Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel, and we went out to spend 5 hours looking around before heading for the airport for our flight to Taipei.
We first went to the nearby mosque with hopes to have a quick look inside, but we likely arrived at the wrong time. Someone who didn't speak much English told me we couldn't really enter and look without him to escort us, and only 40mn later. Since it wasn't clear and we didn't have time to wait in our short morning, we just left to meet arturo at Monas were we had planned to meet around 08:00.

Across, there was a church across the street. It wasn't the best one ever, but probably nice for there:

Walking around town was not worth it, and crossing each street could take minutes before I could find a break in traffic to run across (no lights or crosswalks in many places). I've never been to india, but from what I've heard so far, it seems similar. For next time: use cabs to go everywhere, even for a 5mn walk.

We eventually made it to Monas, the national monument to meet Arturo. They were supposed to have an elevator to go to the top, but it was broken. We took the stairs, and those were also closed 1/5th of the way up, so we ended up just a bit higher for a quick view which wasn't fantastic anyway, so no big loss.

They had a diorama downstairs, with interesting history (as written by the winners :D )

view from the level slightly higher up.

Next, we went ot the Museum Nasional which had decent collections to look at:

nice piggy bank

We got to see places in Indonesia we didn't go to:

When traffic isn't moving at all (which is often apparently), street vendors walk up to the cars:

And that was it, we had to go to the airport. There were a few more things to see in Jakarta, but they were farther away, so we wouldn't have made it there in the limited time we had.