Pros and cons living in Jakarta
Living in a completely new environment would never be as easy as flipping your back hand. It will bring you to new journey and experience. Even more, it will be more challenging if you move to countries you have never live in before. If you happen to be living in Jakarta, you are reading just the right article. Team Serumah will tell you pros and contras living in Jakarta for an Expat, or for non-local citizen.
Pro 1: Friendly people
Jakarta is a very big city with huge population, you will find Jakarta is filled with 20 million people during the day, and 10 million people at night. That means, there are non-Jakarta citizen are working in Jakarta. You will find a lot friendly people, they will smile as you walk and greet you “Morning, Mam/Mister”. It is great in some way, you might never find people as friendly as people in Jakarta in other cities.
Contra 1: Center of attention
If you are an Expat, you might be the center of attention as you walk the street. It is simply because you have different appearance, if you are from the west countries they might be calling you as ‘Bule’ which is not merely nice in some way, but at the end they are just trying to be friendly. Jakarta’s people very welcome to the new comers, they will stare at you as you walk, but don’t worry they will not hurt nor bite you, they just want to be friend with you. Don’t get puzzled if the first time you come to Jakarta and everyone is smiling to you.
Pro 2: Sophisticated facilities
Jakarta is the capital city of Indonesia, you will find high buildings, expensive hotels, sophisticated apartments, and shopping malls almost every block of the street. It is very easy to find good places to eat or night clubs to relax during the night. And most of the things are written in English, so you will never get lost or get puzzled in the middle of cities. Jakarta is now developing MRT and LRT, we could say in three years Jakarta will be as good as other developed cities like Tokyo and Singapore.
Contra 2: Never-ending traffic jam
Nah, due to transportation projects like MRT and LRT, you will find traffic jam everywhere, literally everywhere. Traffic jam is one of the biggest issue that the local government is struggling to solve. It is better to go with public transportation and commuter line or otherwise you will be stuck in the middle of the road for another 2 hours of your life.
Pro 3: Friendly climate
If you used to live in the countries that have sudden change in climates, well, you should never worry about that when you are living in Jakarta. You could wear comfy shirts all year long because you will find Jakarta is featured by summer for almost 365 days. Sometimes it is raining, but for never too long, in the next morning you will find the sun shines just as bright as the first time you get into Jakarta.
Contra 3: Flood
Another big issue that you will encounter in Jakarta is flood. Once it is raining, you will find the road is filled with water until like 30 inches. It is very bad. You must slower your car, or use the roads which are not flooded by water. Remember, where the rains come that is when the traffic jam hits.
At the end, Jakarta is a good place to live. It will be costly at the first time as you have to spend money to rent rooms or flats, or sometimes the company that you are working for will provide everything to you. Sometimes, property owner will put higher rental price for an Expat that force you to find housemates. Don’t worry, there are huge population of Expats living in Jakarta and you will never be alone. You can try to use Serumah.com to find housemates or make advertising about yourselves finding a property to rend or housemates to share the flats.
There is a section in your profile that explains your preferred housemates to live with, so you don’t have to worry about not getting a housemates or rooms to rent. Try serumah.com now!