Walking: Gringos Enter the Hood
Jakarta is not a city that wins you over with its beauty, but it's compelling in other ways. After nearly a week of serial visits to government agencies—think: tropical DMVs—interspersed with sessions in traffic, we decided one night to screw it all & WALK home.
People do walk here, of course, but it’s work. Even at 8 pm it’s warm. Sidewalks are puddled, heaved-up, sunk-in, over-grown, crowded with food carts, & the mice come out at night. Drop your vigilance & a foreigner’s apt to get hit by a bajaj. Still, it felt good to walk outside, to walk for an hour or more in the cool of night. As it happened, it was the best thing we could have done.
Evan has a good sense of direction & he’s been in Jakarta before. He didn’t know the exact route home, but he aims us well: follow the raised train tracks south. “You sure this is a good idea?” I ask, because the path is unevenly lit & between the basket makers & closed Kia repair shops, people are living under the tracks. Where I come from, this is unwise. “It’s a good idea,” he says easily, just as it becomes clear to me that we’re entering a slum.
And yet. The first parked motorcycle has a pink teddy bear on it. Two men centered on the dim path ahead are holding…babies, talking animatedly about fatherhood. Hunched figures off to the side, tucked under the concrete train lines…resolve into young couples staring at a chess board, sipping bottled tea. A little kid on a bicycle toodles by. A warung (food stall) seats a family, the 2 little daughters giggling over their straws. Far from scary or awkward, it felt...good to be there. Then our train-tracks path—none of this shows up on the map—funnels us directly into a kampung.
Kampung means "village", with contradictory connotations of slum & of home. It's where a majority of Indonesians actually live. What we entered was a long, narrow stretch of tenement housing knocked up on either side of a four-foot wide paved gang (walkway) running straight through it. Once you're in, it's either turn around or go all the way through. It has electricity (lights, TVs) &, judging by what I didn't smell: plumbing. Or something clever. But things are very rudimentary here. Very poor. This is where the people who sell fruit from carts & give motorcycle rides live. It's also a hidden bastion of village life & culture sustained within the metropolis. I never would have done this on purpose, & I don’t know that it would happen twice, but traveling through this really was, as Evan said, a good idea.
Everyone who lives there seems to be hanging out along the gang in the late evening, talking, playing guitars, smoking, eating, listening to music. Kids & babies everywhere. There’s so much to take in, but on either side are people’s homes & universal etiquette tells me to train my eyes away. I know who I’m not. We walk single file, answering everyone’s greetings in turn, pretty much on the verge of laughter the entire time.
Because everyone who saw us was either astonished, intrigued or both, seeming to find us...I'm trying to describe these bemused expressions...it was as if we’d suddenly walked up wearing rabbit suits. Because we’re just these gigantic, white, rich (bearded) foreigners—bule: gringos—who can return pleasantries in Bahasa Indonesian & Arabic, & don’t appear lost.
The next morning we learned there's a popular TV drama called "Bule Masuk Kampung" –Gringos Enter the Hood—a comedy about an American boy who’s come to Jakarta to learn about Islam & falls in love with a girl from the kampung. So our arrival was an inadvertent performance of a popular joke. Kids would go saucer-eyed, barely restraining hysterics (squeeze my arm: her first white person), experimentally shout "Hello Mister!" & dissolve into laughter when we said 'Hello' back. They'd crowd us for high fives & formal hand shakes. Along the sidelines of a mini soccer court, a 5 year old kicked a soccer ball at me & when I passed it directly back to him, to assist a running goal, all the mothers sitting behind me cheered. I turned & curtsied; they cracked up.
Suddenly: we're out the other side at last & into the street where traffic is flowing again; a freeway overpass; packs of teenagers cross in jeans & heels gossiping with friends on their way to the cinema. Village life recedes & disappears: from here it only looks like the mouth of a dark alley. It is. We caught a taxi the rest of the way home.
People do walk here, of course, but it’s work. Even at 8 pm it’s warm. Sidewalks are puddled, heaved-up, sunk-in, over-grown, crowded with food carts, & the mice come out at night. Drop your vigilance & a foreigner’s apt to get hit by a bajaj. Still, it felt good to walk outside, to walk for an hour or more in the cool of night. As it happened, it was the best thing we could have done.
Evan has a good sense of direction & he’s been in Jakarta before. He didn’t know the exact route home, but he aims us well: follow the raised train tracks south. “You sure this is a good idea?” I ask, because the path is unevenly lit & between the basket makers & closed Kia repair shops, people are living under the tracks. Where I come from, this is unwise. “It’s a good idea,” he says easily, just as it becomes clear to me that we’re entering a slum.
And yet. The first parked motorcycle has a pink teddy bear on it. Two men centered on the dim path ahead are holding…babies, talking animatedly about fatherhood. Hunched figures off to the side, tucked under the concrete train lines…resolve into young couples staring at a chess board, sipping bottled tea. A little kid on a bicycle toodles by. A warung (food stall) seats a family, the 2 little daughters giggling over their straws. Far from scary or awkward, it felt...good to be there. Then our train-tracks path—none of this shows up on the map—funnels us directly into a kampung.
Kampung means "village", with contradictory connotations of slum & of home. It's where a majority of Indonesians actually live. What we entered was a long, narrow stretch of tenement housing knocked up on either side of a four-foot wide paved gang (walkway) running straight through it. Once you're in, it's either turn around or go all the way through. It has electricity (lights, TVs) &, judging by what I didn't smell: plumbing. Or something clever. But things are very rudimentary here. Very poor. This is where the people who sell fruit from carts & give motorcycle rides live. It's also a hidden bastion of village life & culture sustained within the metropolis. I never would have done this on purpose, & I don’t know that it would happen twice, but traveling through this really was, as Evan said, a good idea.
Everyone who lives there seems to be hanging out along the gang in the late evening, talking, playing guitars, smoking, eating, listening to music. Kids & babies everywhere. There’s so much to take in, but on either side are people’s homes & universal etiquette tells me to train my eyes away. I know who I’m not. We walk single file, answering everyone’s greetings in turn, pretty much on the verge of laughter the entire time.
Because everyone who saw us was either astonished, intrigued or both, seeming to find us...I'm trying to describe these bemused expressions...it was as if we’d suddenly walked up wearing rabbit suits. Because we’re just these gigantic, white, rich (bearded) foreigners—bule: gringos—who can return pleasantries in Bahasa Indonesian & Arabic, & don’t appear lost.
The next morning we learned there's a popular TV drama called "Bule Masuk Kampung" –Gringos Enter the Hood—a comedy about an American boy who’s come to Jakarta to learn about Islam & falls in love with a girl from the kampung. So our arrival was an inadvertent performance of a popular joke. Kids would go saucer-eyed, barely restraining hysterics (squeeze my arm: her first white person), experimentally shout "Hello Mister!" & dissolve into laughter when we said 'Hello' back. They'd crowd us for high fives & formal hand shakes. Along the sidelines of a mini soccer court, a 5 year old kicked a soccer ball at me & when I passed it directly back to him, to assist a running goal, all the mothers sitting behind me cheered. I turned & curtsied; they cracked up.
Suddenly: we're out the other side at last & into the street where traffic is flowing again; a freeway overpass; packs of teenagers cross in jeans & heels gossiping with friends on their way to the cinema. Village life recedes & disappears: from here it only looks like the mouth of a dark alley. It is. We caught a taxi the rest of the way home.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 4:42 PM
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