At Christmas, all the malls had decorations in them. It was a big thing. Little Muslim children lined up to sit on Santa’s lap. Whenever I asked, people shrugged and told me that Christmas wasn’t really about religion in Jakarta.

On Friday nights, the malls are packed. The fashionable kids, speaking a mixture of English and Indonesian, flood the white marble floors. The malls have very loud music, and sometimes DJs.

The malls have food courts in them. Just about everything is meat, and just about everything is fried. All the American fast food chains are there. They look like food courts anywhere.

A burger and fries costs about 40,000 rupiah, which is US $4.50. This is very expensive food in Jakarta. The people who work in the mall do not eat in the food court. They eat in the “kantin” out back, a long shack full of traditional food stalls where a meal is five times cheaper. Average income in Indonesia is about $350 per month.

Malls are not for the rifraf. There’s nowhere to sit unless you’re buying. Otherwise everybody would hang out there, because it’s clean and comfortable and smacks of status. You can’t sit on the floor either. Malls are for the middle class, but the middle class is the elite in Indonesia.

Malls have security theatre, because Jakarta has had bombings. Their entrances are guarded by metal detectors. Bored guards check your bags by patting them carelessly, and ignore the metal detectors when they beep. Other guards wave metal detectors uselessly over the truck of each taxi. You can bypass the guards in almost every mall by walking in through one of the shops.

You can also largely ignore security if you’re white. Sometimes it seems like everybody wants to be white. Every pharmacy in Indonesia sells skin-whitening cosmetics. Actually, this happens everywhere in Asia. Maybe it’s because white people are rich.

I spent a lot of time in Jakarta malls. They were comfortable, the food was recognizable, and they had wifi. The blandness depressed me, because I’ve lived in environments that weren’t built for profit. But in Indonesia — and Malaysia, and Turkey, and India, and China, and a great many other places I’ve been — malls represent the future. They’re clean and efficient and astonishingly modern. It makes me sad that consumerism is the vanguard of civilization for so many people.

Indonesia’s first democratically elected president died last night. It’s been a turbulent decade.

The air smells like exhaust, food, people, and kerosene from cooking stoves. Bright orange three-wheeled bajaj taxis are lined up on the street, many more than usual. The sidewalk vendors are thick today, everywhere selling cheap cardboard horns. Their nasal wail pierces the traffic every minute or so. Some people are dressed up and obviously on their way out, though it’s early yet. The street is bustling. I walk as best I can down the sidewalk which is crowded by vendors and food stalls and motorbikes taking shortcuts.

It’s 30 degrees and oppressively humid. It’s always 30 degrees and humid.

Nobody stops at the crosswalk so as usual I have to time my crossing to miss the turning motorbikes. The trick is not to stop. Try to dodge them and they’ll hit you as they aim for where you wouldn’t have been. The haggard prostitute on opposite side gives me a little nod. At night she sometimes grabs me as I walk past. I pass her and make my way through a series of street restaurants built out of carts and plastic tables and awnings over the sidewalk, then turn.

The little alley twists through the innards of a huge block, and it quieter here. It’s lined with small houses, and open sewers a meter deep. On bigger streets the sewer trenches are covered with slabs of concrete, but not here. It smells bad. Children play. A fruit vendor prepares his cart for the evening, arranging bags of cut mangoes around blocks of ice. This is a pretty nice neighborhood, actually. The houses are concrete and right in the center of town. A man casually throws a piece of litter into an empty lot filled with garbage. Skinny cats wander.

I step out of the alley into Jalan Jaksa, the restless and slightly scummy packbacker district. The blowdart seller is talking to two pale young Europeans. He’s been working the street for 28 years. The old drunk guy is sitting on his usual corner in his usual clothes, nodding off. The local fixer nods at me, smiles his best, and thankfully doesn’t ask me again if I want a massage. It doesn’t smell as much here. A man sorts through a pile of trash on the street. From a story in the newspaper, I know that scavenged bottle caps go for about 50 cents per kilo, when sorted. I’m paying $25 US dollars a night for a clean room with air conditioning. A poor expat, a rich Indonesian.

And out of the chaos comes the evening call to prayer, the muezzin’s clear voice ringing out from the little neighborhood mosque. In the fading light it seems a moment of peace.

A motorbike with no muffler shatters it. Traffic resumes. I walk through several more food stalls, including my favorite juice place. In the evenings after work I like to order a fresh starfruit juice.

There’s going to be a big party tonight. Hundreds of thousands of people. It used to be at the center of town around the huge phallic monument but the police have moved it this year, saying that the revelers always trash the place. You can feel the surge of millions toward the center, you can already hear the odd firecracker popping out the last few hours of the decade. There’s nothing to do but make noise in this noisy city, to press ever closer together and celebrate.

Night begins to fall, fast.

A thirty-something woman in a very short skirt saunters down the sidewalk with nonchalant confidence.

I’m almost at the door of my hotel, where I will shower and change.

The proprietor of the coffee stall across the street sits at his one table reading a newspaper, waiting.

The city draws a breath–