Two local foreigners invading the city!

After two unbelievably busy and dreadful weeks of assignments and presentations, finally my friend and I had some stress relief. This is actually a plan we had decided to do weeks before, but the deadlines weren't permitting us for such daring momentary leave. So here we are, doing it exactly after the last day of our hellish week. It was fun, hilariously conducted, freely planned and simply unforgettable.

Here's the concept: 

My friend, Amanda, and I would stroll down the streets of Jakarta in disguise of foreign tourists. Our gears were simple: sunglasses, cameras, backpacks, shorts, and trainers. Oh, don't we love the sunglasses! We would fool the inhabitants of the city by acting lost around the streets and being able to speak nothing else except English. Now, my friend, has the most Indonesian look an Indonesian can have. So we made up the fact that she was a Thai, and me, looking Chinese than ever, decided to make up a fake identity of a Korean. Our fake names were B for me (as in Bernadette, my name) and Andy for Amanda.

Off we went!

We agreed to meet up at 8 o'clock in the area of Museum Fatahillah. I arrived before Andy, and I patiently browsed around the Museum's area while waiting for her. It felt nice to walk around with gentle breeze paddling my face because the weather was friendly and the area was secluded from the main street. Around half an hour later, Andy showed up. We started taking pictures and our first picture was of Andy stupidly sticking her face inside the mouth of an old cannon replica. 

We played around and took pictures for some brief 10 minutes before we explored the reserved streets of Kota Tua (Old City). The buildings were so old, they stood contrarily different from other modern buildings besides them. We visited an old bridge at which photographers usually take their pre-wedding clients to. We also found an old building, very badly ruined, standing next to a modern well-built Batavia Hotel. It was such an heart-breaking irony to see two buildings of different generations standing hand-in-hand, next to one another but in such different conditions. I really wonder whether extra efforts have been made by governments to reserve the area because not only Old City holds invaluable historic value, the buildings there were actually very beautiful. We go to Europe to see the old buildings and street lamps but in fact, we have our own neglected buildings here in Jakarta. Some were okay, but most of them were in such poor conditions we just had to take pictures of them. We walked around for an hour and half, and took LOTS of pictures which will be posted in an entire separate album somewhere near the future. 

Our next destination are the museums in Old City. We first went into Museum Wayang, in which we were not allowed to bring any cameras. I wonder now why we weren't allowed to do so. And apparently, when I got home, I found some pictures I took in the museum! I forgot, was it because I subconsciously didn't give up my camera? :P Well, inside the museum, we saw the history, and the story of one of Indonesian's most famous culture: the Wayang (shadow play). There are two types of Wayang: Wayang Kulit (leather puppet) and Wayang Golek (wooden puppet). It has now developed its third type: Wayang Orang (human puppet). Basically we saw lots of Javanese puppets and some foreign puppets from various countries like France, Russia, China, Poland, India, and England. It was an educational visitation if only we weren't so freaked out inside. The museum was damp and smelled funnily. We were in the first half of the building and felt there was something weird about the dampness and the darkness of its lighting. Then we stepped out to a backyard in which some of VOC's generals were buried. We saw tombstones, but we were very much happier there due to the open area and freshness of the air.

And then we moved on to the second half of the building which was far more creepy than the previous part. This was the part where almost all wooden puppets and human puppets were kept. Now, there is something about human dolls that I don't like. If you make a human doll and you fail in making it resemble the real human's face, basically the doll will look weirdly painted and somehow creepy. But if you succeed in making a human doll that represents a human face perfectly, it'll result in a very creepy and lively doll face. Which to me, is more creepy than weirdly painted doll faces. In this area of building, all the puppets were masterly painted and their eyes looked very much alive. There were these two crowds of puppets organized neatly as if they were posing for a group picture. I couldn't look at the puppets straightly in the eyes. They were staring, some were grinning widely and some had angry faces on them. Whichever it was, the eyes were very much alive I felt like the room wasn't empty. The whole trip, there was only two visitors, me and Andy. And yet we felt like we were being stared at the whole time and the room was full of unseen creatures. We finished the tour as quickly as we could and got out happily.

Then we went to Museum Bank Mandiri. It was a museum for the old bank and inside we saw lots of (very) conventional machineries. We saw the BIG old typewriter and we saw machines they once used to print the book. We also got to see their general ledger in one BIG book like the Book of Shadows used in Charmed TV series. The building was more like a beautiful old abbey (or at least, a Catholic church) with a small yard in the middle of the building. You can't hear the streets' noise when you're inside so it felt peaceful and quiet. We decided that our main interests in this tour wasn't the machineries so we headed for the way out. In our way out, we saw some guys sitting at some desks doing some things we didn't know about. But what was weird was the fact that these guys weren't moving and they were sitting so stiffly in their seats. Intrigued, we came over and voila! They weren't human after all. :) They were statues, or whatever you call them. Perhaps they're sculpted out of wax, I don't know. We found two figures in a room, one was doing a chore and one was sitting alone at an empty table and we thought they looked like our lecturer and our friend's father. 

On our next destination, we would be visiting National Museum and seriously, there was where the fun began! 

[Coming up: National Museum tour and how we were successfully mistaken as foreigners by local schoolboys and some French guys]