By Anna Antoni (She is an Austrian) Negativity, discontentment, racism, catastrophy-focusing, no interest in strangers. All this I know very well from home in Vienna but in Indonesia you can find right the opposite in the national spirit. The Top 7 reasons to fall in love with Indonesia (for me it was love at first sight) deserve [...]

The BlackBerry is king… in Indonesia, anyway. It’s hard to go anywhere in Jakarta, the nation’s busy capital, without seeing someone using one of these ubiquitous smart phones. In the city’s shopping malls, the BlackBerry logo is advertised everywhere and sellers offer everything from the latest, the Blackberry Onyx, to much cheaper, older models. In [...]

When Indonesian Social Services Minister Salim Segaf Al-Jufrie was spotted driving his car in a dedicated bus lane in the capital Jakarta, he could scarcely have imagined the furore that would follow. An eagle-eyed resident snapped a picture of his transgression and posted it on the social networking site Twitter, where it was viewed by more [...]

Bare walls, bars and a rock-hard bunk. Just a normal prison cell, but possibly a shock to the system for many of the inmates soon to be housed in a new wing of Cipinang Penitentiary in East Jakarta — graft suspects and convicts more used to living the high life. The jail’s new wing was designed [...]