Jakarta

I'm so surprised to see all these comments. I absolutely love Jakarta !
You can take a gojek bike taxi for 1$ and they bring you anywhere. The skyline is beautiful at night. The food is good. The people are kind and always smiling...
I prefer Jakarta to Bali ! And I've been multiple times in both. For sure it's a city with many skyscrapers, so the quality of the air is not great. But you can drive out of the city and have absolutely beautiful mountains and rice fields (such as Bogor).
In the city center there are many malls with all the big brands you know of. So many delicious restaurants too.
It is true that sometimes people dont speak English but... what's the point of travelling to Asia if you want absolutely everyone to speak the same language as you ?

The ugliest city I've ever set foot in. It is very polluted. Developers are obsessed with "European" style building because it looks "rich". There are an endless amount of shopping malls with new ones coming, which get old quickly. "Parks" here are more of an afterthought, not a legitimate park. Gated communities are the fabric of the city so you must drive or walk through the main roads that are jam-packed with traffic. In other words, the city is made up of exclusive pockets of housing areas that are unintegrated with the rest of the city, meanwhile, the rest are slums. People are (as a previous review mentioned) smug, pretentious, and deeply insecure about themselves but manifested outwardly as being rude. Traffic is a problem in itself but to drive here is entirely another subgenre. To give you an idea about the mentality of the people here; nobody will do anything if there's someone dying in an ambulance. Not a single car would give way for an ambulance or pedestrians crossing the road. Speaking of pedestrians, the city is extremely unsafe to walk.

Skip this place and go to Bali right away. This city only looks beautiful in tourism videos but ugly in person. It is dusty and smelly.

Some things I don't like about Jakarta-
1. Not much English spoken
2. Everything is overpriced especially food and alcohol.
3. People are weird, smug, rude and kind of r-cist actually.
4. The food isnt good except for nasi goreng and satay and most of it is low quality.
5. Everywhere is crowded and locals are loud so good luck finding a place to work.
6. Visas are costly and difficult if you want to stay long term.

"Don't go to Jakarta" is what people from Jakarta tell you.

But you do. It can't be that bad, right? Then you arrive. Although "arriving" is a big word for getting stuck in traffic first for hours. When you do finally arrive in your apartment, you open the windows and wonder why you can't see further than 10 meters. It must be a foggy day? No, it's not fog, it's smog, and it's an every day occurrence in Jakarta, a city that is now competing with Beijing for worst air quality in the world.

What's good about Jakarta? It's one of the few places in Indonesia (except maybe Bali) that's open-minded. Jakartans are friendly, helpful and warm acting as if Jakarta is still just a small Indonesian village and that's great. It's also one of the fastest growing cities in Asia. It's cosmopolitan. But all that doesn't weigh up to the negatives that is Jakarta right now.

Clean up the air, fix the traffic, and Jakarta might be liveable in a decade.

"Don't go to Jakarta" is what people from Jakarta tell you. They're right.