The photos may look like sunshine and rainbows

I had no idea Jakarta was the world’s biggest (most populous) city at over 42 million. For comparison, Norway has around 5 million… in the entire country 😳. Jakarta…well it’s interesting. Overall, it’s probably not my cup of tea. It’s packed, full of traffic, dirty, and the air hurts my eyes. There is so much happening at once it is hard to keep track mentally. So yeah it’s different.

But I did get to experience some cool things today don’t get me wrong. I just want to say how I honestly feel sometimes because the photos may look like sunshine and rainbows but I don’t feel like that all the time 🙃.

I got to see Southeast Asia’s largest mosque in the heart of Jakarta which was really cool. At certain times in the day the «call to prayer» would come on the loudspeaker which was in Arabic (ps: the song on this post). Muslims pray at least 5 times a day.

In order to go into the mosque we needed to wear a hijab and take off our shoes. It was quite the cultural experience, we were all kind of excited to try something so different. The tour guide showed us the original tung tung sahur (some sort of drum that they use in prayer) because it makes a tung ting sound. I had no idea that the brainrot was actually something real (if you don’t know what I’m talking about don’t worry about it).

What I found really interesting was that there was a cathedral directly in front of the mosque. Earlier we were talking about how weird it is, two completely different religions right across the street, battling it out. But the reason that they were like that was actually very beautiful. The mosque was built close to it on purpose to show that different types of religions can live together in harmony.

Later went to Chinatown and let’s just say that the photos online were misleading… it was just a chaotic street with some Chinese souvenirs. If we stood still for more than a few seconds, little kids would be sent by their parents to come up to us with a bucket and beg for money so it was sad.

A few of us met a German girl who is traveling around Indonesia alone with no plan in place, just taking it one day at a time. She is very brave!