Saturday, February 24, 2024

As you can imagine, after the adventure of the volcano and the massages, it felt really great to know that my daughter had a slow day planned. I needed a rest. I also knew that the following day (Sunday) was going to be super fun because I knew we were going somewhere with a suspension bridge. I love suspension bridges!

There was no early morning pick up on this day, so we just puttered around. I believe I did some work, I read, and I believe I worked on the blog, too. We didn’t have anywhere to be until around ten.

My daughter has told me about volunteering for coffee chats at @america, the US Embassy’s American Center in Jakarta. Click on the link to see all the other programs they offer. The coffee chats are really just for groups of people to come and talk about various topics to practice their English with native speakers. Of course, I was interested in volunteering. I’m always interested in being able to talk to people in different countries.

To get to the location though, we needed to go to the Sudirman Central Business District (SCBD) first because @america is located in one of the malls there.

@america is located in the Pacific Place Mall, and I think it’s one of the fanciest malls I have ever been in. I’m going to admit that I do not shop a lot, and I’m hardly in malls. I actually know that I go shopping more when I’m on vacation than when I’m at home partly because shopping on vacation on vacation is an experience while shopping at home is a chore.

But still, I think even if I were more of a regular shopper, I still would have been overwhelmed by Pacific Place.

We walked around for a little bit partly because it takes a while to get to the location. We also saw some people that Kiana knew from work, so she introduced me to them. We stopped in a fancy tea shop (below top left) just to look before going to find @america.

The location is in a small, fairly quiet corner. I don’t have pictures from the inside because I needed to leave all my items in locker before going in. But I did take some of the outside, and the place where they list events.

We got split up into three groups, with Kiana leading one. She got a list of conversation starter questions, and the hour (90 minutes?) flew by. We talked about all sorts of things–languages, education, food, vacations, wishlists, travel.

I’m always embarassed being in such a group because whenever we talk about languages, it’s only the Americans (me) that only knows one or two languages. Everyone else in the group, including my daughter, knew at least three languages. All the Indonesians knew the language from where they grew up in Indonesia plus at least two others in addition to the English they were studying. I asked about different accents as well, and that drew a lot of laughter just as talk of accents in the US does.

After we finished there, we went to look for a place to eat lunch. I was really tired for some reason. I think that the hugeness of the mall was wearing me out. We thought about going somewhere else for lunch but decided against it. Instead, we went to a beautiful Vietnamese place. I can’t remember what it was called though.

Afterwards, we left the mall and took ojeks to go batik shopping.

I really can’t convey how much I love riding these things. I took a couple of videos while riding this time, but they are too large for me to send to laptop to share here. Hopefully, I will figure this out because people need to see how fun–and a bit scary–the ride can be. Ojeks find spaces in between things that I didn’t think possible!

One of the things Kiana had thought about doing was booking a tailor, so I could get batik tailored to fit me, but there just wasn’t time. Instead, she took me to a Batik Keris, a store and brand that she knew had more sizes. We had shopped for batik when we were in Yogyakarta, but hadn’t found anything that fit properly.

There were so many styles, designs, and colors from which to choose. I also had to keep myself from buying scarves or just pieces of cloth. Where would I put these? How much could I pack?

I finally just bought two shirts.

That evening we had plans to meet a couple of Kiana’s friends that she met through the coffee chats for dinner.

Multiple people had recommended that she take me to Remboelan, an upscale chain restaurant known for being “Indonesian Soul Food,” which is its tag line. The one we went to was at Central Park mall (the same place where the great cheese Katsu is).

Another lovely space, but I don’t have many pictures of the space because we felt like when we got in, we needed to focus on the menu. For my American readers, think Cheesecake Factory menu times three! Look at the size of that thing.

I really wanted to try Indonesian fried rice, which I had heard much about, so that’s what I finally decided on even though so many other things were tempting. I also ordered a drink that had longan in it because I wasn’t sure when I’d get that fruit again. I need to check at my local Asian market.

I also took some pictures of some of the other dishes as well. I am sold on Indonesian fried rice. It’s a bit spicy but also smoky, which was a surprise, but not a bad one.

That was it for the day. It was fun meeting people my daughter knows and with whom she works. It’s nice seeing your adult children in their adult spaces. It made me feel good knowing that she has people that she can count on and who bring her joy and respite.