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Published: March 18th 2006
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After a comfortable late morning noodling in my room I meet up with Vanessa over at the Sarinah Busway platform and we head towards the National Museum, a stone throw from the MONAS monument (well, a pretty exhausting throw, considering the size of the MONAS compound...) to inspect the latest announced additions to the collection. Being the cartography nerd that I am I find the gigantic relief maps exhibiting the country's topography and population the most interesting, while the rest of the collected historical items leave the same bland impression I get from visiting Bronze Age exhibitions back home (it's been a while). Seeing all the imposing volcanos strewn across the islands I feel a bit bad about not having scheduled some time to see at least one. If I could pick one though, it will be Anak Krakatau, the child of the mighty Krakatau for sure. But getting there is an expensive affair, it lies far out at sea between Java and Sumatra, and the journey will require several days, time which I feel is not available right now.
Moving on we go back outside in the heat and have a walk over to the MONAS compound before having
to seek shelter in the shadows of some puny trees in the park, listening to a lone saxophone player and eating some nice street vendor fruits. Without going into detail, the MONAS monument is a gigantic concrete tower, ironically labelled as "Suharto's last erection", which contains a big exhibit of the history of independence in the base, and has a viewing platform at the top (see the entry for August 20, yes I know, I haven't written it yet, so sue me...). After having a glance at the long snake of visitors queueing up outside I decide I'd rather move on and come back at another time, especially since I have found another interesting object on the skyline, the grand Masjid Istiqlal. While it is certainly not the most charming or exquisite of mosques, it holds the record of being the largest one in Southast Asia. Unfortunately it is closed for the day so a brief stopover will have to do. Just another short stonethrow away is the great catholic cathedral. I don't know if it was the full intention of the mosque construction project or not, but the cathedral now looks like a little speck on the city map
The Welcome Monument
This part of town feels very much out of sync with the area where I'm staying in comparison. Despite being built already in 1901 it looks surprisingly modern.
The cramped space of downtown Jakarta and the barrage of skyscrapers and elevated roads and railroads makes it hard to get a chance to appreciate these grand buildings, in fact you'd have to stand right next to them to be able to see them at all. Check back on the 20th for some better pictures...
At this point Vanessa is starting to wonder how many more hours I am planning to drag her around in the sun staring at big piles of concrete. As I don't have a very good answer I agree that we should seek shelter and refresh ourselves in a place equipped with air conditioning. We grab a cab and head northeast to the Kelapa Gading area. We drive through some of the nicer neighbourhoods I've seen so far, with small ponds and big villas hiding behind security doors and brick walls. Over at Kelapa Gading a lot of signs come up in English and this area has some really gigantic malls. I find it to be a good place to stock up on film and cds, the first really big buy I've
done on my trip so far. In the late afternoon we find a nice slab of concrete outside, still warm from the sun, and wind down from the day, people watching and talking trash. We also seem to have ended up in the middle of a dance competition of sorts, I am just waiting for some announcer to pick up a microphone and start advertising (insert your favourite annoying commodity here).
We find a great Sundanese restaurant for our dinner and stock up on spicy shrimp soup, very bitter vegetables and to my amusement, some fried spleen, which doesn't taste all that bad, in fact it tastes pretty much like liver.
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