It is a long rainy season this year in Jakarta. When rain starts these young men appear next to the door of the office tower where I work. It happens all over the city. They appear and accompany under their umbrella the people who need to walk to the near coffee place, the motorbikes parking, of into a taxi. There si no negotiation on the price. A silent agreement. People just know how much to give them.
I always like to walk in the narrow alleys of Kemang, in the south part of Jakarta. People greet me. I stop for a quick chat. I discover interesting angles and details that I capture in a photo with my iPhone.
This is a very elegant two stories house. It has an internal yard with a nice soft light from the sky. Walking through the rooms, seeing old gramophones, faded mirrors, old family pictures in wodden frame, it is possible to imagine large family gatherings for the Chinese New Year. This is what was once the house of the richest man in town and maybe the whole of Sumatra.
The Tjong A Fie Mansion is a two-story mansion in Medan, North Sumatra, built by Tjong A Fie (1860 – 1921) a Hakka merchant who came to own much of the land in Medan through his plantations, later becoming ‘Majoor der Chineezen’ (leader of the Chinese’) in Medan and constructing the Medan-Belawan railway. Tjong A Fie is said to be related to Cheong Fatt Tze, who built the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Penang, Malaysia. The building is constructed in Chinese-European-Art Deco style, and was completed in 1900, and said to have been modeled on the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion.
In central Jakarta there is an old market, called Pasar Baru (New Market). It has been there for a long time. It is still possible to see the Chinese storage house and some of the old Dutch buildings amongst the many modern ones that have been built during the last few decades. I walked there on a quiet weekend afternoon a year or so ago. I do not go very often to central Jakarta, so it was a bit like discovering a new part of this city,
As @tedforbes says: take pictures with whatever camera you have. This is dedicates to the guy who broke into our house the other night and stole (among other things) my Olympus camera and four great lenses. You are not stopping me, I continue more then ever to take photos of the streets of Jakarta. Here the one I took with my iphone this morning at Halte Senayan!
Great blog
There are many guards in Jakarta. They work at the gate of housing compounds, the entrance of office tower, at the malls and at some less known place like a music school in South Jakarta. They have long shift and sometime really need to take a break, if just for a moment.