Jakarta, Indonesia Part 2

One of our favorite activities in Jakarta was eating!  Surprise surprise!  We love to eat everywhere we go!

Indonesian food is quite delicious though.  It’s similar to other foods in the region featuring curries, rice, fish, and soups, but we found it to be more flavorful and more……dynamic than others.

One of our favorite meals was the same day we went to Taman Mini.  Our driver asked us if we wanted to try some food from his home province – central Java – for lunch.  Jakarta is also on the island of Java, but it is on the far northwestern corner of Java whereas our driver was from the middle of the island.  The main dish was Nasi Pecel – a vegetable curry with peanut sauce on rice.  It was delicious!!!

It was served with this cracker which had lots of little fish cooked into it.  If you look closely at the picture above, you can see the fish!

We also had some delicious ginger tea.  I always love ginger tea – but I’m used to it starting as powder and water.  This was actually made with ginger!!  Below you can see the ginger floating in it – and also the bowl of peanuts that was served as our appetizer.  They were kinda boiled peanuts… not quite like in Alabama, but sort of!

Mark tried the coconut juice which came with chunks of coconut meat in it.  Yum!  You can see it, along with Mark and our driver, Heru, below.  It was fun to spend time with Heru; he tried to teach us many Indonesian words which was fun and difficult.

Back to the Southern Hemisphere: Jakarta, Indonesia Part 1

Mark recently had a work trip to Jakarta, Indonesia and I was able to join him and we stayed the weekend.  One of our stops was the National Museum.  It was under construction – as you can see above – but it was still open and I was able to check out 4 floors of history from the beginning of man through the modern era.  Unfortunately they didn’t really have anything on the Dutch colonial period and I was hoping to learn more about that piece of history.  Maybe next trip at another museum or with another guide…

Instead, here is a shot of an ancient boulder with ancient writing carved into it.  I found it to be quite beautiful.

After that, Mark and I went to Taman Mini Indonesia.  We expected some sort of museum that had miniature representations of scenes or provinces of Indonesia. That wasn’t at all what we found though – instead it was very large!  It was a complex of ~10-20 full museums and 50 houses, built as replicas of traditional houses around Indonesia.  In the middle was a lake with the Indonesian islands in the middle.

After driving around for a while, overwhelmed and confused, we decided to stop at the information centre and get some recommendations.  At the direction of the English speaking info staff (for which we were really grateful!), we went to Museum Indonesia.  More history, but also lots and lots of beautiful artifacts.  Check out this bad boy for example!!

The museum itself was also gorgeous.  Here’s a shot of the outside.

And here is one of the traditional houses.  I’m not sure which province it’s from… but it’s beautiful!

Last stop in Taman Mini was the Komodo Dragon Museum. The coolest part about it was impossible to take a picture of!  The whole building was built like a komodo dragon!!!  It was beyond cool and so giant.  I downloaded this image off wiki so  you could catch a glimpse.

We did see a komodo dragon, but we also saw this giant python!  Yikes!