All prices and conversions in this piece are personal records from Jakarta in February 2023 and do not represent current prices or statistics.
A City Folded and Cut Apart
Fourteen days aren’t enough to draw conclusions, but one impression is strong: this is a city that has been folded and cut apart.
Outside the car window, on one side are high-rises, malls, and office buildings; on the other are low houses and street stalls. The same meal can cost ten yuan, or forty-some. They don’t simply sit side by side; each has its own way of moving, its own way of consuming, and its own everyday, and they rarely truly meet.
All the numbers recorded on this trip are really just tracing that seam.
Traffic Jams, and Motorcycles Everywhere
In the morning I finally figured out how to hail a ride to the office area. The main roads look fairly clean, but the road surface isn’t great—many places are patched with concrete.
Mostly motorcycles from Grab and Gojek. Cars are jammed, motorcycles are jammed too, yet countless motorcycles still shoot past through the gaps between cars. The roads nearby are narrow, yet large flat-roofed buildings line both sides. Someone in the car said Jakarta is one of the most congested cities in the world.
Outside the office window, one side is a cluster of buildings and the other is a stretch of low houses. I couldn’t tell whether they were ordinary homes, a struggling neighborhood, or a villa district; I looked once by day and again at night, and still couldn’t figure it out.
At noon I went downstairs; there’s a snack street nearby. A street-stall meal costs about 20,000 rupiah, roughly 10 yuan. The sound of motorcycles is denser than that of cars—it feels like Beijing’s streets when they were full of shared bikes, only much faster and more dangerous.
Two Metro Stops, Four Thousand Rupiah
That day I took the metro for the first time. From the office area to Grand Indonesia Mall, two stops, 4,000 rupiah. Getting the card and topping it up came to 35,000 rupiah in total: 25,000 for the card and 10,000 loaded onto it.
At the time, the metro only covered part of central and southern Jakarta. Judging from the daytime, there aren’t many buses; motorcycles are the most common, then cars, with buses coming in last.
At the time I did some rough arithmetic based on a monthly income of 4,000 yuan: if I took the metro every day, the round trip would be at least 10 yuan, and with twenty workdays a month that’s 200 yuan; adding other transport, it could reach 300 yuan. That proportion isn’t low. Later, when taking taxis, I ran into fares of 46,000 rupiah and highway tolls of 50,000; it’s best to set the pickup location to a specific lobby, otherwise the driver can easily go the wrong way. When we didn’t share a language, we had to gesture, or ask the front desk to call for us.
Malls and Street Stalls: Two Price Systems
At noon I ate local food in a mall, about 60,000 rupiah per person, roughly 30 yuan. The dishes were very spicy with heavy spices, and the fruit salad looked quite different from its picture. In the evening I ate ramen at the mall next to the hotel: a two-person set cost 195,000 rupiah, and at checkout nearly 70,000 more was added in service fees; that meal came to about 80,000 to 100,000 rupiah per person, or 35 to 45 yuan.
A street-stall meal is 8 to 10 yuan; a somewhat more proper stall with a drink runs about 20 to 25 yuan; an ordinary mall meal is 35 to 45 yuan.
This gap isn’t about “expensive or not”; it’s two parallel consumption systems. I later heard that many people don’t eat in malls—they either buy from street stalls or bring their own food and heat it up. In the mall there are trendy people, pricier restaurants, and imported goods that sell for more than back home; none of these can represent a city—they only show that the people I see in different places are different people.
SIM Cards, Payments, and Air Conditioning
I bought Telkomsel: 140,000 rupiah for 20GB for one month. Cheaper plans run 70,000 to 80,000 rupiah. Speed tests came to about 20 Mbps on 4G; packet loss was fine, but the signal became noticeably unstable once inside buildings or restaurants.
For payments, cash is still common. Bank cards and the corresponding bank apps can scan QR codes, and I’d heard of Dana and OVO, but the coverage I saw in malls wasn’t as high as I’d imagined. Exchanging money requires a passport and cash. Hailing rides, finding shops, paying, and contacting drivers all need a network, and once the signal is weak, things get stuck in very specific places.
The weather is hot and humid—outdoors feels like a sauna, harder to bear than Chongqing. Inside malls the strong air conditioning blasts straight at you; shorts and a T-shirt are fine, but it’s best to bring a jacket. Light rain is frequent, and occasionally it suddenly pours.
The Seam
The photos have been sitting around for a while and I couldn’t dig them out just now, so this piece goes without pictures. But the traffic jams, the two metro stops, the ten-yuan meal at a street stall, the 40-yuan ramen in the mall, and that talking-past-each-other feeling whenever I set the pickup to a lobby—I still remember them all.
What fourteen days showed me wasn’t a whole city, but a few folded cross-sections of it. Each holds together on its own, yet they rarely truly meet—that is probably the strongest impression Jakarta left on me.