Bule living in middle class neighbourhood experience
Here is one experience that I would have never got if I was still in an apartment. During the Ahok election in 2017 they put a polling station in our garage. A guy from the army slept on the floor next to the ballot box the night before. On election day there was this whole system of queuing and punching paper, dipping ink etc. in different parts of our front garden. When it came to the count, the voting papers were opened one by one and scores chalked up on a board, and as Anies inched ahead, certain members of the crowd who had come to watch the count started to cheer whenever he got a vote. The others, who wanted Ahok to win, were I guess too embarrassed to cheer when he won a vote since it was clear many of the neighbours regarded it as an "Islam vs the rest" election. It was all good-natured but by the end, having seen the character of some of the neighbours I decided our garage would not be used for this purpose any more, and we refused the request to do it for the Jokowi 2019 election. I did find the whole thing fascinating though, and a bit of a window into life in the country.