300 words on Jakarta

Jakarta looks like somebody dropped it. It’s one of those delightfully unplanned cities that just seems to keep growing and growing and not really going anywhere. Like my old home in Seoul, though, the city centre has nice wide avenues built to let the Powers drive through in their air-conditioned limousines without having to toil through the grubby masses who pay their salaries.

Then someone introduced motorcycles. There’s something very egalitarian about Indonesian motorcycle riders. They don’t care who you are or what you’re driving. They don’t care which side of the road they are on. They just know that they have to get somewhere and you are in the way.

In Korea the terror of the roads is the propane delivery boy – a 20-something student on a 125cc death trap with the back end jacked up so high that his nose is three inches of the handlebars and four tanks of propane gas strapped to the back. No helmet, no fear, no regard for anyone on the side walk. Which is probably where he’s driving. By those standards the roads in Jakarta are quite tame.

This the third country within which I’ll be plying my trade as an itinerant flack for Edelman. And the third time I’ve made a serious attempt at keeping a blog. In the past I’ve always failed because I insist on taking a few hours to write each post. None of that stream of consciousness stuff.

Not this time, though. A self-imposed limit of 300 words per post on whatever topic grabs my attention. Probably mostly on communications and what’s going on in Indonesia.

The first post is always the hardest to write – it’s the last one that’s easy. With a little luck (and a lot of inspiration) the last post will be some time away.