I would be hard pressed to identify where I live on a map. Or to name or point out any key landmarks or neighborhoods of this city. As far as I can tell, there's little reason to be able to do so. Whenever I ask people where I should go or what I should do here, they rarely offer me anything other than a list of shopping malls.
My 908-page Indonesia Lonely Planet has only about 3.5 pages of sights in Jakarta. This is limited to a town square, another town square, a former governor's home, an old bridge, 6 museums, a church, a port, a Chinese neighborhood, a temple, the national monument, a cemetery, a mosque, some government buildings, and a mini Indonesia theme park. I haven't been in any great rush to tick these things off the ol' list.
That said, this is all extremely uncharacteristic of me, and so despite my genuine lack of interest and motivation in this particular case, I do tend to feel guilty and obliged to venture out and explore this ugly and uninviting city a bit more when I have free weekends.
Consequently, this past weekend CT and I traipsed over to the Kota neighborhod, which was once the "hub of Dutch Colonial Indonesia". There we had brunch at historic colonial Batavia Cafe, moderately famous despite its mediocre food. Afterward we meandered about the weekend market in the central cobblestone square (the first mentioned above), Taman Fatahillah. Despite the fact that we spent over 3 hours in a taxi roundtrip to make this journey, it ended up being a fun little excursion.
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| Busy day at the market |
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| You could find everything from Spongebob.... |
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| to colorful rental bikes... |
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| to carnival style games.... |
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| .... to switchblades, ninja throwing stars, and brass knuckles. (Just a teensy bit unnerving.) |
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| I'm not sure why exactly, but adolescent Indonesian girls are obsessed with asking bules if they can take their photos with us. This is usually a drawn-out event, as each wants a shot with her own cellcam, sometimes with several unique poses. This time I added mine to the mix. |
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| Another group opted to conduct a very official-seeming interview with CT after the photo shoot |
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| From the window of the cafe I watched the guy with the green bicycle cart tediously grill dozens of thin banana leaf packets. I became extremely curious what was inside of them and also felt bad that during the entire time I watched not one person made a purchase. So I vowed to buy one and try it after brunch. |
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| A close-up of the mystery snack being prepared. Will it be fruit, vegetable, or possibly (please no) meat? |
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| Google Translator was no help in identifying this substance. Utak Utak apparently means "tooling tooling". |
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| Purchased and ready to be eaten.... Can't wait. |
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| Digging in! In reality I took only one tiny cautious nibble. What looked like banana ended up being an extremely tough meat-like substance that was very difficult to chew. Not really my cup of tea. |
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| SHIT! It later occurred to me that "utak utak" might actually be "otak otak". Brains?!? What kind of brains did I consume? And how the hell can that be safe considering each packet was only grilled for a little more than a few seconds on each side. |
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| Fish Brains... according to Wikipedia. Actually, given my location, probably just fish paste. Phew. Only fish paste. How bad can that be? |
All in all, a fairly successful outing.
And one key Jakarta destination checked off my list.
