Dutch Old Town

I woke early today, kinda as a result from previous days’ sleep pattern.  I tried to skip a big breakfast and made do with a coffee and a bun before Grab’ing to Tawang station for my exploration of its Dutch Old Town around 0800.

In general Indonesia doesn’t revere its colonial heritage, including architecture. And I can understand that. However, amongst the large number of dilapidated colonial buildings in Semarang, there are some that are quite well restored.

Everything I had wanted to see was close by, so  I was “done” in around 30 minutes.  I had walked around the station, visited the Praoe Lajar kretek (clove cigarette) factory and seen the Blenduk church from the outside.  The best thing was that was that it wasn’t too hot or humid yet.

With so much of the day ahead, I decided to just enjoy the area with slow explorations and continued to Chinatown which was very rundown and largely taken by hardware shop.

At the risk of glamourising colonialism, I’ll share some of these pictures with you below.

After 10 sticks of sate kambing (goat satay) as a early lunch, I took a Grab back to the hotel for a rest.  Despite my best intentions to do eat less, I couldn’t do without another meal mid-afternoon and went downstairs to the restaurant for a rawon.

In the evening I took a Grab ride to the Ciputra Mall area to check out a few pharmacies to stock up on pharmaceuticals.  But for what I needed, availability wasn’t there and for what they had, it wasn’t cheap like in India. I continued to the mall where I forced a light dinner into myself as I seemed quite full from lunch still.

I bought some muesli and fruit for breakfast so I could start getting back to some semblance of my home breakfasts.