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Jakarta, Indonesia — Hmm.. Alright, I shouldn’t be using a dateline since I got back yesterday. It was a rather short trip, made even shorter by the infamous Jakarta traffic.

Yahoo!’s weather forecast gave me a heads up for thunderstorm for the three days that I’d be staying in Jakarta.

Day 1 (04 April)
True enough, it started to pour violently within just 30 minutes of our taxi ride, and that made traffic even worst. I guess just like in Manila, the road shrinks when it rains.

The ride from the airport to Intercon was just a few minutes shy of two hours, but it gave me a good glimpse of the city’s landscape.

Jakarta has a pretty good road network. There are flyovers everywhere. The U-turn slots are permanent. It can get pretty disorienting at first since they use right-hand drive vehicles. The cabdrivers survive the road pretty much as they do here, horns- and swerve-galore, whenever possible.

I had another good serving of bad traffic on our way to dinner - six lanes, all jammed up. Sheez.

The spicy dishes for dinner made me forget about the traffic for a while. And it was a good thing the (quite offensive) smell of the local driver didn’t spoil my appetite. (I literally had to scratch and pinch my arms to distract my senses until my nose adapted to that which is probably one of the works of the devil.)

Oh, dinner.. lemme see if I can still remember everything. The first thing served was the "fruit" salad.. I’m not exactly sure what’s in it but I think I remember getting a bite of green apple. That must be the fruity part.. Oh and there was also some browned (fried, i suppose) grated coconut.. or something It was not so spectacular.

Thin spring rolls, which they also call lumpia (spelled out differently though.. something like loempia), came next. It was a bit on the sweet side, and it was served with peanut sauce and cucumber salad.

The main dishes were a good lot but I particularly loved the fish topped with chili sauce, and beef bacon topped with.. guess what? more chili sauce! I’m not quite sure if they make rendang with chicken but.. well, it kinda tasted like rendang, which was also good. They also served something like chopsuey, and fried tofu with soy or something. Never liked tofu. Blech!!

We were back in our rooms at around 11.. which is like midnight in RP so sleep crept in real fast that night.

Day 2 (05 April)
After breakfast the next day, I went walking north to see more of the city. The map was not very helpful. I guess Jakarta’s just too big for a detailed guide. I walked huge block after huge block and ended up seeing just a bunch of construction sites. Signs of progress for the city, but not for my so-called adventure.

Real work started at noon with a scheduled lunch with Nissan’s COO and other execs. It was followed by the launching of the Nissan Grand Livina at Senayan City, an upscale mall with top brands like Versace, Gucci, CK, etc. I learned that the mall was just about six months old so some stores have yet to open.

Constructions were hidden by walls marked with quotations on shopping, and one was too familiar.

"Win or lose, we go shopping after the election." - Imelda Marcos

I was itching to go out again when we got back to the hotel. I have been warned that it’s not safe but I really wanted to check out the nightlife so I texted a friend who lives in Indonesia for tips. He said he was in a province west of Jakarta so he can’t go with me but said the EX Mall is pretty safe and it houses Hard Rock and F Bar. He also told me to choose only Blue Bird taxis since they are the safest cabs.

Hard Rock was pretty crowded, and the dancefloor was filled with mostly Caucasian women. I was led to the bar where I ordered Chocolate Martini. Yum. I left after my downed my second martini. I saw a gelato bar and had a scoop of Chocolate Rum-flavored gelato, then went looking for F.

F, apparently, runs under Fashion TV and it has branches in fashion capitals. I guess the idea of having monitors showing scantilly-dressed women doing the catwalk does not sell very well in conservative Indonesia since there was just one small group of people partying when I got there.

They do serve pretty interesting cocktails and I ordered Chocolate-covered Strawberry something (yeah, yeah.. i REALLY don’t like chocolate :P). I think it was mainly vodka with strawberry syrup at the bottom. Another shotglass holds the chaser - two strawberries covered with grated white chocolate. I wonder if that would work for tequila

The next thing I tried was the Flaming Rainbow. I dunno if this type of drink is available in Manila. Anyhoo, it was also a shooter of made of liquor in different colors carefully layered for that rainbow-ish effect, and the glass was flamed up with a lighter.

The lady bartender handed me a tiny straw and told me to sip. When I was just staring at my drink, all too mesmerized by the cute flaming thing, she startled me with an insistent, "Now!" I guess now I know why the place is almost empty

I was happy with four drinks so I flagged a Blue Bird cab to go back to the hotel. At 6am the next day, I woke up wondering how I’m going to test drive a strange right-hand drive vehicle with a headache

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.