So Many Indonesias

I moved to Jakarta yesterday.

Apparently I’m supposed to feel some kind of anxiety about moving into the worst traffic jam in the world, but I don’t.

Being so close to Singapore, I’ve come here so often — work, leisure, friends’ weddings, for the food even — that I didn’t even realize I had moved here until I went out in search of a towel.

Douglas Adams’ advice still rings true. Bring a bloody towel. That’s about all you need.

I didn’t have one.

I moved here to join the Ideabox incubator program with my startup, which will create mobile financial services for low income women in Indonesia and Myanmar. I wrote about the journey to get to that point, here.

Day 1 of Jakarta

I know this place. I am unmoved when scammers try to convince me that their taxis are genuine Blue Bird cabs (they’re not). I speak Indonesian. I do okay. It feels like just another business trip — get on the 7.40AM Jetstar flight, get out on the last plane out that same day. I used to do that weekly. Now there’s no plane to get back into, there’s just… time.

Time to purchase a towel, which I need very badly.

Why is it you can never find a shop which will sell you a towel when you truly need it, and why do towels cost so much?

It’s a good thing I’m not numerically dyslexic, because I think that towel I just saw in that department store cost US$50, after a 50% discount. It’d better be made of panda fur.

I find the stuff I need by avoiding the big expat and upper-class stores. Indomaret is the broke entrepreneur’s friend (because you also work so late that the mom-and-pop shops are closed).

Day 2 of Jakarta

I wake up this morning in a strange bed.

I’ve been doing a lot of that, but I know when my bed is strange when it is so large, and so… empty. An empty bed on an artificially cold morning.

My new neighbourhood: Taman Anggrek. I don’t know it at all. Up until yesterday I had to spend 30 minutes hunting for the house I lived in, each and every time. Now I can find my way home in the dark. Could be a sign. This neighbourhood needs street lighting. But we’re not in Singapore anymore.

Actually my new neighbourhood is the poorer cousin of Taman Anggrek. It’s in a rambling mess of local houses. I love it here. I took one look at the apartments and condominiums, and swore I would never want to come to Indonesia to live in the kind of apartment that would make me forget where I was. Which is perhaps why other people live in those things. But I don’t like modern living. Even in Singapore, I’ve managed to find myself a house in a forest that makes me happy. Of course in Jakarta I had to find a such a place. Charming. And shabby. The latter marginally more important.

I live with an old Indonesian lady who used to work in the oil and gas industry. She was the personal assistant to a large Indonesian oil conglomerate’s CEO, back in the 1960s. She flew to Singapore a lot, and ate a lot of chicken curry. Now, she rents out the attached studio apartment that’s part of her house for side income — and we speak a smattering of broken English and broken Indonesian to each other. It works.

Everything is the same but nothing is

I know this music. I grew up with it. I know this language. I‘ve spoken a little bit of it every day of my life, in some way — ordering food, getting around— the conversational Malay I knew was close enough for me to kinda get it, but not close enough for me to blend in. Not good enough for me to switch into the lilting language Bahasa Indonesia requires of its speakers.

My life for the next four months: every morning at around 8AM, I will leave the house in search of breakfast on the roads. I like this part the most. It really is a huge plus. (I love Indonesian street food with all my heart.) At 9AM, my team and I will start our day at the Ideabox office together with the other six Indonesian startups who are part of our incubator program. Mostly, there will be a lot foosball going on in the back of the office by the other teams while we work ourselves to tears. It’s fun to have the pressure to build a great company. Even better when you are surrounded by people working hard for the same thing.

I will live out of Asana and Slack. I will be hiring up to five people at this time, interviewing dozens more. I will be hiring, building, iterating, hustling, eating, sleeping, in a city that is suddenly home, and all of that will blur into a haze of Jakarta’s smoggy air.

It already has.

At 6PM on our first day together, my team and I were sunken into our chairs staring at lines of code with our stomachs churning loudly.

Why isn’t this working?

My stomach churned louder. I’ve missed this. This: the obsession. The mutual staring at screens. The furious typing, from yourself and the rest of the people who share your crazy dreams. Banging away at the keyboard making something like it was waiting to be born. Kicking. This: the visions that come to you at night. When a pixel changes, and everything does. This, too: the late nights hunched over a computer, pushing until you can no longer think. The friends you’ve lost because you’ve disappeared. You were making something, that was all they heard. The downward spiral which happens hopefully just once in your life.

Why isn’t this working? Because it’s time for nasi goreng kambing, which is for today more important than a flawless site. Because I am surrounded by incredibly talented people who share my dreams. And I need to feed them — no one who ever works for me should ever eat badly.

This is going to be so much fun.