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It is hard not to be pleased with a smooth arrival in Singapore, especially after a year and a half living in Jakarta. Changi Airport almost glistens, and even with renovation going on at Terminal 1, I speed through immigration and baggage claim and am in an orderly (no touts!) taxi queue in under 20 minutes.

Then the blue Comfort cab whistles along the expressway into town, getting me to my central city destination in 30 minutes. And I don’t feel as if have just landed in a war zone.

Singapore does so many things right that I have always had a hard time understanding the typical Jakartan’s — local or expat — reaction to mentions of Indonesia’s close neighbor. Almost invariably it brings snide comments about fussy politicians and sheep-like citizens. Singapore, it is implied, is the nanny state where nothing happens that hasn’t been sanctioned by People’s Action Party ministers and drained of life.

An obligatory roll of the eyes and it’s over, and then it’s right back to the usual litany of complaints about the Big Durian — the corrupt cops, the lack of efficient public transportation, the traffic, the pollution, the chaos, the baffling telecommunications, the labyrinth of useless cable TV and Internet connections — without one moment to acknowledge the irony that each Jakarta irritant has been largely smoothed over in the maligned island-nation.

Questions of political freedoms aside and disregarding feelings of national loyalty, this disconnect confounds me. If Singapore is boring — an assertion I would dispute — it is so precisely because everything works. And then there are parks (parks!) and green belts and bicycle paths. People obey the traffic rules and follow building codes and zoning regulations, and food vendors don’t treat their preparations like a high school chemistry lab experiment.

For nine years, I lived in Asia’s fairest “clean and green” city and had no complaints. In the seven years since leaving it, I have often missed certain things — a Saturday morning bowl of laksa, a stroll along pedestrian-friendly sidewalks, a particular pub — and I have often gone back, always happy to return and see old friends. But I can’t say I ever had any real homesickness for the place.

So I was caught by surprise on Thursday when, standing in line at my Ubud bank, I heard the sounds of Indonesian rock band Andra and the Backbone playing on a TV show and was suddenly hit by a heartfelt yearning for the derided Indonesian capital — a city where I lived for less than a quarter of the time I did in Singapore. And earlier last week, when my Balinese driver remarked on the macet , or traffic, in the center of the village that Conde Nast Traveler has named the top city in Asia, I said, “Oh, I got used to macet in Jakarta, and I kind of like it now.”

If, in terms of lifestyle and convenience, Singapore is a walk in the park, then Jakarta is boot camp and battle. It can’t help but leave a few marks on you, scars that one fingers later with nostalgic reminiscence, not unlike love, thinking, “That time she almost got me.”

Singapore is all bright, shiny corners and well-lit nooks and crannies, with grass cut to uniform length and neatly trimmed around the edges.

Jakarta is the gritty place where the dark monsters of the subconscious live, where fellow plumbers of the depths find solace and refuge in the cool safety of monumental mercantile institutions (or in pubs).

While in the midst of devastation, in places where you think people would be crushed and ground to rubble and bone, there are 3-in-1 jockeys, street buskers and beggars, dangdut queens, trash-pickers and the other downtrodden, who cope and survive with the sort of equanimity that comes from having been tested and tried and not found wanting.

Jakarta is the proving ground where the dross of existence is burned away to reveal the fine kernel of humanity that exists in some — not all — of us.

Unlike too-easy, too-convenient Singapore, Jakarta builds character and is probably good for you. It builds the immune system through overuse. It rips and tears muscle like a max-out day at the gym, so that new growth can provide new strength.

In Jakarta, those that thrive are gems — hard diamonds condensed and pressure-formed from carbon-based living tissue. And so, I wonder what it says about me that I hated it so?

Thomas Hogue is a former Jakarta Globe editor