Around Jakarta

Over the past weekend, we made several day trips around Jakarta. First, on Friday, we rode the train to Bandung. There we visited the West Java provincial BPS office. We saw more processing of census data, similar to what we observed at the office in Manado, except the scale here was so much bigger! (The Manado office is working with 2 million people's data, this office is handling 43 million people's data.) There was a rented out parking garage stacked with boxes and boxes of completed census forms. I could not have imagined. I was, once again, impressed by the enormity of this task and the organization of it all. We got to meet our boss's husband on this trip too, since he works in Bandung at the Institute of Technology.
Saturday, our friend Izana, who is from Indonesia and also in our MPH program at UW, took us to her family's home in the southern tip of Jakarta. A bunch of her family (her mom and dad are each one of 7 kids!) were getting together to break fast, so she invited us to join in. One part of the custom I really enjoy--eating dessert first! (because of low blood sugar after fasting all day) We had lots of delicious food, some of which I really want to try to recreate when I get home, but we'll see how that goes, and they did prayers for Ramadhan. It was a really fun night.
Sunday, we went to Bogor to see the Botanical Gardens and Presidential Palace--from what I understood, sort of like the Martha's Vineyard of Indonesia, a presidential retreat home. It was a nice place to walk around and breathe fresh non-smoky air.
Now it's our last week in Jakarta, just trying to finish up our projects at work and spend time with the many nice people we've met here before it's time to leave...

Mountains of data.













Appetizers/dessert.










Jake, Bagus (Izana's cousin), Izana, and myself at the Palace.