Jakarta…that tangled mass/mess of 14 million people all trying to get to the same place at the same time on the same street, or so it seems. Motor bikes/scooters zip about with a carelessness that defies logic or sanity. It is like those old Scotty magnetic dogs my grandfather had, one black, one white. I would put one magnetic pole at the opposite pole on the other dog and literally chase it across the table simply by letting physics do its thing. They never touched. This was the visual image I saw when spending several hours in Jakarta cabs attempting to get across town and seeing all forms of transportation get ever so close to each other and then, magically the reverse magnetism kicks in and they move apart without touching. It made no difference the time of day. There is no “rush hour,” they simply have “rush days.” Any day, any time. Holidays, working day, morning, night, midday. All the same. They have even built toll roads above the traffic to alleviate the mess. For a stiff fee of $0.33 you can pay the freight and literally speed part way on your journey. However, they are limited and like a bad drug trip, you’ve got to come down at some point and face the reality.
We got out of Jakarta as quickly as possible on our arrival at the beginning of the trip and only came to it because we wound up with just a couple of days left in the trip and not enough time to go some place else. What a pleasant surprise then, to find it is actually a very fascinating place….once you get to where you want.
Our flight from Kalimantan was scheduled for 11:50 a.m. but Dessy told us that they changed that schedule a month ago and that the flight left at 8:00 a.m. I scoured my emails and there was nothing anywhere, but checking their website we discovered the change…Lucky that Dessy was up on flight schedules or it would have been “missed flight, phase 2.”
We made it to our Holiday Inn Express phase 2 since so many of the Jakarta hotels were overpriced and the good old HIE offered everything we needed at a fraction of the price, sans any personality. Situated on top of a shopping mall from floors 10-19, you take an elevator to get to the lobby on floor 10, then another one to reach our 18th floor room. The upside was that we were greeted by two happy faces at the desk whose spirit made our coming and goings filled with laughter and positive attitudes. Our agenda for our two days was packed with a full “to-do” list: Textile museum and batik class for Carol, haircut for Jim, Hard Rock shot glasses for our daughter Ange, finding a knife that represented the culture for our son, Jeff, his traditional gift, find coffee to buy and bring home for my caffeine craving friends, gifts for this person and that person until we wondered if we could get it all done in our short stay.
So it was an ambitious schedule and we hopped to it. First stop was to the mall attached to the hotel….two elevator rides later we are in a mall catering to upper middle class types…each floor had its own theme. One floor was the furniture floor…beds and mattresses in one, upscale Italian home décor, and assorted household furnishings. Another floor was just children’s clothing with a little fun arcade with kiddie rides for extra enticement and another for wonen’s fashions. It was a theme mall attracting a burgeoning middle class in this up and coming section of Jakarta.
And of course, there was the inevitable food court an entire mall floor packed with western and Indonesian fast foods, upscale restaurants and a large number of cafeteria type places which served a variety of Indonesian foods. It was quite the visual display in addition to some simple, but good tasting, dishes. Patrons in our restaurant were a true mix of a portion of Jakarta society. There were just the two westerners looking out of place, a mixture of women in hijabs and uncovered coiffed heads. Families with three and even four generations, the elder generations looking very traditional, and assorted groups of young adults looking western, but obviously Indonesian all shared conviviality and food.
A table of eight contained grandma, two sets of young adults and three children. The little two year-old was a very cute little princess who finally strayed from the table and began to dance in the aisle….Nobody at the table even paid the slightest attention to her. Then from the side there was a plain green uniformed girl of about 16? who whisked out and took the little girl back to the table. Every move of the girl from this point on was watched and dealt with by her, not the well tailored family. The nanny/au pair was interesting “Who is this girl, and what is her story.” I have no clue, of course, but I do know that in many places we’ve been village girls without prospects or any real hope of advancing in life have to work to provide for their families, thus perpetuating the circle of young children who seldom have the opportunity to get the education they need to have a better life. She went about her work very stoically, never smiling at the child or looking at her surroundings and taking things in. Her focus was the child…she was “on,” and it was a joyless task dealing with this little princess who refused to be fed by her, lashed out at her as she put the spoon to her mouth, and was, basically, the stereotypical spoiled, bratty child. I really felt empathy for the nanny because it seemed such drudgery for her, and yet it was better than the alternative.
However, after lunch, we felt that this was not the place for our needs and so off we went to find the Hard Rock Café for the shot glasses. We were told that it was located in another eight story, Macy’s type, store…(they’re everywhere in Jakarta) and that they had a lot of the things we were looking for as well..GREAT…an all-in-one stop shopping. In fact, the Hard Rock had moved, but they did have a treasure trove of lots of what we wanted so, off we went with shopping bags in hand, walking to the Grand Hyatt Hotel attached to another grand plaza of shopping. A 15 minute walk in the Jakarta afternoon heat was not rewarded when we were told that it had moved again. This time an air conditioned cab was hailed by a friendly policeman, and we cooled down as we headed to the most upscale mall I’ve seen this side of Dubai. At One Pacific Plaza, the mall is attached to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Aren’t they all? Inside was a virtual litany of high end stores, the crowning jewel being the indoor showroom of the McLaren automobile, going for a cool $874,000 US.
Thankfully, the HRC was, indeed attached as well and we got the glasses…following our walk and time in the heat we decided to have my favored afternoon quaff, a chocolate milkshake while Carol changed from her usual Strawberry shake to a root beer float. We had had a variety of what were described as “milkshakes,” from colored water to huge ice cubes taking up most of the glass, but I can unequivocally say that was the absolute best milk shake I’ve ever had. Carol’s root beer float was real ice cream that fizzed up and overflowed the glass when pushed to the bottom. Unlike the soft serve stuff we’d had in other places which just didn’t make it at all. So when the $17 bill came, I didn’t even flinch. Given everything, it was perfect and I had no complaints.
A $5 cab ride back was a cooling climax to our outing. With the HRC shakes/floats filling us, we were done for the day and hunkered down for the evening.
