Arrival in Jakarta

Finally, after a prolonged journey of over 40 hours, I arrive in Jakarta around 10:30 pm on Tuesday, January 12, 2009. 

Driving into the city from the airport, Jakarta looks like it could be any American city.  A highway sidelined by modern office buildings and shopping plazas (not only is there McDonald’s, but there’s even Starbucks)! 

Little by little, however – after a day or two – the extremes that are the city of Jakarta become evident.  The extremes of excessive wealth and tremendous poverty, existing side by side and simultaneously.  Jakarta is an industrialized first-world nation and a developing third-world country all in one.  It is a city of contrasts and contradictions.

However, before I get a chance to take in all that is Jakarta – and it is a lot to take in!, an overwhelmingly large sprawling megalopolis – we head out to the neighboring island of Sumatra, where we will clown for victims of the October/November 2009 earthquake.