Satellite
  • Day 28

    Day 28: Shopping in Jakarta

    July 13, 2016 in Indonesia ⋅ ⛅ 32 °C

    Last full day here in Jakarta before we depart for new countries and new adventures! We'd worked out over the last few days that the main thing to do in Jakarta was to shop, so figured we should go and check out a shopping mall or too for an authentic experience.

    Caught a taxi to the Grand Indonesia Mall around 10:30am after a leisurely hotel breakfast. I should mention by the way, that these areas of central Jakarta have seen terrorist attacks occasionally (remember the JW Marriott hotel has been bombed twice since 2001, the Australian embassy nearby was bombed, and there was a bombing in January this year at a police post and a Starbucks - remember the photo of that guy in the middle of the road waving a handgun around). But this westernised area of central Jakarta is like a warzone - police checkpoints, helmeted and machine-gun toting security everywhere directing traffic. Crash barriers, razor wire, inspections on every driveway where they use mirrors to check under the car and in the boot for bombs. Metal detectors and bag inspections at the entrance to any large property. Crazy stuff.

    Once we'd gotten past all the security we set about wandering the mall. There was a couple of things I wanted to buy - some shorts, since mine were feeling a bit old and shabby, a hat to replace the one I lost, and some new headphones as the ones I'd bought just days before leaving Sydney had stopped working already!

    We walked around looking at the shops - not really much to report since as you can imagine it's basically like any other upmarket Western shopping mall. There weren't any super-luxe brand stores like Versace or Gucci etc (they all seemed clustered in a different mall across the road), but the stores here still had surprisingly high prices. The stores were basically the same international chains that have set up shop in Australia over the last couple of years - Top Shop, H&M, Zara etc, along with a lot of brand stores like Nike/Reebok/Adidas and some Asian-specific retailers like Seibo.

    Had a lot of trouble finding shorts that would fit - obviously I'm a lot larger than the average Indonesian guy so most stores just don't bother stocking things large enough for me. Managed to find a couple of pairs of shorts large enough at H&M which were about $20 AUD each, so no difference to buying them in Oz really. For lunch we visited Tim Ho Wang which is a Michelin-starred dumpling place (although it's a chain now, the original is in Hong Kong). Best known for BBQ pork buns (and BBQ chicken buns in this Muslim country), I can report they were excellent!

    Wandered around quite a bit more before I found a hat I liked at Cotton On - a trucker hat, and some headphones from the Sony store. More than I wanted to pay ($50), but hopefully they last a bit longer than my last pair!! Went exploring into the upper levels of this gigantic mall, and found an entire three floors that were kitschily decorated to look variously like Shanghai, New York City and ancient Rome for some reason. The food outlets were all heavily decorated and themed, which felt a little unusual. I guess in Aus it's reasonably common for a stand-alone restaurant to be heavily themed, but not outlets in a mall? Anyway it was kind of fun.

    We chose a Vietnamese place and grabbed a salted caramel iced coffee and salted caramel iced chocolate - genuine Vietnamese fare of course! Caught a taxi back to the hotel tired but contented around 5pm, just in time for a quick freshen up in the room and heading downstairs for our standard complimentary cocktails and canapes. Indulged a little too much with free mojitos and Bintang!
    Read more