getaway day 1: jakarta

*WARNING*
This post is super heavy. There are a lot of pictures and a long writing.

What an exhausting day!

Well, I should open my post with this information: we missed the train.

Yesss! We actually missed it. By about 10 seconds.

I was already in Bandung railway station 10 minutes before the departure time, which was 5.30am. I texted and called my friends and they all said that they were on their way to the station. And so I waited and I waited. They actually came right on time… when the train started to drift away. We got to wave at it. God… We decided to catch the next one at 6.30am, but unfortunately we didn’t get a seat. So we stood from Bandung to Bekasi. We were lucky enough to have two empty seats and two more after a lady and her daughter got off at Bekasi. It was fun, though. We were the only people who talked during our journey. We talked about so many things and laughed at a lot of things. We were meant to be backpackers, right? So, getting no seat in the train was acceptable :p

At about 10am, we arrived at Gambir. We walked to Monas and took some pictures there, and then we asked people around for the free shuttle bus that could take us to Kemayoran (where the Jakarta Fair was held). We walked from Monas to the bus shelter to find that the shelter was empty, the bus wasn’t there yet. We decided that we didn’t want to wait any longer, since it was very hot there. So we took the bajaj.

After holding back the pain in the butt for a few minute, we finally got to Jakarta Fair. Yay! 😀

But, wait a minute… Why was the place so empty? Well, it turned out that the fair started at 3pm. What on earth were we doing there at 11.00am?! We sat there for about 30 minutes, thinking what we should do. Vicky suggested that we go to the nearest mall, just to cool down. But malls were million miles away. And it was Friday, so the boys had to do the Jumat prayer. We then decided to find a nearest mosque by using Afief’s GPS. Luckily there was one in 950 meter from us. We walked following the direction from Afief’s GPS. We walked and we walked and we walked… Still no sign of a mosque. We just kept walking until we arrived at this Al-Ihsan mosque (Mr Boyfriend’s name!) The boys proceeded to do the prayer while us girls waiting for them at a cafe. We ordered four drinks there.

A few minutes later, the boys were back and they sat with us. They didn’t order anything because us girls didn’t finish our drinks, so they finished them. And the owner of that place yelled at us for spending too much time there. I still can’t believe how rude she treated us as her consumers! We paid and we left right away. Jakartan people are so mean!

It was still 1pm and Jakarta Fair was still closed. So we went back to the mosque and stayed there for a while. We prayed and we took a nap. At 2.30pm, we left the mosque and went to have lunch. At 3.30pm, we finally got in the Jakarta Fair! 😀

Jakarta Fair… was kinda boring and disappointing. It wasn’t like what I had imagined before. It was basically an expo where merchants sold goods. There were kitchen and house appliances, clothes, electronics, cars, food, etc. None of which had caught my eyes. But I didn’t go home with empty hands. Why? Because I found an elephant hand puppet! 😀

We walked around in the fair for about 3 hours. After that we went to May’s house in Bekasi, which will be told in the next part of the getaway series 🙂

Sincerely,
Putdar.

PS. All pictures are courtesy of Afief. He also wrote our story in his blog. Go check it out.