By Jullie Y. Daza Photos by JYD and Pat-P Daza Where in the world will you find diamonds, pearls, rubies, and other gems gleaming gold and golden in a fresh market but in Jakarta’s Chinatown? Unusual, maybe, but to the people residing in Northern Jakarta’s Chinatown, the display and sale of 22-carat jewelry arrayed alongside rice, coffee beans, vegetables, fruits, sweets, batik, kitchenware, and all sorts of dry goods is as normal as the law of supply and demand, and the customer is always right. But then the Pantai Indah Kapuk market is located in what appears to be a prosperous part of the district, in a prime development where it stands out as more of a tourist attraction than simply another common public building. Glittering under the lights shared with the more mundane merchandise, the jewelry shops on the ground and second floors appear to be so safe that no security guards or policemen are to be seen in the premises, in and out. But when the elderly man from whom I bought a couple of batik shirts and a pair of lounging pants saw the watch on my wrist, he could not resist pointing at the timepiece and warning me, “Be careful. Jakarta and Manila, the same.” From which I inferred that the thieves and burglars that we call “snatchers” in the Philippines are the same everywhere. Then there are the little extortionists and their tried-and-tested modus. In Metro Manila, we are all familiar with the racket of watch-your-car boys and “parking attendants” who collect parking fees even before you can get out of your car. In Jakarta there is no such thing yet; what they have is the business of “traffic volunteers” pocketing a coin worth about R2 from every driver who has just negotiated an intersection, rain or shine, on a busy street. C’est la vie, live and let live. In Indonesia, the word for corruption is korapsi—they, too, have an agency dedicated to fighting corruption in government, just as they are waging the drug war and reminding the youth to “Say no to drugs!” in English, in a country where English is not the lingua franca, Indonesia being a former colony of the Dutch, not of the English nor the Americans. Thus the proficiency and fluency of Filipino expats speaking a strain of American English puts them in a class by themselves. Will English be the language of the future in Indonesia? “It is not a priority for us for now,” said the Jakarta-born family driver hired by a multinational company to serve a Filipino couple. “I learned English not in school but from my father. He taught me by conversing with me and telling me stories in English, and encouraging me to ask questions in English.” What this tourist can predict about the future of Indonesia is that while some of our leaders in government and business seem bent on cutting trees, more and more of them in greater numbers, in the name of progress and development, our Indonesian neighbors are busy planting more and more trees, caring for them, multiplying them, propagating the message that trees are their treasure and their pride, their past, present, and future. Jakarta is just one of their cities, but it is those trees that give a refreshing first impression and leave a lasting impression: Jakarta, city of trees.