111–120 of 398 posts
Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.
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Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
Canada has less people, even with a 10% increase in the last 4 years through imigration, some of which is from Indonesea presumably including a significant number from Jakarta, where the civil infrastructure must be epic
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Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.
> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states. Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China t…
For Europeans wanting a megacity experience within weekend jaunt range, Cairo can be kind of a mad experience, with things like the Garbage City https://www.adventuresnsunsets.com/cairo-garbage-city/ and cave church https://www.egypttoursportal.com/en-gb/blog/egypt-attraction... plus the usual pyramids etc. Very cheap Ubers like $8/hr.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages , with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
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> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states. Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China t…
Even in democratic Taiwan they have this mindset to an extent - private land must not stand in the way of infrastructure.
After democracy, Taiwan shifted towards trying to preserve traditional neighborhoods or working to normalize unofficial neighborhoods and slums - basically adopting a bottom up instead of top down approach [0]
[0] - https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=5fc...
I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.