Big Durian

Above:  Art made up of scrunched up fishing nets at Sarinah Mall.

Leaving

Despite retiring much later last night, I woke at 0500 for my rehab exercises and taking breakfast at 0730 to avoid waiting (like yesterday).  I told them to skip the pastries and juice, in order to eat less.

Checking out at 0900, I ordered a car for the airport, getting there at 0920.  With a mobile boarding pass, I was airside in seconds with no queueing.

There were two lounges competing for business with pretty staff trying to intercept passengers to go to their one.

The Blue Sky lounge had much better rating but it wasn’t really busy enough for their food to turn over quickly and it all looked a bit sad.

Flight change

Today, I fly to Jakarta for 2 nights.  I had booked 1035 flight on Lion Air but late yesterday afternoon, I had a notification from Traveloka that it had been cancelled and had been rebooked to the 0805 but was allowed to refund or further rebook for free.

The 0805 is doable since I’m waking early but I would be in Jakarta too early for the hotel to let me into my room.  So, I did a free change to 1155.

Soon after doing that, I realised that the price for that flight had come down and was about NZD25 less than what I had paid.  Damn, I could have refunded my original ticket and booked a new one and kept that money towards 2x 1h30 massages!

Arriving in Jakarta

The Lion Air flight on a B737 MAX 9 was uneventful, and we landed a little late at 1315.  With traffic to the city on Google Maps not too bad, I decided to skip the train and rideshare combo and just take a single ride by Grab all the way to the city.  It was a little pricier and would take about the same amount of time.

At the kerbside, two Grab really cheap rideshares cancelled on me after I had waited for a while.

Gojek was considerably pricier and had a different system.  I had to show a booking reference to their staff who put me in a queue with an estimate of 30 mins.

I opted to use a Bluebird metered taxi.  A car was available for me within a couple of minutes, at 1400, but that’s when it turned sour.  Traffic closer to the city meant that the ride took 1h30 to the Swiss-Bel Inn Wahid Hasyim.

The agglomeration of Jakarta (Jakarta + Bogor + Depok + Tangerang + Bekasi) has a population of 33 to 35 million, making it the second or third largest cities in the world using this measure, after Tokyo and perhaps Delhi.  This is the Big Durian, so the traffic shouldn’t be a surprise.  Despite this, I find it one of the friendliest cities.

Meeting up with old school friend

After a rest, I headed at around 1630 to explore the neighbourhood.  I’m meeting an old school friend at a Minahasan eatery in the food court of Sarinah Mall.

So that mall was a good place to start my wander.  I found the dinner menu and as I felt peckish, I bought some kuih to eat, and also as a gift for Tim.  My favourite was the Nona Manis, which was a custardy cup-shape kuih.

Tim turned up a little before 1900 and as he recently had a bout of food poisoning, we both agreed to miss the Minahasan food which had been sitting for a while.

We went to Bakmi GM, a noodle shop, outside the mall.  I ordered the “all singing and dancing” version while he ordered the plain noodles to eat with his leftover lunch.

I learnt from Tim that Sarinah Mall was Jakarta’s first shopping complex.  Soekarno named the mall after his wet nurse.

After dinner, Tim took me to St Theresia briefly befor going out for a drive south towards Senayan. There, we had a drink at Starbucks Reserve.  Senayan and the southern part of the city is the posh area.

The route back took us past the highly fortified US Embassy, and I was dropped off around 2200. Despite the 1h time difference from Bali, I didn’t sleep till 2330.