Domestic Goddess Travels: Shopping In Jakarta

Living in Jakarta usually its quite easy finding the food you like to eat and some of the items you wish to buy. Depending on what you are looking for will depend where you go to buy it. I once read in one of the local English papers that the government did a survey on how many shopping centres there are here in Jakarta but no one could agree on the exact numbers. Everywhere you go there seems to be some sort of shopping mall, selling the same items. Each of the shopping mails can be put into a class such as lower class, middle class and high end class.

Depending on how much people earn will depend what type class shopping centre they buy there items from. The middle class and high end class shopping malls usually have air conditioning so many Indonesians will spend hours in the malls to try and keep cool on a hot day. Most of the shopping centres are open from 10am to 10pm every day including public holidays. Going to a new shopping centre can be an adventure as you never know if you are going to get lost or not so if you only wanted to do shopping in Jakarta there there would be lots to do.

As for our latest shopping adventure we needed to try and find some new school shoes for Paige so Ben, Paige and myself spent a Saturday afternoon exploring a couple of different shopping malls to see if we could find what we where looking for.

We asked our driver the best place he believed to get shoes from and he suggested Block M.

We found Block M to be the lower end of the shopping malls list, lots of small shops with a range of different items at a lower cost but we didn't have much luck with Paige's shoe size.

We then headed to Pasar Raya Mall which was in the same location and more high end up, kind of like Myers in Australia. We didn't have any luck finding anything suitable but did have fun exploring the level of handy crafts. We had never seen such a big place that was filled with every handy craft that you could find in Indonesia.

We then headed to another shopping centre closer to home and on the way we stopped to look at plants on JI. Darmawangsa. In Australia you would maybe go to Burnings or a plant nursery but here in Indonesia there are many streets just dedicated to the selling of plants.

We then headed to a shopping mall called Pondok Indah. This shopping centre has two different shopping Malls connected by a walk way. Pondok Indah One is a middle class mall and Pondok Indah Two is more high end mall with both having large department stores in them. We went to both department stores and only was able to find some black runners that where not our first choice for school shoes but will have to do in the mean while until we can find something else.