The Office – Outside

I try to give everyone who reads the blog a flavor of the day-to-day things we do because most of you will probably not get to experience living in Jakarta, Indonesia.  Not everything we do is connected to the terrific projects we work on (and they are GREAT experiences)  – so I try  to include pictures of the traffic, people, different food, odd things, observations, etc. of every day life here.

Let me start by saying we love it here – the people are SO kind, nice and friendly.  The food is great and we have been pleasantly surprised that the mosquitoes and the heat are not nearly as bad as we had expected or heard.  Trust me, Missouri in July is worse.

Our office address is Senopati 115, Kebayoran Baru, Jakarta (you can Google map it). It’s in a nice area of Jakarta with several ambassador’s residences in the neighborhood, and fairly close to a VERY nice area of Jakarta.  I thought I’d give you a tour of the office – first the outside, the next post will be the inside.

Across street, looking at the front of the office

However, we’ve been having trouble with flooding – every time it rains hard (it does that here… a lot) the front driveway floods.  So there’s been some workmen digging out the ditch in the front – yes, there’s a ditch under all the sidewalks.  I wish I could impress on you how filthy this job really is.  Whatever they’re making, it’s not enough…

Digging out the ditch

The work crew – these guys are doing a really tough job – and they have the toughest feet on the planet

Notice their smiles….

I’m not sure you’d get much of a crew in the States to do this day after day, down in filthy water.

From where I took the picture of the front of the office, this is looking left:

Notice the “sidewalk” just ends because it’s full of parked motorcycles.  Oh, you wanted to walk here?  Sorry,  you’ll have to get in the street and walk around it!

I wish the pictures of the traffic would do it justice, but alas, they do not.  Here is picture looking out the taxi window – the bike is RIGHT next to the cab…..no biggie!

Bikes everywhere

Go-Jek (above pic) and Grab are motorcycle ride/delivery services 

Grab is a ride service like Uber – call and get a ride.  Go-Jek is everything – rides, delivery (restaurant food, groceries, pharmacy, packages, stuff, etc.) repair, travel, all kinds of things.  They started up in Jakarta in 2010 with 20 bikes.  They now have 0ver 250,000 bikes all over Indonesia and just raised US$550 million in a private offering.