Met an Indonesian Chinese guy and he brought me to try out local street food.

Street food is pretty popular, sometimes it’s hard to walk around because there are street food at most pavements.

Mie Kalimantan.

Met up with Yannuar at Senayan Plaza.

Found out that many of my university friends from Indonesia went back to Indonesia recently and were quite successful in business. Yannuar started his own coal mining business few years ago and expanded to oil digging and owning power plants in just few years. Indonesian Chinese are pretty savvy business people and have good a business network.

Jalan Mangga Besar has a lot of Chinese places, they even sell Shangdong dumplings.

Got on the Damri bus (20,000 Ruppiah, 45 minutes bus ride) from Gambir station to the airport. Luckily it’s Saturday and the traffic was not that bad, managed to arrive at the airport just an hour before my 7pm Lion Air flight to Padang. There is a domestic airport tax of 40,000 that is required. However, the flight was delayed for 1.30 hours.

Sumatera stretched for around 2000km from the northern tip to the south of the island. Padang is at west Sumatera and is frequently hit by earthquake. The last one happened on September 30, 2009, just around 5 months ago and killed over 1100 people. Padang is mostly inhabited by Minangkabau people and Padang cuisine is pretty famous, with hot and spicy as the main flair.

Got to Padang airport at 10pm after the 1.5 hours flight. The airport is 20km away from the city and got on a Damri bus (18,000 Ruppiah)

to Padang city at 10.30pm. Since I got no idea where am I going to stay, got off the last stop and tried searching for a cheap place. Walked around and found nothing that fit into my budget then took an Ojek (motorbike taxi) to Wisma Salleh (75,000 Ruppiah).

Had Padang food (11,000 Ruppiah), Padang food is spicy.

my second meal for the day at 11.45pm.

Moved to a different hostel (70,000 Ruppiah) few doors away

because the one I stayed at looked dirty and my skin has rashes sleeping on the bed.

Jakarta pusat.

Jakarta has a similar transportation mode to the Transmileno in Bogota, Columbia. But the one here is called transjakarta, it’s actually buses running on a special lane, 3500 Ruppiah per trip.

Museum Mandiri, an old dutch bank just right across Kota transjakarta/busway station.

Bajaj, a three wheeler transport vehicle

The rivers in Jakarta are dirty and do smell.

Museum Jakarta

Bridal photo shoot in the museum

Bicycles at the square

Walked to Maritime Museum

The museum is informative. Ports and the maritime sector do play an important role in Indonesia because of the geographic and shape of the country.

View from a tower

and then to Sunda Kelapa.

Sunda Kelapa is a port north of Jakarta, it was a burstling port of the last Hindu kingdom of west Java before the Portuguese came at 1520s but then was driven out by a Muslim leader and was renamed Jayakarta, meaning Victory City.

Sunda Kelapa

The Dutch then came in the beginning of 1600, built a fort and named it Batavia, making it the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch colonialize Indonesia for the next 350 years.

Walked from Kota, the old city to Glodok which is also called Chinatown.

The gap between the ethnic Chinese and other ethnicity in Indonesia is obvious, with many Chinese businessman owning shops. Ethnic Chinese only make up of 3% of the population but they control almost 70% of the economy. The riot in May 1998 happened around Glodok area.

Lunch, GadoGado at Glodok Plaza (16,000 Ruppiah)

Museum National

There are many Hindu statues because Hindu was a major religion just around 600 years ago before Islam came.

Jewelry for different ethnicity

Sanskrit writing and the many different forms used in Indonesia before Roman alphabet was introduced.

Local houses during old times

The national museum is also known as the Elephant building because of the bronze statue in front, given by the King of Siam in year 1871.

Monas (Monument Nasional)

built by Sukarno and the flame on top was said to be covered with Gold. Wasn’t able to get up the tower because there were demonstrators practicing some drills.

It’s not uncommon to see protest on the street here.

Met Stephanus for dinner, Mie Bakso (15,000 Ruppiah)

and Stef dropped me off at FX mall which has quite a cool design. There is also a 7 storey slide in the mall.