Breakfast in Jakarta

Today we got up and crossed the street back to Plaza Indonesia, and ate breakfast at a French bistro while we waited for the rest of the mall to open so we could get breakfast.

While at first it might seem quixotic, or plain greedy, to have two breakfasts, you have to remember that it wasn't a real French bistro, and so the croissants there didn't count. They tasted correct, I'll give you that, but a croissant should be fluffy and light, not hard enough to tap out a drumbeat with. Still, it was an acceptable simulacrum of a bistro in some imaginary version of Paris, a sort that had no customers apart from us, and almost invisible staff. I drank an espresso and then we wandered into the mall, to eat crepes in a place designed to look like a rustic Alpine shed. This might have been more convincing if it hadn't been inside a temperature-controlled shopping mall.

While my crepe tasted fine, it was obviously wrong for me not to engage with local cuisine and customs. That's right, while in Indonesia I should have been smoking cigarettes like a clove-scented chimney, and going to Starbucks.

Oh well, another time, perhaps.

Breakfast infected us with such lassitude that we went back to the hotel and did nothing for about three hours, before remembering this was our last full day in Jakarta, and so we had to be doing something, aside from updating Facebook as to our whereabouts.

After another hour, we took a taxi down to Kota (the old town of Jakarta), which took an hour, and meant we had no opportunity to have an all-day breakfast at the hotel. What a fool I am.