National Museum // National Monument (Monas)

Being someone who was born and raised in Jakarta with very little knowledge about my own city, let alone my country, is kind of a shameful thing to be proud of. I know I should have not embraced this un-patriotic feature of mine in the first sentence of this post. But again, it is a good start since I am confessing something and it eases me in the whole writing process.

I always see this statue when i pass the museum

It has been in my bucket list to visit the National Museum since the first time my wandering eyes landed upon it during my ride home from school. At first I was not that interested because to be honest I am not interested in the history of South East Asia since everything is very closely related to religion like Hinduism and Buddhism. I am not saying that I despise the religions but it is just because I know very little about them and that is why when I look at the statue exhibits I probably won't understand any of them. And you know what, I was right! I don't understand anything. I tried reading the description captions beneath every exhibits, but I lost interest half way, and I just enjoyed the whole eye-gazing trip. I was familiar with some of the Hindu Deities like: Ganesha, Shiva because they are the famous ones. The rest is just a blur to me. On top of that, some of the exhibit do not have any descriptions, they might have fallen or got pealed off.

The museum was beyond my estimation. It was bigger than I was expected. In fact I was a bit worried if we would not be able to have enough time to visit this museum plus the National Monument. There are two buildings filled with wondrous exhibits in this National Museum. Not to mention, there was even a floor filled with the original real-deal things! It is on the upper-most floor which was on the 4th floor and it's guarded with a couple of guards and also cameras everywhere. We were not even allowed to take a photo of the things inside that particular room since they are all the original specimens (?) idk what to call these things inside the museum. We saw a couple of gold crowns, gold necklaces both for human and also elephants. The elephant necklace is huge! duh. -_- We also saw gold coins which are in a form of corn kernels. They look like corn kernels while Vivi depicted them as golden teeth.

It was a bit tiring wandering around the museum since it was super duper spacious. We started to head to Monas at around 3:30ish because we were waiting for the rain to stop. We should have visited Monas before this museum first. Since Monas is an outdoor-sy type of recreation and you are taking a photo with a monument that is located outside the building, so expect it to be massive. There is a museum inside that monument too but to our unfortunate calling, we missed the opening session. It was completely my fault though because I searched the net that it should be opened till 5 o'clock especially on weekends. But, it is only opened till 3! So make note of this everyone who is visiting to Monas, come to Monas before 3! Then afterwards you could just visit Museum Gajah which closes at a later time than that. They are just across each other, so if it is sunny you have a greater chance to commute faster than travelling on a slippery rainy day like we did.

but i never knew it was a whirpool with people in it. 

hitting the trip today with Ci Lisda

I am sure I'll reach there

National museum is also known as Museum Gajah 

room for Dewi Sri (The Goddess of Rice)

reminds me of Pinocchio 

nyai roro kidul

table decorations shapes as fruits

from the Nias tribe

caveman

single-letter signals! i know this from Studio Ghibli's movie: From Up on Poppy Hill

so cute

grandfather clock

sandals

piggy bank

it drizzled a bit

rain drops

having a picnic just below the entrance stairs while waiting for the heavy rain to stop since we had to walk from
this museum to Monas. And it was quite a long way to reach the entrance 

delman ! 

finally! achievement unlocked! 

it drizzled a bit when we reached monas

i wish i could ride a bike

kites! 

Anyway, it was a lot of fun getting to know just a spec of Indonesia. We were that motivated and despite the rain we still went for it! How awesome are we! I am recommending myself to visit the two museums again since first of all I haven't entered the Monas museum at all and secondly with all the photo session ruckus going on within me that visit to the Museum Gajah, I did not spare moments to read every description of each exhibit. I guess that was a lost for me. Oh and have I mentioned about the price ticket of Museum Gajah, it's Rp. 5,000.00 each local visitor. Tourist costs about Rp.10,000.00  IF i'm not mistaken.

After the walk of shame and disappointment of not being able to visit the museum on the ground floor of Monas, the rain has stopped which was a good sign, we were in a dilemma whether to continue our walk or just head back home. We were all a bit hungry and so we decided to go for Burger King which was just 2 bus stops away from Monas. We decided to walk instead since it was only 2 bus stops away and not to mention the pedestrian walk around Monas is pretty decent for walkers compared to other pedestrian walks available in Jakarta. However, we were a bit scared in crossing the road, the buttons provided do not work at all when you press them. Pretty much useless. But together, the four of us are UNSTOPPABLE! hahahaha

We stopped by a movie theater for a while but there weren't any good movies airing on that day. Movies these days suck so bad. Nothing interests me. I am still waiting for Into The Woods to come out.

stick ice cream which tastes like momogi

After enjoying our stick ice cream we started to have our early dinner at burger king which was unbelievably satisfying. All the calories burned from those walks are gone with us devouring the calories from the burger and the soda and not to mention the stick ice cream. 

All in all, it was a fun day out, and I slept soundly as a baby.