It's been a week of work, work, work so I will sum up the weekend in one fell (and hopefully succinct - oh who am I kidding) swoop. Saturday morning, I headed to Pasaraya which is one of the many - and I mean many - shopping malls in the city. Truly this is a city all about shopping malls. I saw one on Sunday (not even the biggest) that reminded me of Mall of America. There are limited green spaces in Jakarta so everyone goes to the mall.
I was on the hunt for one-stop-shopping souvenirs and managed to a find a few among the two floors of handicrafts from around the country. It is a bit overwhelming to say the list that after two hours, I couldn't handle the though of doing any regular shopping for myself. In the afternoon I went over to the neighbor's house - she is also my coworker's next door neighbor and we got to talking Thursday night at a group dinner, where we discovered that she had flown to Bali on the same flight as me. I had seen her at the airport and hadn't recognized her and she hadn't seen me. I think the Jakarta expat world is actually very, very small.
So Saturday we hung out and talked until it was time to go to a pro-Peace Core party being thrown in the "Inner Sanctum" also affectionately known as Wisteria Lane (after Desperate Housewives. In the complex where I have been staying there is the apartment building (where I am), then you go through a gate to the housing complex, and THEN you can go through the big green door into the inner sanctum where anybody who has anything to do with the US embassy lives. (I may have described this before). We went at night and it was rather eerie. It was like a movie set. Very pristine, tree-lined street with no signs or sounds of life except for frogs and crickets. I was told by another party-goer non-inner sanctum liver, that the floor plans of each house are nearly identical which gives it just that extra bit of hmmm.
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