This particular week in Jakarta should be spent to get to know, to re-evaluate and simply see to ponder.
Forget concerts, for there are some but only a handful of them are worth your while, such as the 32nd Jazz Goes to Campus on Sunday, Nov. 29 -- a chance to enjoy tons of Indonesian jazz greats with the lowest ticket price possible and the company of cute college girls -- and the oozing rage of Haydn, Wolfgang Rihm and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy brought in by the German-based Signum Quartet on Saturday, Nov. 28 at Goethe Haus.
Tempting isn't it?
And as Signum Quartet is quite a meteor in today's classical scene, running their first South Asia/Pacific tour until the start of December, missing them would be totally daft. There will be limited seats, but the tickets are free, and as you are the only person in Jakarta who digs classical music -- so you naively think -- the seats will be empty! . you wish.
Anyways, forget concerts. You can make your plans and arrangements to watch them but please do so in secret as this week in Jakarta, as mentioned in the first paragraph, should be dedicated solely on getting to know, re-evaluating and pondering upon the world and hence getting to know a little bit about ourselves.
Now that things are settled, Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn, the German botanist who died on April 24, 1864 in our beloved Bandung, is having his works exhibited in Erasmus Huis Jakarta from Nov. 18, 2009 to Jan. 10, 2010.
It's almost ironic that no one in the world knows the island of Java more than Junghuhn did. And now, 200 years after his death, there's no better time for us to learn about our most populated island from his past records, literary works such as the 1845 released Die Topographischen und Naturwissenschaftlichen Reisen durch Java (Topographic and Scientific Journeys in Java), Die B*ttalander auf Sumatra (Batak lands of Sumatra) in 1847 and the four volume treatise, Java, seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke, und sein innerer Bau (Images of Light and Shadow from Java's interior) released anonymously between 1850 and 1854.
These books are rare and there's little chance that one will actually get a copy of them. Yet, those displayed in Erasmus Huis are extracted pages with words and images of the past through the eyes of the botanist, allowing us to inevitably get to know our land, where we came from and hopefully inspire us to love this land as much as Junghuhn did.
After all, like Sigmund Freud put it, "only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past."
