Monas

Saturday, I decided to go to central Jakarta to see the Istana Merdeka (Presidential Palace). I picked it from a list of sights. I told the taxi driver where to take me and settled in for the 20 minute ride (which cost me less than $5). It had just rained, so the sky was slate blue and the clouds were still hanging heavily over the city. What I noticed most on the ride was just how green everything is. There are trees everywhere. Palm trees, of course. And some that look vaguely like deciduous trees I am used to, although I don't think these ever lose their leaves. There are these trees that I like that are shaped like Christmas trees but the leaves are dark green and waxy looking. I haven't worked out yet whether they grow like that or are trimmed but they seem to be all over the place.

When we got to the Presidential Palace, the taxi driver wanted to let me out across the street but there wasn't a pedestrian crossing and I wanted to go inside and I tried to use my dictionary to communicate that he should drive to the entrance. He wasn't budging and there was no way I was walking across. Luckily, he had pulled over right in front of the entrance to Monas (Monumen Nasional). So, I did that instead. After I got home, I realized that the Presidential Palace is only open to the public on Friday afternoons and that was what my taxi driver was trying to tell me. Oops.

Monas was a perfectly good alternative. It's is a large, phallic statue smack in the middle of a huge park which is smack in the middle of Jakarta. It was built in the 1960's, during Sukarno's presidency, and it commemorates Indonesian independence from the Dutch. The park was practically deserted. Sunday is the big day of rest and relaxation in Jakarta, so that is the day to avoid tourist destinations. I wandered through the park toward the monument, practicing my meandering and noticing basketball and soccer courts (yes, courts--on painted cement, just like basketball and tennis courts), fountains, and small historical statues. A few people were lounging around.

To get into the monument, I had to walk through an underground tunnel that was liberally air-conditioned, which was a welcome relief from the sun and after-rain steaminess of the outside. At the end of the tunnel was a place to buy tickets. Because I can't read even basic Indonesian yet (lessons start Friday), I handed the guy a 50,000 rupiah note. That equates to about $5 and nothing outside of the mall ever costs more than that so it is my default when I don't know what something is going to cost. He handed me my change and two tickets--one green and one yellow. I followed the people in front of me up the stairs, figuring they knew what they were doing.

The stairs come up on street level in a big open terrace surrounding the monument. There is a wall around the terrace that depicts three dimensional scenes of what I think are either from Indonesian history or mythology. At the entrance to the terrace, a woman tore my green ticket. Again, I followed the crowd and a roped off path straight into the basement where there is another large open room lined with dioramas of Indonesian history, concentrating mostly on rebellion, revolution, and Independence. After walking around the museum room for a while, I went back outside and up the stairs to the platform where there was another ticket booth for the elevator to the top. Again, I gave the guy some money and got a pink ticket this time. Then, I stood in line for a really long time. Lucky for me, the student groups arrived just after I did, or I would have been in line for a couple of hours. As it was, I think it was about a half hour.

At the top, there is an open-air observation tower from which I could see the whole of Jakarta. It stretches endlessly in all directions except north, where the water of the Java Sea stops the city from expanding further. It was windy and cool at the top, so I spent a lot of time peering out of all sides and taking lots of pictures (which I put on Facebook, for anybody who is interested in seeing them).

After a while, I took the elevator back down and meandered some more through the park before getting a taxi home. My taxi driver, who could speak a little bit of English, was from West Jakarta and I live in east Jakarta, so he didn't know where my neighborhood was. I was very proud of myself that I was able to direct him (using Indonesian words-yay!) to my gate. All in all, a nice afternoon. I am once again struck by the overall calmness of Jakarta. There are so many people and so much traffic that it seems almost inevitable that it would be more manic. But the heat keeps everybody a little bit lethargic so things sort of roll along without incident.