Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

axios.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 398 posts

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#81

Post by seattle_spring »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #69
itake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar

???

Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#82

Post by phainopepla2 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #81
phainopepla2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar

??? Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.

Burmese food in the US is very different from the food you encounter in the country itself.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#83

Post by rafram »

itake wrote: post #79
mmooss wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?

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.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#84

Post by speedyapoc »

gorbachev wrote: post #80
nerdralph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KL has subways. Even better is the KL city bus network which is free, air conditioned, and has free wifi. Despite Malaysia being a nominally muslim state, I found it multicultural and tolerant. If it wasn't for the heat and humidity, I'd consider it a great place to retire.

KL?

Kuala Lumpur

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#85

Post by EB-Barrington »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #69
itake wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar

Nice. I'm an ex-tour guide, and had many jovial discussions with a colleague who toured Myanmar and LOVED the food - he knew I thought it was pretty average, at best.

Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#86

Post by elgenie »

superconduct123 wrote: post #13

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

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.

They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#87

Post by numpad0 »

superconduct123 wrote: post #13

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

Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].

1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#88

Post by rafram »

Froztnova wrote: post #46
cdmckay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which assumptions are those?

Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate. I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got aroun…

Only 20% of the Muslims in the world live in the Middle East.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#89

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

itake wrote: post #43
decimalenough wrote: post #17

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…

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…

Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#90

Post by awongh »

superconduct123 wrote: post #13

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

I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.

Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.

I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.

Post reply on HN