Jolly Jakarta

So we spent the last few days in Jakarta – the capital of Indonesia – touring and exploring around the city not so well known to tourists. None of us (me, Linnea, her parents and brother) have ever been there and neither did we actually plan on going there. Just ended up there due to the cheapest available flights around Christmas. The only thing I've heard from a friend was “There are two cities in Asia that you should avoid, Manila and Jakarta”, so not the best advice to start a trip from. All in all it wasn't that bad that you should avoid it, we just had some troubles like finding a place to eat since our hotel was located in a banking district where everything was closed on Christmas days and the city isn't really made for walking.

The best way to get around was by taxi, usually in Asia people tend to use Subways but Jakarta doesn't have one and I wouldn't even start looking at how the buses run since taxis were incredibly cheap. Going from one end of town to the other cost us less than 5€. The traffic is a major problem though – like in every big Asian city – so driving from A to B took quite a long time even with very short distances.

Jakarta doesn't really have that much to offer, it's okay to visit for a few days and say that you've been there but don't go there for a week. During these few days we visited the Indonesia mall in where you could buy about anything you wanted, nice mall but way overpriced even on Finnish standards. We had fun walking around for a few hours though, there was also a very weird Asian Christmas event going on that caught our eye.

The national monument – MONAS – was also nice. The first thing we noticed was the high presence of police around, apparently due to the high risk of terrorist attacks. Well we didn't get bothered by that and moved on towards the monument. The monument is a high tower surrounded by a huge park, which was built to symbolise the independence of Indonesia. We took a few funny Christmas pictures in front of the park and in an instant we became celebrities, all the locals surrounded us and started taking pictures of us and also wanted to come on the picture with us. What a weird experience.

The main attraction in our minds was the old town, it wasn't really advertised anywhere and the taxi driver had no idea about it. It was just a few blocks and one main square but this really nice old Dutch colonial style buildings. At the square we found this lovely restaurant – Cafe Batavia – which I definitely recommend you should visit. A bit pricey though but located inside a beautiful colonial era building. We had a lovely breakfast and you could even get Nutella dumplings, Nutella goes with everything!

When we left the restaurant we were surrounded like movie stars again. Now there was like ten times as much people, we gradually had to pull out in order to get away from the cameras. And I am not exaggerating. The people were nice though, they just simply wanted to be on a picture with you. Nobody even tried to grab our bags or steal anything.

Me and Luukas also had a KFC bucket challenge of who could eat more chicken. It was a pretty tight race, the better one won - Luukas. I lost to him by a mere half piece of chicken but I just couldn't finish it up. Congrats to him! 

Afterwards Linnea and the parents wanted to fill their stomachs with something else than delicious crispy chicken so we just found our way to the nearest restaurant. No one really said a word there, they just took us in and sat us down and without even ordering anything the table was filled with plenty different local dishes. Some more better looking than others. And as we were not hungry with Luukas and the three of them could not finish all of it, we had to pretend looking like we ate something and took stuff to our plates just to mess them up. I mean it would look bad if we came and didn't touch the food they were carrying in front of us so kindly. And in the end when we asked for the check, the waiter came to count how much we had eaten and by that he created the prize of the food. So we kind of ended up paying of the food we just messed the plates with not to look too rude.

On Christmas eve we went to eat at this nice place located close by, good local food but a dead empty restaurant. After eating we found out there was a little roof terrace in our hotel so me and Linnea went to chill out there and exchanged our Christmas presents on top of this ever moving city. Next stop: Bali!

Greetings:

Arno (and Linnea - and Luukas who photobombs a lot)