Couchfish Day 344: First Impressions

“Jakarta is not what you’d call a beautiful place. It’s a chaotic maze of low-lying slums, gleaming skyscrapers and imposing road tolls, enveloped in a gigantic cloud of pollution and trapped in hopeless gridlock.” So writes my friend Daniel Ziv’s in his introduction to Jakarta Inside Out.

It’s a cookbook to the city, explaining through a foreigner’s len…