Burn Your Rubbish

How is it that I once more sit writing this blog post in my kos, having just eaten pop-mee and watching the Crows play again?? And this afternoon I will once more be going shopping…. Weird.

Anyways, am about to enter my final week of my time in Jakarta. I gotta heap of work to finish before I finish my internship, which I have a feeling is going to entail several later than usual finishes. But the good news is, there is a silver lining on the horizon – very soon I will be in Bali/Gili Islands getting a tan, so that I don’t get back to Australia and have to face your incredulous questions about where I have been living because of the enduring whiteness of my skin!

So anyway, today I am going to tell you about something that amuses/dismays me everytime I ride along Jalan Casablanca on my way to work on the back of the motorbike with a scarf tied around my face to block the pollution.

Jakarta has some of the worst air quality in the world, it also has some of the worst traffic in the world. The government, having in it’s wisdom decided that these two things may actually be connected, in an effort to ease the congestion in the CBD, implemented a law that says that between certain hours of the day any car on the road must have a minimum of three passengers.

Ok, cool. But because some people just couldn’t care less about complying with the spirit of that law, that is by organizing for example (shock horror) ‘car-pooling’, a few enterprising young souls realized that they could earn some spare cash by standing on the side of the road, and jumping in the cars of the law-breakers, earning probably the equivalent of a dollar or less, and then jumping out when the risk of the driver getting a fine has passed. It looks to me like the kids who stand on the side of the road, and who by the way are probably homeless/unemployed/orphaned or all three, have regular “customers” who pick them up everyday. Good on the kids I reckon, but in the meantime, absolutely nothing is being done about the pollution problem.

That is one thing that gets to me about Indonesia. Everything comes wrapped in 27 layers of plastic, people look at you like you have three heads when you say you don’t need a plastic bag, and the idea of throwing rubbish in for example, a bin, as opposed to the street or a public waterway, is quite a foreign concept. Burning rubbish is also contributing like mad to the poor air quality. Even many of my exceptionally well-educated friends that I have met through the internship don’t quite get the idea of taking care of the environment. Nonchalance about the environment is systemic, endemic, epidemic, call it what you will. Sadly, the Western world can put their shopping in recyclable “green” bags as much as we want, but while this kind of ignorance prevails in the developing world, it seems hard to see anything improving. Of course, this is all anecdotal and based on observation only, as opposed to facts and statistics, but I am pretty most people who have lived here will understand what I am saying. And my the way, I don’t attribute blame toIndonesian people generally. In the absence of a government that prioritises the environment, and strong civil society with influential and well-resourced NGO’s, it is probably not surprising.

Ok, enough ranting. One thing I realized the other day is how little I have mentioned the importance that music has had for me while I have been here. Right now I have a minor obsession with Gnarls Barkley, who I saw on MTV two weeks ago (that song Crazy…) and as yet, have been unable to find the CD. I bought the new Keane album the other day though, and that is very good. What else have I been listening to here?? Madonna-Confessions on a Dance Floor (yes I am a remarkably daggy Madonna devotee, still), Peterpan – Alexandria Soundtrack, Jamie Cullum, Neil Young and James Taylor, Tiesto, Pete Murray, m-FLO, Joanna Newsom, Kanye West- Late Registration (I still can’t get sick of that hip-hop masterpiece), Ween, John Legend, Goodnight Electric (of course), Kyoto Jazz Massive, Radiohead (of course), a Coldplay MP3 CD that I bought and has about 200 songs on it, and Nihtin Sawnhey! And a heap more of course, but there are some of the particularly important musix that now have memories of Indonesia embedded in their choruses and hooks. ;-)

Anyway, I’ve had my whinge. Time to go an upload this baby onto the blog. And if anyone can tell me more about Gnarls Barkley I will be, forever in your debt. Oh and btw, I am going to add a link to vimeo to my blog soon, which will let you see my video’s. I haven’t made many, but now I can share them I will make more. Sip!