I thought I'd have a well-earned rest from trying to get on the ruddy boatway for a while and instead paid my first-ever visit to Jakarta Fair last week.
However, this first entailed a busway ride from Blok M all the way up to the other terminus at Kota Station. The ride itself was fine but the rush-hour wait at the Blok M busway terminus was a touch unsettling.
The crush of humanity and high temperatures made me feel dizzy and the only way out was via the busway: Once you've committed yourself to the crush, there's no escape.
I felt as though I was in a scene from Schindler's List; to be fair, though, peak hours in London and Tokyo can be just as sardine-like. In Tokyo, they even crowbar you into subway trains with big sticks.
Back to Jakarta Fair; as I said, this annual festival has always managed to pass me by in previous years.
The fair used to be held at Monas (the National Monument), apparently, but its current location at the expansive Kemayoran fairground area is a little out of the way for me, as I'm sure it is for many other Jakartans, too.
That said, over two million people, it has been predicted, will visit Jakarta Fair this year. With that in mind I elected to visit the fair on a Monday evening when I thought it would be quieter.
Ha! Fat chance of that, as it turned out. It seemed to me as if the two million had all decided to show up at the same time and the whole place was a riot of people, color and noise.
God alone knows what it must be like on weekends. The fair itself covers a huge area, both indoors and outdoors, and it took me a couple of hours of traipsing around, promotions girls foisting snack foods on me all the while, to see everything.
*****
Jakarta Fair is basically a cross between a huge shopping mall and a funfair, with the accent on the shopping mall side. Everything you can possibly think of is on sale inside the cavernous halls of Kemayoran: motorbikes, furniture, watches, TVs, chocolate, electronic gadgets, bicycles, computers, clothes -- the lot, and most are at discounted prices.
Yes, take a break from the usual shopping malls and enjoy this annual opportunity to go and see ... a really huge shopping mall.
But it's not all about conspicuous displays of material consumption. Well actually it is, mainly, but there is some entertainment to enjoy, too. As well as a few funfair rides there is a tourist train that circumnavigates the site, which the kids were attracted to.
There's also a main stage hosting nonstop entertainment including plenty of slinky hipped dangdut singers; the dads seemed to love that one.
At the rear of the fair there's a motorbike safety course, which I think every Jakarta biker should be forced at gunpoint to sign up for, although it would probably take several centuries and several thousand hospitalizations to achieve that aim.
On a similar but slightly more dangerous biker note, I was amazed and amused to see that one of the fair's attractions was a good old-fashioned "wall of death".
I watched a few daredevils whizzing round and round before starting to feel dizzy and heading off for a feed.
As with any fair, there's plenty to eat here, from salmonella hot dogs and grotty, teeth-rotting sweets to the slightly more palatable fare available in the food court.
Boy, was it ever busy in Kemayoran, though; on weekends it must be even more so as family groups spend quality time together masticating on peanuts, drinking virulent blue soft drinks and entrenching their psyches even more deeply into the soft belly of the material consumer lifestyle as they ogle the products on sale together.
Don't come here if you're looking for a bit of rest and relaxation. I came away with a throbbing headache, although I quite enjoyed confronting the racket, hustle and cheap glitz of the Jakarta Fair experience.
It was somewhat like a concentrated version of the city itself.
A ticket for the fair will cost you a mere Rp 15,000. It's open from 3 p.m. to around 10 p.m. weekdays and all day on weekends. You've still got a couple of weeks left to check it out.
A few aspirins and earplugs may come in handy, though.
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