On coming back to UI

10 February 2007
I have never been to the University of Indonesia’s Depok Campus since 2004. After three years, I set my foot again in Depok.
Frankly speaking, there are a lot of pleasing development in the Campus. It looks greener now and is much better regulated than it was back in 1999 when I was a freshman. The English Department also has a much better curriculum and the administration seems to be installed. Back in 1999, it was an ‘organised chaos’ or ‘chaotic’ organisation, if I may say so. The advancement of our on-line library is amazing. Now we can access on-line books as well as on-line journals. I even haven’t seen any library that can do that, including UNSW’s and UPH’s libraries.
Well, nevertheless, you always have the sense that the university is still not as advanced as it should be. There are still a lot of things to fix here. We haven’t adopted the global best practice in managing a university, like my Australian lecturer once said.
I still have one major complaint though. Our trains. They are as ugly as ever. There is seemingly no real attempt to improve the conditions of our trains. Luckily, now there are more express-air conditioned trains–the ones I always eagerly anticipate. Nevertheless, our regular trains, oh come on, we live in the twenty first century! It is not the time to put animals on trains along with humans anymore. Goodness.