Glodok is the Chinatown area in west Jakarta, one of my favourite places to go to for Chinese food. In the Petak Sembilan area you can find rows of small restaurants and little shops, and on the street are food-vendors in carts or bicycles. Don’t expect fancy looking restaurants with a hip atmosphere here because most of the restaurants are shabby looking. Some are not even restaurants because they consist of only long tables and long wooden benches where you sit together with others to enjoy a bowl of noodle or hainam rice, and you can even see them cook, all the pots and pans and stoves are there right in front of you. It’s crowded, it’s noisy, it makes you sweat, and while you eat some street musician will probably approach you and serenade you with an off-tune song. Most likely you will meet a Chinese street musician who only knows a song (because each time i went there, there he was, singing the same song again). And oh… don’t forget the street vendors. All kinds of them. These ”salesmen” walk from one person to another, offering what they have to sell, from toys to cookies, often refusing to give up even after you say no. One such guy approached me at one time while i was enjoying my bowl of noodle and he nonchalantly threw a bunch of table-napkins on the table, offering them at a bargain, he said. I said no and he reduced the price. I still said no, and he reduced it even lower. Not getting the response he expected, he kept on reducing the price until i firmly said no no no. Off he went then, to the next person. Annoyed as i was, i considered him and others like him to be an integral part of this area, and together with the noise and the crowd, they give this area an odd charm that makes me want to return there again and again. And of course the food is excellent. Especially the pork dishes. You should have pork in mind when going to Glodok. Try the “sekba”. What is “sekba”, you ask. Well… it’s all part of a pig, you name them: chitterlings, ears, blood, skin, lungs, and almost everything else but the “oink”. Does it sound like some stuff from Fear Factor? Not at all. If you can eat haggis, then you can eat “sekba”. And of course there are also tofus and potatoes and sayur asin (chinese pickled veggy)  that you can opt for. Eat your portion with rice, or without (if you want to have some room left for other stuff). The “sekba” vendor usually parks his gerobak (cart) outside a restaurant and you can sit in the restaurant. He will bring your plates and bowls inside. But do order some drinks in the restaurant.

After finishing your food, probably you’d like to take a walk along the alley and the rest of the neighborhood. I find these alleys interesting, with the many Chinese-type houses, small household businesses and people who sit around in groups, chatting away the day while tending to their business or just doing nothing. Men and women fanning themselves outside their homes in a hot afternoon, children playing, a street vendor or two squatting on the corner (as seen in the picture, the vendor’s basket contains salted eggs and peanuts, and in the other basket he has chips, boiled bananas and sweet yams), an occassional small table in front of a house, selling bacang (a triangular shape rice dish with pork/chicken filling, wrapped in bacang leaf), mochi, moon cakes, and various stuff. Some of the people here only speak Chinese, as proved when i stopped by to look at some hairpins and knick-knacks. The woman behind the table looked a bit panicky when i asked her the price of a necklace i was interested in. She hurried to get a neighbor to talk to me Well… i suppose it does happen that you live in a country for years and never learn to speak the local language.