Tasha & Treen
Hi Everyone!
Welcome to our Blog. We are new to this blogging business but wanted to create a space where we could share our love of Jakarta. My friend recently came here and we took her to our favourite places and when she left us for Bali (as they all do!) she met a lot of backpackers who had come to Jakarta and they said to her, “Everyone has a horror story about Jakarta. What’s yours?”. To their surprise, she didn’t have one. In a few days she ate great food, some healthy, some fried beyond health regulations, got massaged, got drunk, had a swim, sang with a band and shook a thousand hands of smiling people. In this city full of contradictions; where your feeling can go from utter joy to despair, there is never a dull moment.
So, if you don’t know us, we are the May sisters. We come from Melbourne, Australia. Treen came to Jakarta first on a whim, to escape the desert of Australia, leaving a high school teaching job to become a (shock horror!) preschool teacher. Thus began the world as the ‘token bule’; hired not for skill but for the need for the school to have a native English speaker. After a shaky beginning, the joy of working with Indonesian people, of making new discoveries every day about the culture, the food, the secrets of the city, the endless confusion, the fun of public transport, the hospitality, the motorbike rides, the ongoing near death experiences – all leading to a buzzing feeling maybe known as the joy of being alive.
Tash followed a few months later to check out if it was all true. And she never left. Tash shocks the population of Indonesia; proud of their food, who know where each dish originates from, who understand the cooking processes, who gush with love about the flavours and wonders of the taste sensations. Filled with pride, a common question is, “What’s your favourite food in Indonesia”. They wait in anticipation for the answer (will it be gado gado, ikan bakar, nasi pecel, nasi goreng, bakso….ooh what will it be) and she usually responds with “nasi putih”. This is the garden variety ‘white rice’. Their shocked faces are priceless.
So together we have embarked on a great adventure of daily life in Jakarta. From delicious food (a thousand varieties of nasi putih for Tash, with a side order of tempe), hilarious bars, great music, chocolate cocktails for Tash and bintang for me, way too many sampoernas (Indonesian cigarettes), ojek rides through the city (motorbike taxis) to cut through the traffic, great friends, glitzy shopping malls, street warungs, a million “hello misters”, a few thousand “I love you mister” (mostly from teenage boys or toothless men), tours around Indonesia, week end trips to Jogya, more nasi and a thousand belly laughs every day. This is our Indonesian experience.
We hope you enjoy it!
www.welovejakarta.com – for all our crazy adventures in Jakarta
www.mycameraimybestfriend.com – for adventures outside of Jakarta
www.tashamay.net
Please feel free to contact us at Email us a welovejakarta.com@gmail.com and like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/We-Love-Jakarta/149981401715708 and if you have suggestions of events or places we should visit and write and photograph about, or if you just want to say hello! We would love to hear from you 🙂
Much love,
Tasha & Treen
——————————————————————————————————————————————
NOTE: All photos on www.welovejakarta.com are copyright of © Tasha May and cannot be republished or used without my consent and without being credited to myself. Please do not take my photos and remove the logo. Any photos not taken by Tasha on our blog have been acknowledged where necessary with their owners permission.
Thank you 🙂
——————————————————————————————————————————————
