I’ve come up with a list of about 20 malls to visit in Jakarta and so far I’ve visited about 5, all the malls in Kelapa Gading area. The environment in Jakarta isn’t as friendly as I had hoped; in general, the people are a little snobbish and calculative, very similar to a congested country like Singapore.

Moreover the people here are rather superstitious too, malls and levels don’t have the number “4” (which sounds synonymous to “die” in Chinese); at kelapa gading the malls are numbered 1, 2, 3 and 5. My condominium tower at Wisma Gading Permai skips the level “4” as well, and most malls either have level “3a/b” or level “5a/b”.

So today I scouted two malls, the first one was MOI, and the second was KTC kelapa Gading. Well I finally got to walk through the whole of MOI (Mall of Indonesia) and discovered that it isn’t that big after all, except for the indoor mini theme park that was a pleasant sight for my eyes when I first discovered it last week, the place doesn’t have much to offer. Restaurants are expensive and the whole mall’s outfit caters to the upmarket segment of society, prices are a little too steep for me to swallow on a regular basis.

KTC Kelapa Gading ITC seemed a little run down in the interior, with barely a tenth of the mall’s tenants open (it’s like a dying mall), but it turns out that the department store Matahari in KTC sold relatively cheap and affordable items and the hypermart at the basement is teeming with affordable groceries, I will definitely be visiting that place again. Basically it’s only these two major tenants keeping the place up and open, the other shops are just negligible.