June 2-4: Jakarta

Fortunately, in Indonesia, people have chauffeurs, who will do all the work for you while you sit and wait for your destination.

So (after picking up Al’s sister, who had arrived on a later flight) we drove to the mountains. While there, we did some shopping, but mainly the day was occupied by driving and eating. I became somewhat irritable about how many calories I was consuming relative to how many I was burning. Fortunately, that night we stayed in a hotel with a gym, so I got to work out while listening to great dance music and looking out over the picturesque hills.

The next day, it was back to driving. It took most of the morning to drive further up the mountain to visit … you guessed it … a restaurant. Apparently this was a very famous restaurant, and I will admit it had a lovely view!

By this time, we’d been to enough restaurants for me to be confident that I would never be able to order food in Indonesia, because even when the menu had English descriptions, I could not even hazard a guess as to how it would taste. So Al ordered for me: gado-gado, which is apparently vegetables and peanut sauce which seemed very similar to the pecel I’d had on the first day. The difference with this one was that Al ordered the sauce on the side, so I was able to keep the spiciness down to a tolerable level.

Then it was another drive back down the mountain. We made a couple of stops for shopping, but I didn’t buy anything. Shopping is definitely cheaper in Indonesia, but still not cheap enough for my high (or would you say low?) standards, and I was intimidated by the thought of trying to communicate with the salespeople. Most stores in Indonesia, people will speak to you in English, but my social anxiety was still not appeased.

Wednesday was our last day in Jakarta, and we spent it … driving. We made a stop to visit some of Al’s relatives and pick up one last American member of his family (his aunt).

Then it was off to the airport for the next leg of our journey.