It's been a while since we've been on a plane but we made it Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, in one piece. We got the public bus to the centre and a rickshaw to the hotel and it felt like being in India again, with how busy and smelly everything was. We didn't do much on the first day we got there, changed some money and went on a big search for an internet cafe to update our blog for our crazed followers. World cup fever has really kicked in, with one guy sat on the corner laughing at us when we told him we were from England because we drew to the US. We watched the Portugal-Ivory Coast game at a restaurant but we were joined by loads of people on the streets too watching it from the curb.
We had a bit of a deserved lie in the next day, checked out, and made our way to the train station with Lieve, our new dutch comprande to book our tickets (people are just wanting to travel with us all the time-must be my good sense of humour!). We got stopped by Hermen, who was telling us to go to another station as the tickets are a lot cheaper. It also said this in the book but we were a bit weary of him at the start because he approached us and usually they ask for money. He got on the bus with us, took us to the main office, where we spoke to the master officer fo the station and he sorted our tickets out for us. There was a huge que, which we would have happily waited in but this station manager waited in the que for us and called us up when we had to pay-What a nice guy!
It was lunch time now, so Herman took us to his house, in a small poor village right next to a stinking, rubbish-filled river. We met his mother, who was either blind or had really bad eye sight. The house had one room and an outside toilet-these guys were really poor but yet she had the biggest smile on her face. He got us chicken and rice, because allegedly the chicken in the town is no good and village chicken is better, so we all munched that down. We got a pic with Herman and his mother and another pic with the boys hanging around smoking as they've got nothing better to do. As we walked back through the village to get back on the bus, we walked past some school kids playing football with a tennis ball (ghetto), but then they stopped their game to shout 'boolay' to us and we were cheering with them until we found out they were calling us 'foreigners'. We laughed it off and walked off before we were about to hmmer these school kids-only kidding.
We wanted to see a bit of the city while we were here, so he took us to Indonesia's National monument (monas) and we got mobbed by kids, grown men and women for photo's. Lieve got it the worst, a white girl, and every lady wanted a pic with here-bless them. We visited Masjid Istiqbal, the biggest mosque in South East asia, which holds 200,00 people. It wasn't that impressive from the outside like usual mosques but inside it was really huge. We had to cover up properly so we all had to wear a gown to look cool. Across from the mosque was a nice looking church, which we also visited before we made our way back to our hotel and then to the train station.
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