By Jullie Y. Daza Like Singapore or Tokyo, Jakarta is 3 hrs 30 minutes away by plane from Manila. Unlike Singapore and Tokyo, JKT is not as popular a tourist destination with Filipinos. How come? There are lots of similarities between Mnl and JKT, the weather, for one, and the people, who because they’re both of Malay stock, could pass for brothers and sisters. Except for religion – theirs Islam, ours Christianity – and language, there abounds a multiplicity of likenesses. The Indonesians (261 million, as of 2016) live in an archipelago of 17,000 islands; ours is studded with 7,000. They love color, the more, the merrier. Their world-famous batik is one of a kind, but whereas we’re proud of our plain, cream-hued pina and jusi for barong and terno, we love to embroider on them in multicolored threads. Their cuisine is varied according to the regions, but so is ours, with a mutual preference for food from the sea. Take a look at the malls around Jakarta and see if you can count them – it’s obvious, they love to shop and hang around the malls, just like us. Unlike Filipinos, however, Indonesians prefer to communicate in their own language, bahasa Indonesian, but then again many words sound the same in our language (such as anak, yamok, pintu, masuk) with the same meaning in Filipino. On the other hand, there are words like bukaka (meaning ramp) and selamat (welcome, as in “Welcome to Jakarta”) with very different meanings. (To say “thank you” to an Indonesian, the phrase to use is “Terima kasih.”) Thanks to a beautiful couple who live in a big beautiful house with their children in the expat district of Jakarta, three of us June-born Dazas recently fulfilled our “Jakarta revisited” mission. For five days we moved around the city in a coaster, experiencing a slice of life in a Southeast Asian neighbor that is no longer Third World (though not yet First World). Like Manila, moving around Jakarta’s traffic jams can be an ordeal. Unlike Manila, Jakarta’s streets, creeks, highways, bridges, overpasses, toll roads are bordered by and covered with trees – what a sight for tired city eyes! Throughout our five days in the city, and we did a lot of traveling on four wheels, I did not see an empty lot or a piece of raw, undeveloped land that was not shaded by trees. Residential or commercial, wide or narrow, the streets are protected and beautified by tall trees. No one has labeled JKT the city of trees – Sacramento in California, USA, used to go by that nickname; I’m not sure if the label is still in use – but wouldn’t it be nice if an English-speaking Filipino residing in Jakarta made the suggestion to their tourism officials? “Wonderful Indonesia,” as their slogan goes, enriched by “Visit Jakarta, city of trees”? There’s a large white-collar Filipino expat community in Jakarta who are professionals in finance, banking, pharmaceuticals, marketing. Their children are enrolled in international schools, and the lucky families are those with nannies “imported” from the Philippines. I was told that as a matter of policy, Indonesia does not encourage employment of overseas Filipino workers because “their priority is jobs for Indonesians.”