Discovering Jakarta by foot

The market in Glodok

Our goal for the morning was to have a coffee and lunch in the famous Kopi Es Tak Kie – a café we had heard about in one of the vlogs we watched while planning the trip. Despite what google said (potentially a problem with time zone settings on the laptop, to be fair), the place was closed and would only open at 6PM. Not being discouraged by the first hiccup, we settled for walking through the tiny market lanes, amazed by the foods we had never seen before. We must have looked like kids in a candy store with our eyes wide open, full of excitement. This is the first time we tried the absolutely delicious purple mangosteen and jackfruit. Up until now during this trip and especially at that moment, it was amazing to be in the position of not knowing what you are about to experience in terms of food and drinks. It’s like discovering the world anew. Simply amazing.

If like us, you want to explore the less touristy/upscale places, google and TripAdvisor are not the best sources of information since the majority of local places are not listed. Would rather recommend seeking advice from the locals or just exploring the surroundings.

The cool thing about most of the places around markets is that you can sit in a café and as long as you buy drinks there, you can bring in food from any of the surrounding street food booths. Having found one of those places, we shared a plate of Singapore-style fried noodles with seafood – simple, cheap yet delicious! (BTW, we didn't really have a clue what we were ordering since there is no English menu and nobody really speaks English, but that's part of the fun! :))

The Dutch quarter

Strolling through the market streets with weird goods (“who buys that?”), ice cream-selling tuk-tuks, genuinely fake converse flip-flops for half a euro (we know people who bought that :D) and an endless flow of people, we made our way to Kota Tua – the historic square surrounded by the Dutch-period architecture.

There are a lot of museums to visit around this area, however we rather opted for just observing people and the neon bicycles circling around the square. Just a moment after arriving, we got approached by groups of young people asking for a minute. Despite the strong instinctive reaction to decline, we agreed and launched into a series of interviews with students doing their English homework assignment. It was very endearing – the kids had notes neatly written in their notebooks (and some on the palm of their hands), touchingly nervous, they asked about our first impressions of Indonesia. Every interview was filmed, a picture with the interviewee and the support team taken, interview protocol signed <3 #superstars

On that note, we would recommend trying to get over the mentality that anyone approaching you wants something from you that you wouldn’t be interested in giving or receiving, and stay open-minded So far we have made great experiences chatting with random people on the streets – usually you get great tips, insights or just launch into an interesting conversation. Everybody is extremely friendly and respectful, especially if you act the same way yourself.

Jakarta is not the most fascinating destination in terms of sight-seeing, thus after 20 minutes on the square we continued our discovery of the city. Although there are many public transportation options (train, bus, taxi, grab, motorcycles, tuk-tuks), we chose the slow-mo option of walking. This gave us time to learn counting one to ten in Indonesian (not without the help of by-passers, giving us tips when we appeared to have forgotten the following number).