Friday

Bumi bummer! Check out this description:
The Bumi Johar Hotel - a deluxe boutique hotel - offers a rare and unexpected haven located in the heart of downtown Jakarta… ... Bumi Johar Hotel is a true luxury hotel located in the Central of Jakarta. Let us welcome you with a glass of Ice Toraja Coffee, Johar Juice upon arrival.

We booked the Bumi Johar hotel because it was cheap as chips and the one we really wanted wasn’t available. Once I checked in I realised why it was cheap as chips and they weren’t Hester Blumenthal baked in straw, deep double-fried and injected with tomato sauce, French Fries! They were more like end-of-shift Maccy-D’s left out on the table for an hour. And, no one offered me Iced Toraja Coffee or Johar Juice upon arrival.

Martini was working until late so when she arrived room service had suspended itself, possibly with a bed sheet and from the rafters. We turned left out of the hotel and wandered around the quaint, narrow, busy, dangerous, interesting streets looking for a suitable restaurant. The five-way intersection brought back memories of Athens so it had a place in my heart straight away. Potholes abounded and one whole meter-square flagstone was missing from the sidewalk with no guardrail or warning sign whatsoever. The vertical drop was around two meters into what looked like a septic tank! The drop from a hangman’s noose is less than that. Hey, your safety is not our responsibility, you should keep your eyes open and watch where you’re going; Athens all over again.

Street-side “restaurants” in Jakarta consist of a couple of plastic tables and chairs with a plastic sheet suspended over them in case of rain. The “kitchen” is a single pan-sized hotplate powered by a gas bottle, both of which block the sidewalk from any perambulating pedestrians who have to step into the road and risk life and limb (always thought that should be prioritised as limb and life, but whatever), with motorcycles on the wrong side of the street and cars weaving around other cars. Martini either wasn’t hungry or she knew a thing or two about Jakarta street-side restaurants, so I ordered what I thought was deep-fried fish and rice. Deep-fried, whole fish is my staple choice in any restaurant when I’m in Thailand or any Thai restaurant world-wide. I love it, especially the crispy skin. This was Indonesia, so not quite the same geographical or culinary territory. What arrived was a kind of fishy stew with soggy, slimy skin but the taste and texture of the flesh was actually quite good. The rice was rice. They know how to do rice in Asia unless it’s sticky rice, which you have to pick up with your fingers and roll into a ball before you eat it. This was rice-rice, so everything rice-related was fine. Original size and shape Coke bottles appeared to be exactly that; original – with copious layers of rust under the tin cap. I sent two of them back but the third and fourth appeared from a different direction, delivered by a different waiter and they displayed the same vintage of rust so, what the heck, everyone needs iron in their diet.

Night and day. No idea why the shy guy was sitting in the hole in the middle of the day.