on Expat Living and Common Sense

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
~Frank Zappa

I’ve many expat friends, most of my friends here are expats. Most of them are nice. Online, I also read a lot of the expat blogs, they’re also nice, with one distinct characteristic: most of them are miserable.
Expats in Indonesia are the most miserable people. I feel sorry for them.

[this post is a bit lengthy and deals almost exclusively with expat living in Indonesia, globalised world and common sense in general. if none of them describes your interest, then scroll down and maybe you find other things more interesting for today]

I love this country and I love Jakarta and I know that many expat friends of mine feel the same way (granted, many of my friends are a little wrong in the head and aren’t to be trusted with sensible decisions). Not that I’m too crazy about it either, most of the time, my dog is the only thing keeping me here – too much hassle in moving countries with a dog.
I’d move back to London in an instant or anywhere else – given a little more thinking time - for that matter. There’s always an upside even in the birthplace of Boredom (hint: try Boston, Lincolnshire).

I’m sad to hear that so many people are finding their most miserable life here in Indonesia. I’m afraid it doesn’t do justice to the place. I need to ask, what is it then? Why do you bother at all? I’m asking in the most sincerest form of question here, why do you bother staying around if the place is so awful?

I understand that the traffic is shit, the language is funny, the officials aren’t very serious looking and the can openers don’t work, but really the upside works in your favour most of the time, no? The girls are hot and great in bed, the mistresses are discrete, mansions are properly staffed with maids and gardeners and your stupidest drunken moments are always forgotten and forgiven.

The same song gets tiring after a while, Indonesians are racist: Probably true, although I will argue for redefinition of racism. White boys get the hottest chicks at all time. Indonesians very definition of pretty is white. Expat in the same position always earn more than the displaced little brown guy. The ugliest redneck with beer belly from the rural outback will get the most preferred treatment next to your regular native chap. It’s affirmative action on steroid.

Next, Indonesians are Moslems and Moslems get nuts: get this, if your preference is Catholic radicals, you should try Belfast. Indonesia is the worlds largest Moslem country, there’re lots of Moslems here (about 200m on the last count). Some are nuts and others are totally insane, sure, and they do blow people up at times, but really, they do that too in Belfast.

If Indonesians don’t like Playboy, there’s little you can do to tell them to like it. Indonesians weren’t in Woodstock, imagine having to watch Bollywood all the time. If Indonesians have prayers at school, that’s because democracy here never had church secessionist drive, there never was separation of church and state. The Constitution here was written by people that didn’t have last names.
If Indonesians have a dislike for the Israelis, well, Indonesian read papers like everybody else and have none of collective guilt of the holocaust. It has nothing to do with holocaust, or the Jewish solution or even Fox News, to dismiss the attitude for anti-Semitism is insulting to their understanding of the world. Not everybody in the world is bent on fixing the wrongs of Hitler. Terrorism isn’t an exclusively Western problems, there’re more people killed around the brown part of the world than anywhere else. Labelling 220m people as racist, hypocrites and anti-Semites just shows that your language is as bad as your cultural literacy.

The perpetual whinging gets a bit old. The world have different flavours and we all miss home. We miss the noisy sirens of NYC nights and smelly people in the Tube. We miss the blonde jokes and swearing in complicated multi-syllabic compositions. You’d want to queue and incestuous royals. You want proper paper with proper punctuation and policies that make sense. We need convictions to share and third world countries to invade.

Well, get this: you’re not home.

People do things differently away from home. Different values, different lives, different languages and crazy enough, sometimes even different logic. Either learn to live with it – and make the best of it – or we’ll be better off bugger off home and forget the chauffeured corporate cars. Bitching on about how things aren’t like the way they are back home is stating too much of the obvious.
If you read papers back home, then you’ll know that slapping people around to make them do what you do they way you do it back home doesn’t really work. People go home in body bags that way. You can bring your own painting to a guest house, just don’t tell them to put it in their living room.

When people from different colour do things differently, it’s not racism, it’s just different. I’m not sure what to call that, but shipping brown people for sale was racism. Putting jews in gas chambers was racism. Racism is a word to use with care.
When things work differently from the way you expect them to work, it’s not hypocrisy: it’s just different.
Hypocrisy is when you preach two contradictory things to two different people. Preaching the moral high ground for common good is just good politics and Western countries are masters of both these arts.

It’s not about right or wrong and that is a different subject entirely, but it is a difference that will take some learning to understand. As in most cultures of the world, the burden is on the guest to behave.
For the last 500 years the West have been going around drawing the map of good behaviour, the next 500 years will be for everybody to learn how everybody else do different things.

I just feel sorry that you guys having such miserable time learning.