Easy like Sunday morning

Easy like Sunday morning:

“Do you have a trash bin Mister?”
The beverage vendor sweeps his eyes around his cart then looks to the ground on the left.
“Just throw it there,” he says, nodding with his head toward the road.
I ball the water bottle wrapper in my hand and thank him. Then I’m back on my run. Soon a teenagers rides by on a bicycle with a helmet that looks like a durian, the beloved stinky fruit found here in Asia with a spiked shell so sharp that handlers must wear gloves.

This is car-free day, the one day of the week when the municipal government closes a main thoroughfare in this chaotic, traffic-choked city and allows bikers, runners, walkers and skateboarders to rule the road.
It’s a carnival of sorts, a time to socialize. Each week there is something new and eye catching – a boy on stilts, old men riding vintage bicycles from Dutch colonial days (some of them dress in old army digs the way former dictator Suharto did).
Today, BRI Bank, one of Indonesia’s biggest lenders, is signing up new credit card clients. White food tents stand in rows selling sweets and rice porridge. Signs highlight amazing promotions like deals on concert tickets or, for the big spenders, family sedans. A band plays Lionel Richies’s anthem “Easy Like Sunday Morning” on a nearby stage.
After my run I stand on a bridge crossing the road and watch the hordes of cyclists go by. An angry foreign woman who is running smacks a teenager with a towel for getting in her way. He laughs, and so do I.

On the way home I pass a single severed chicken foot, abandoned and looking lonely. Two boys read a paper on a bench beside the claw, paying no attention. It seems cruel. Then a little girl with ragged hair jumps up and down as I approach shouting, “foreigner, foreigner.” When I say “good morning, darling,” her mother breaks into riotous laughter.
Further along a tiny kitten lays in a box on a trash pile, while another snacks on orange peels and other refuse. Then there is the fish market, where Mariyo, a fisherman, asks me to take a picture of his catch. He works as an office boy but on his days off he comes here to make some extra money. He’d been out all night in the north of the city fishing for what he had arranged on a blue tarp this morning.

And so another day gets underway in Jakarta. People come out to laugh and play. They find their communities. They eat and gossip and some fall victim to the credit card trap. They come from all classes and dozens of ethnicities. They are Javanese, Sumatran, Chinese-Indonesian.
It is a window on this city, where trash piles high and clean water runs scarce. But it is one of the most social, friendly places despite all the problems. And when people claim the roads on Sunday morning, it does indeed seem like the day will be easy.