Life on a Merry-Go-Round

What’s a typical weekend look like for a young Jakartan? Maezara captures the colorful life of someone’s typical weekend – with a daytrip to the beach, and a limited invitee house party – full of shrieks, laughs, screams, sizzles, and whispers through her lenses.

Morning View
Above Us
Drive Safe
So Fast
Priority Seats
Lonely Zone
Adversity
Daydream
Light Trails
Life on a Merry-Go-Round
Self Portrait
Sizzle
House Party
The Morning After
Model Citizens
Weekenders
Crunch
Take me Home
Healer Alley
One for the Cutie
Tile by Tile

You are a single girl in your early 30s, living in one of the tiny apartment blocks in South Jakarta. You wake up on a Saturday morning, contemplating what you’re going to do today while sipping your morning coffee and staring outside your window. You see rows and rows, columns and columns of similar apartment blocks just like yours. You see many other souls, staring outside their windows, contemplating their Saturday morning, just like yours. You decide to go to the beach today. A decent beach is hours away, by car or by the trains. But it’s always worth it. Escaping Jakarta to see a vast body of water under the big blue sky, is always worth it. Then you come back to the city. You decide to visit your trusty Nasi Padang restaurant. Everyone in Jakarta has their own one trusty Nasi Padang restaurant. You eat your meal: a plateful of rice, cassava leaves, tender meat slow-cooked in coconut milk, green chilli paste, and lots and lots of spicy coconut milk drippings. You lick your fingers in satisfaction. Your cellphone dings. A friend of a friend is having a house party and you are invited. You hurry to a nearby satay stall, ordering thirty skewers of grilled chicken to bring to the party. It’s a bad gesture to come empty-handed. You arrive at the party when it is at its height. Before you know it you immediately drink two suspicious cocktails, and somehow you take blows from someone's bong. Past midnight, you lay down on the floor with the others, laughing while rotating a blunt, Indonesian hit songs from the 90s play on the stereo. The lights are dim because your host does not like ceiling lamps. When the calls for dawn prayers make their way to the ventilators and into the room, everyone has fallen asleep. Belly full, head foggy. Fever dream. You wake up past midday on Sunday. You find yourself among people you barely know, but you believe are kind-hearted. You agree to journey with them to North Jakarta, to the Chinese quarters. You and your new friends want some good noodles and strong coffee. On the way, you encounter a pair of ondel-ondel, overloaded motorbikes with the city’s crackers supply, and a truck-full of women on their way to public sermons. And it was your weekend.

***

This photo series is part of the virtual exhibition Norient City Sounds: Jakarta, curated and edited by Gisela Swaragita.

Biography

Maezara is a freelance graphic designer whose entire career revolves around media companies. Her love for magazines led her to study Visual Communication in college. In between drawing and daydreaming, she also travels, attends concerts, and takes pictures of whatever catches her eye. When she’s not going out, she takes refuge at home with her cats and vinyl collection. Follow her on Instagram.

Biography

Gisela Swaragita is a journalist living in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the 2010s she played in several bands in her hometown of Yogyakarta including the dreampop unit, Seahoarse. Now she focuses on writing about music and culture in various media outlets, while working full-time as an editor for Southeast Asia pro-democracy NGO, New Naratif. Follow her on LinkedIn, Instagram, and on her Website.

Published on August 27, 2025

Last updated on August 27, 2025

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