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Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
121–130 of 398 posts
Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time. The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a…
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know. Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar
Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
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Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#125Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even know what it would it even look like to "build a city" from scratch in the US. who does the building and puts together the central plan? does the government build a bunch of public housing and a publicly owned commercial district? i guess they kind of have experience doing this with military bases, but at some point you need to encourage a bunch of private development and ownership, right? or would the g…
Honestly, if you build transit, developers will build. I wouldn't call it "building a city", but if you look at Northern Virginia today, you'll find that vertical districts are popping up along the Silver Line metro that now extends past Dulles airport. At the end of the metro, there is literally a "town center" residential area on one side with buildings around 5 stories tall. On the other side of the tracks is lite…
tysons is a good example as well. I always think the development of the DC metro is some of the most impressive in the sense of 'cities' popping up along the train lines.
I haven't travelled the entire country but I've never seen anything quite like Silver Spring, Bethesda, or as you say, Reston. Super interesting.
Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#127I 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…
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA
The regional abbreviation, or the airport code? .... what? Either works?
Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.
Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#129I 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…
I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed. Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car. Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either. Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at…
Putting Indonesian below Filipino food is quite something.
Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world
#130I 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…
Is being an attractive vacation destination necessarily a good thing for a city? They're the biggest city, didn't they "win"?