Catch Up As Jakarta rapidly empties with the approach of Idul Fitri, the end of the Islamic fasting month, peace descends on those of us staying behind. A rain storm or two and much reduced traffic should give us breathable air and a chance to catch up on lost sleep and those DVDs we intended to watch if we could find the time.
Me? I've got loads of writing to do whilst spending the next 10 days here in Jakartass Towers placing buckets beneath the leaks. Much of the writing is to build up a post-dated frontlog, so to speak, of posts for here, but much of the other is, for the time being, hush-hush.
So, meanwhile, please make do with these snippets.
1. An Indonesian lass in Singapore calls her blog
Pleasantly Annoying. It isn't.
---Yet.
2. Christopher Taylor is a Canadian from Vancouver who's lived in New York for almost 10 years. He's an award-winning freelance journalist and he's set up
Everything Indonesia. When I emailed him to find out why, he replied, "
It's really astounding how little Americans know about Indonesia, so maybe together we can boost their IQ a bit." :)
---How could I not give him a plug, eh?
3. Apart from a few areas in Jakarta and surrounding satellite towns with the closed communities of housing complexes, I'm not sure that Jakarta affords a sense of belonging to a particular area. When I lived in London, local newspapers were of great value as they gave a sense of belonging rather than the alienation felt by many.
London has a number of blogs written by 'local' residents and one of the best I've recently discovered, and from an area I once knew very well, is
Stockwell News. This is what a community newspaper should be.
Any chance of Jakarta bloggers doing something for their local patch or is this vast megapolis just one amorphous mass?
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