Adventures of Isabel

In the north, bloody protests left three (confirmed) dead.
In the south, torrential rains and flooding.
The former, I chose to avoid.  The later, I had no choice but to confront:

Jakarta’s 800-year-old port. Still a working cargo port, Sunda Kelapa only allows piring, traditional two-masted sailing ships.

Cargo is still loaded manually. Interestingly (though not terribly surprisingly) most of the workers in the port and on the ships are Bugis — the seafaring ethnic group that earned notoriety in the English language as “Bogeymen.”

I felt [...]

I had a chance to escape from the office for a few hours yesterday and accompany friends from Voice of Human Rights Media to Klender, a kampung in East Jakarta. They were shooting footage for a documentary about efforts to provide kampung youth with basic legal training to protect themselves and their neighbors against [...]

Gado-Gado vendor in BenHil, Jakarta. On a heated stone, he mixes together peanut, citrus, sugar, chili, and your choice of vegetables, rice cakes, tofu and tempeh to make a delicious lunch.

Hallway of a Rumah Kost in Tebet, Jakarta.