Living abroad is bound to change you. It has definitely changed me. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to say that living in Jakarta has completely transformed everything about me, but it has impacted my life in some pretty incredible ways. If you’ve been following along on this whole journey with me you’ll know that living…
I’ve been traveling the world on and off for 10 years, but before I moved to Jakarta I’d never actually lived outside of California before. Clearly living abroad is way different than traveling. Having the chance to live in Jakarta has enabled me to fully immerse myself in the culture and get up close and personal with…
UPDATE (May 7, 2017): I’ve been hearing from some readers that Pasar Santa has all but shut down. Because I no longer live in Jakarta, I’m not exactly sure what the status of Pasar Santa’s businesses is. It looks like some are still open, but it sounds like a lot of them have been forced to…
I’ve never been an apartment person. I lived in a studio apartment once, during my college days at UC Santa Cruz. The walls were so wafer thin and I remember being able to hear the girl next door binge watching episodes of Sex and the City. I can distinctly remember the theme song penetrating the walls. Ever…
I’ve officially lived in Jakarta for six months. It’s unbelievable that six months have come and gone. At times it has felt unbelievably fast, at other times it has been painfully slow. My time in Jakarta has been thrilling, emotional, difficult and amazing – pretty much take any emotion and chances are I’ve experienced it….
Is it bad that I almost forgot it was Christmas? I suppose that’s what happens when you live across the world from home. This is actually the second consecutive year I’ll be spending the holidays abroad, and being away from my family for a second year in a row is a little bit of a bummer….
A responsible person probably would have found a job before they actually moved to Indonesia. That’s the proper order to do things. But, no one said that I was responsible. In all fairness to myself, I found out that I was moving to Jakarta only three weeks before I arrived. Suffice it to say, I didn’t have a…
When I tell people I live in Indonesia, they picture me living in a cute beachside bungalow in Bali, spending my carefree days working on my tan and sipping fruity cocktails. Guys, I hate to break it to you, but that’s most definitely not my life. Jakarta is a gray, sprawling, traffic-snarled metropolis. And though a…
There a lot of quirky things about living in Jakarta but the one thing that I cannot get used to is Indonesia’s trash problem. To be specific, the overuse of plastic bags is the number one thing that drives me crazy about living here. I’m from California and I am, admittedly, a bit of a hippie. But as…
As I wrote in a previous post I was a bundle of nerves about my first ever solo trip to Penang. As it turns out, solo travel is pretty fantastic. And I was ecstatic that my three-day jaunt to Malaysia went off without a hitch – well, it almost went off without a hitch. I…