Spread of America

A friend asked me some questions that I imagine others of you may wonder as well, so I thought I'd answer her here on the blog. She basically asked me what sort of American things we can find here in Jakarta, and her questions relate to some things I had been thinking of mentioning on my blog anyway. So here goes...

1) Do you get any American tv shows there? The answer is yes, yes, yes. Most importantly, I get American Idol, in all it's wonderful current season glory. We are 1 day behind and of course can't vote, but I can't tell you how thrilled I was when we arrived here and I saw that it would be shown here as well. Seeing the trailers for American Idol and 24 before we left the US was killing me. So yes, I am fully up-to-date on Sanjaya finally and mercifully being kicked off, Simon's latest cracks, and Melinda's amazing talent. 24 is also shown here, but it is not the current season. We have been really getting into Heroes, which is the current season but a few months behind. All the CSIs are on, as well as Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and others like Scrubs, Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, but none of these are the current season. But no, we are not forced to watch Alf or Green Acres in order to get our American tv fix. We also get CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Discovery channel, Disney Playhouse, National Geographic channel, ESPN, HBO, Cinemax, and Star Movies which shows good movies in English with Indonesian subtitles. Definitely not a bad selection.

2) How about the radio? The radio pretty much sucks here. Given that it is horrible in the US as well though, I'm not surprised. There are a couple "good" channels that seem to play a better assortment and have some commentary in English, but it's still pretty hit or miss. They just play the most random selection of songs. One minute we could be enjoying Coldplay or U2, and the next we're stuck with Olivia Newton John or Tiffany. Our car also only has a tape deck, so we have started buying some cassette tapes. The availability of good cassettes is pretty small though, so it looks like we're going to be stuck with only a few good tapes. Remember all the fun of making mix tapes back in junior high school? Well, if you've still got a tape deck in your stereo, why not relive the glory days and send us a few mix tapes!

3) What American movies do you get? We get American movies in the theaters here, although a bit late and a pretty random assortment. We have gone to 2 movies here, Music and Lyrics with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, and last Friday was Shooter with Mark Whalberg. I expect that most of the big summer movies will make their way here. Let me tell you about the movie theater we went to though. It's the nicest movie theater we've ever been to, and this is for the regular theater. They also have a VIP theater where I guess you are served food and drinks. The theater we went to is in one of the nice malls, Plaza Indonesia (stores include Cartier, Tiffany's, Valentino, Nine West, Benetton), and the price of a ticket is a whopping $3. You get to choose your seats when you buy your ticket, and they have a full concession stand as well as a cafe or something in the lobby. The theater itself has fantastic surround sound (was great for Shooter) and the seats are heavenly - big, plush recliner like seats with plenty of leg room. We will have to check out some of the other theaters around town because it can take us 1 hour to get there, but at least it's a nice experience once we're there. We can also get just about everything on DVD. We can buy officially released movies, but we can also buy pirated ones for about $.70. The quality is usually fairly good, and you can get most of the major movies as soon as they hit theaters in the US. We can also get a lot of tv shows on DVD. We have been really enjoying Entourage this way, and have bought past seasons of Scrubs, West Wing, and X Files (oh yeah!). I just recently bought part of the current season of Grey's Anatomy and 24, but only some of them work in our dvd player. But we can't really complain at $.70/dvd.

4) What's the availability of American food? Believe it or not, but just about all the major restaurant chains have reached Jakarta. There is at least one TGIF, Tony Roma's, Chile's, California Pizza Kitchen, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, KFC, Dunkin' Donuts, and Starbucks. Krispy Kreme has also just arrived, and has become my favorite treat. I don't remember liking it quite this much back home... One nice thing is that these places are here, but another nice thing is that you don't find them everywhere. America has definitely not taken over. As far as the grocery stores, you can find just about anything, at a price. We can buy Cheerios here, but no thank you at $11/box. We can get Ben & Jerry's, and it's not too much more than back home. We have certainly been able to find everything we "need", and sometimes we treat ourselves to something we don't need. And there are a couple things we have either not found or have a difficult time finding, like arugula, pine nuts, Goldfish crackers, some liquor like Bailey's, etc. The other challenge is that in order to get everything I know is available that we might want/need, I'd have to go to about 5 different grocery stores. In a big city with bad traffic, this is not fun. So usually we just live without.

So as you can see we aren't doing without very much. It's quite a comfortable place to live. Many of the people I am coming to know here work outside of the international development industry, and have either never been overseas before or their expat jobs have been in the middle east or Asia. I take their complaints with a grain of salt. I find it quite amusing when they get worked up over not being able to get x, or having to pay so much for it if they can find it. Considering that we expected our overseas assignment to be in Africa where you can't get at least 3/4 of what I described above, we think we're living in a pretty posh environment.

Hope this has been at least mildly interesting. Feel free to ask me any other burning questions.