Misadventures in Jakarta: Like Rats in a Maze

Reading is one of my passions so I'm always encouraging my children to read wherever we go. They ran out of reading materials so today we wanted to pop into another bookstore to find some books. But finding books in English is always hard in Indonesia!

We were told that a bookshop called Gramedia stocked imported books in English so we drove to the shopping centre that has this bookstore. It wasn't very far away from where we were staying and soon we got there without incident. Spoken too soon, of course.

The problem wasn't in getting there but it was in getting inside. One thing you have to understand about Indonesia is that the shopping malls are HUGE. I don't know about where you live but in Sydney they aren't that big. Here, there are floors and floors of shops and the parking is usually in the many levels underground or on the many levels above ground and alongside the building. To drive down, you go down the ramps but to go up, you have to spiral up and up the many levels. It's also quite dizzy just to look out of the carpark from above ground.

First, we went down one level and drove around looking for an empty space but couldn't find any so we then went down to level two then three level. No luck at all so we spiraled up the levels and finally found a space. At this stage we had no idea where we were.

When we went inside the automatic doors, we spent another 15 minutes looking for a way in, little did we know that we had to walk through one of the shops to get to the inside. My husband asked but was told to go up so we went up but couldn't find a way through there so we went back down. Then we followed some people through a shop and finally found ourselves on the inside. Now we can look for Gramedia.

We asked people but people's direction giving are pretty lousy. We then looked for a directory and ended up going around yet again. When we found it, it wasn't much help. It was one of those fancy touch screen ones. If only it could give us directions like Google maps.

Having figured it out at last, we finally made our way to the bookshop. We ended up buying some Lucky Luke books because they were my husband's favourite (along with Tintin and Asterix) when he was growing up. Living in Sydney, though, I've never heard of it. 

After reading them, my children loves them too - I guess we'll be making our way back to Gramedia soon to buy the other titles. And this time, maybe we've memorised our path in the maze and can find our way much better.