Mosques will regularly wake you up at 4:45 in the morning. You'll need to start going to bed earlier to compensate for this. Mosques are loud enough to wake you up even if you're on the top floor of an apartment tower. You can't fix this without changing your location, or finding a residence with soundproofed windows.
If I were to remain in Indonesia forever, I would need to purchase a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and make them a part of my daily attire, for the rest of my life, until the day I die. Yes, it's really that bad.
2). It's not safe. I don't understand why sidewalks and crosswalks don't exist in Indonesia. Being a pedestrian in Indonesia is like being a lesbian Jew in Nazi Germany. There are almost no sidewalks, and the ones that do exist are frequently in terrible condition, crossing the street consists of picking a random spot to walk across the road, all while making eye contact with oncoming drivers in hopes they slow down.
3). It's not clean. To paraphrase Howard Beale, the air is unfit to breathe, the food is unfit to eat, the water is unfit to drink. You literally need to take medicine (activated charcoal) in order to protect yourself, unless you want to experience diarrhea and bronchitis, and then remember to rub lotion on your body to avoid being eaten alive by the mosquitoes. Pollution is so bad it'll shorten your life span.
4). It's not cool. Even the locals, who were born and raised here, tell me they can't stand it. You'd think warm temperatures would be a good thing, like sunny California, but nope. Not when it feels like you're being boiled alive. You end up needing to hide indoors during the middle of the day, and then even at night, the humidity has you sweating until your body is soaked from your face to your ass. If I remain in Indonesia, my days will probably consist of hiding in an air-conditioned apartment, commuting in an air-conditioned vehicle to an air-conditioned mall, so on and so forth. The heat is so oppressive it affects my ability to function. Sunscreen goes from being a recommendation to prevent premature skin aging to being a minimum requirement to avoid sunburn and cancer.
5). It isn't cultured. Firstly, the food in Indonesia isn't merely unhygienic, it's also bland and boring. If you're anything like me, it'll take you less than a month before you're tired of endless variations of "rice and chicken", forgoing the native cuisine in favor of far superior Korean and Japanese food. I'd rather eat McDonald's than eat this stuff, no offense.
Secondly, almost nothing in Indonesia is visually appealing. Dilapidated shacks, crumbling sidewalks, tangled power lines, and apartment towers that look like repurposed prisons. All of this exist alongside garish advertisements and soulless, glass and steel shopping malls. Everything feels improvised. The exception to all of this is the natural world, outside of the urban areas. Indonesia is like India; if you're looking at something you enjoy looking at, you're probably looking at something built by nature, not by humans.
The center of cultural life in Indonesia seems to revolve around the shopping malls, which are built on a scale and level of complexity that looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings. Public parks do technically exist, but if you enjoy such things in America, you'll feel deprived in Indonesia. You'll be living in a depressing jungle of steel and concrete. Even the locals complain that there's nothing to do besides going to the mall.
6). It isn't convenient. There's no Amazon, and the supposed equivalents like Tokopedia are honestly more similar to Temu than to Amazon. Whenever you buy the local Indonesia version of a product, it simply pales in comparison to the American version, unless you're buying something that was imported, in which case it'll be more expensive than it was in America, due to import taxes. If I continue living here, I'll need to do my shopping whenever I return home to America, then return with my new purchases in my luggage.
Traffic congestion, in particular, is so bad that it effectively turns an otherwise massive city into a collection of smaller cities that are all directly adjacent to each other. I wouldn't be surprised if the people with money in Jakarta started using personal helicopters to bypass traffic. This is not a joke. If traffic in Jakarta remains as bad as it if for the next 500 years, I could easily see a situation where the populations of the different areas of Jakarta become genetically distinct form one another.
Worse than the traffic congestion is the overcrowding. If you're commuting someplace, you can at least sit comfortably in the back of an air conditioned taxi, checking emails, answering texts, listening to music, et cetera. The moment you get out of that taxi, you're going to be completely swallowed by the crowd. Crowds in Indonesia are unlike anything in America, they're not just large, they're massive, and so densely packed that you can barely move your body in any direction. People in Indonesia have no concept of personal space, will stand directly behind you so closely you can feel their dick pressing against your ass, pass directly in front of you so closely you nearly collide, and walk so slowly that you feel as if your feet are submerged in molasses. If you're naturally a speed walker, you're going to feel as if you're in the ninth circle of hell.
If you're from the West, you simply have no frame of reference for understanding what this is like. If you need to cross from one end of the mall to the other, you're not merely going on a "walk", but traversing an obstacle course comprised of people completely devoid of proprioception. All of this while enduring the deafening noise of that same crowd, and then the droning of obnoxiously loud pop music being played by the stores's PA system that makes it impossible to actually think before making a purchasing decision....I could go on and on and on.
Every day, whether it's speaking to a barista in a coffee shop, a clerk in a hotel, or a woman on a dating app, you will be continuously reminded of the fact that you live in a country where the average IQ is 87.
----------------------------------------------
I need suggestions about geomaxx locations. I can't stand it here.
Right now, the only thing that could probably "save" a place like Jakarta for me, is if I could live in some sort of gentrified suburb, maybe one filled with other expats, where everything you need in life, like the grocery store, laundry, et cetera, is either concentrated within a giant residential compound, or can be easily be ordered in via a delivery service.
My understanding is that this is how the local Chinese Indonesian live there lives, huddled away in a sort of "Cloud District", an island of order, peace, quiet, and cleanliness in the ocean of chaos and insanity that is the city of Jakarta.
What should I do? Try searching for a nearby "Cloud District", or start looking at other countries altogether? I'm American, but my personality type less closely resembles that of the stereotypical American, and probably more closely resembles that of the stereotypical central European.
Taiwan perhaps?
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