Jakarta as it is

Written: 21 june 2011
Travel time: 12 october — 29 december 2010
Who does the author recommend the hotel to?: For a relaxing holiday; For business travel; For families with children; For recreation with friends, for young people
Your rating of this hotel:
8.0
from 10
Hotel ratings by criteria:
Rooms: 8.0
Service: 7.0
Cleanliness: 7.0
Food: 8.0
Amenities: 10.0
I lived in Jakarta for 2 months. we lived in Sudirman Park apartments, which was quite convenient - reception, cleaning, 2 swimming pools, 2 jacuzzis, a gym. a lot of cafes and restaurants on the territory. There is free Wi-Fi in the lobby (it is also free in almost all cafes, restaurants, shopping centers)
quite a lot of young people live in Sudirman, since the London school of PR is located on the territory. the territory is protected. so everything is safe. the locals were amazed that they could go to a supermarket or a bar in their pajamas.
near the pools sunbeds, mattresses, umbrellas and even a shower. the biggest minus - the pools are already very chlorinated. and if you come in the morning, you can feel the bleach at the bottom with your feet. so not fun.

the apartment has a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room and a balcony. technology is present. boiler in bathroom. BUT! the boiler is small and in order to wash your head and body, you need to constantly turn off the water, that is, wet your hair - turn off the water - lather them with shampoo - turn on the water and rinse. with washing the body the same garbage. hot water flows 3-5 minutes. after which it becomes icy. You have to wait 20 minutes to heat up.
even if you immediately turn on the kettle, stove and TV - it will knock out the traffic jams. fun too.
lizards lived with us from living creatures - quite harmless and they tried not to show their eyes. there were also a lot of ants. how they climbed to the 16th floor is more or less clear to me, but how they got to the 41st (our friends from Italy lived there) is not clear to me. but a rather cheap (1 dollar) crayon saved from the ants - they died before our eyes and for 3 days they disappeared. then a cleaner came (cleaning was 2 times a week) washed off the chalk and they crawled in again. The easiest method for ants is don't bring food. then they won't either.
the view from the rooms is different. someone to the courtyard to the pools, someone to the cemeteries, and someone to neighboring hotels and apartments. we had a view on the left of the cemetery, on the right of the Shangri La hotel. Barack Obama lived there when he came to Jakarta. it was fun to watch soldiers with machine guns along the perimeter of the hotel and on the roof. It was dumb to smoke at that time on the balcony.
I advise everyone to travel by taxi - cheap and safe. but the traffic there is a quiet horror. there is no metro and do not look.
what struck me the most was how wealth and poverty could coexist so closely. next to the cool hotels there are small huts where the poor and people live, and there, just under the bridge, people live in families in cardboard boxes. and most importantly, everyone is happy, smiling.
Everything is cheap in Jakarta. although everyone told me that Jakarta is expensive because it is the capital and that in small towns and villages everything is several times cheaper. I was surprised how much cheaper. . .

a lot of shopping malls. prices are cheaper than ours. also well, very cheap clothes of local production. especially in the Ambassador - you can buy T-shirts and shorts for 2-3 dollars. both for myself and for the children. There are a lot of children's clothes in general - the quality is good, the prices are affordable.
Supermarkets Carefor and Lotte Mart are somewhat similar to our Metro and Auchan - they have everything.
eat in cafes and restaurants very cheap. It's the same whether it's in a cafe or at home.
FOOD. I fell in love with Japanese cuisine even more and just fell in love with Chinese.
if you, dear residents of Ukraine, think that there is normal Japanese cuisine in our country, then believe me, there is none. perhaps only in Kushavel it still didn’t go anywhere, but the prices are there - in Indonesia, you can feed 10 people with that kind of money.
even in Japanese restaurants there they never heard of Philadelphia cheese and California rolls. there are only dragons.
Chinese cuisine, I ate it most often, generally surprised me. no bugs and cockroaches, everything is very tasty and appetizing. I did not expect.
local Indonesian cuisine - to put it mildly for an amateur. if you want to order rice, be prepared for the fact that there will be more spices in it than rice. I don’t use spices at all, so everywhere food orders began with the phrase “KNOW SPASI”
seafood is generally my weakness - I ate them every day and now, having returned to Faina Ukraine, I can’t eat mussels and shrimp... by the way, at the expense of mussels - they are terrible in Ukraine. I didn't love them. for this reason, I didn’t want to order in Indonesia, but once I ordered seafood pasta, I tried it and realized that we had mussels - fucked up.
fruits are wonderful. a lot. fodder bananas are more expensive than small ones. several types of mangoes, yellow watermelons, etc. etc. the bulk of the money was spent on fruit. plenty of vegetables too. in supermarkets everything is sold washed, even potatoes are clean and beautiful, and not like ours. Asparagus is worth every penny. its pricing in Ukraine is not clear to me at all. soy sprouts are the main ingredient that I added to salads.

the drinks. here, too, its charms. if you want to drink freshly squeezed juices, and there they are packaged like we have, you must definitely say "Know ice, know sugar, know water. " otherwise they like to pour water with sugar syrup into the juice and another half a glass of ice. we got so screwed up on the first day by ordering fresh papaya. they said about ice and water, but they forgot about sugar. Who would have thought that they would dilute the juice with sugar. the juice was sooooooo delicious. only then, having bought papaya, we didn’t quite catch up with why it tastes so nasty...
alcohol. this is a separate issue. in supermarkets, apart from beer and carbonated UPI with alcohol strength of 4 degrees, you will not be able to buy anything. they even sell wine in separate stores, and stronger - so in general you have to go to a special store. prices: the cheapest bottle of Australian wine is 50 bucks. whiskey red label bottle costs from 100 bucks.
in restaurants, bars and clubs alcohol is very expensive too. whiskey cola costs 15 bucks, double 30. and now attention: in the wonderful country of Indonesia, a single is 15 ml. double - 30ml!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
people are all welcoming, does not apply to taxi drivers and sellers in places without fixed prices. they think that if you are white, then you are necessarily rich and are trying to breed for money. and taxi drivers can generally roll you around in circles - taxis by meters.
in general, for those who travel to Bali - I would advise to allocate a couple of days to Jakarta - this is a completely different world.
we also visited the city of Bandung. 90 km to it. but we drove 5 hours - traffic jams tin.
there is also a Safari near Jakarta. I'll try to write separately.
Translated automatically from Russian. View original

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