Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Palmerah Market: an introduction

I've been taking a lot of pictures at the Palmerah marketplace lately. I'll be posting them gradually, and I figured I'd have some geeky fun first and draw a map to give you a sense of how the whole place is laid out. You can click on the map for a bigger version.

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This seems to be a pretty typical Indonesian market design: a sort of hulking concrete building with a maze of little stores inside, and a plaza full of stalls outside.

Inside the building are durable goods like housewares, jewelry and clothes. Produce stays outside. On the second floor of this particular market is a Ramayana department store, your one-stop source for blaring music, junk food and cheap t-shirts.

Here's the front, taken from where the red X is above. You can see some humble fruit stands in the far-right corner.


And here's a picture of the road, taken from the humble fruit stands. This road seriously has more public minivans (mikrolet) than any other place I know in Jakarta. Every minivan route for miles around must come through here. They always create a huge smoggy traffic jam. You can see some fuzzy red rambutans in the corner. More on those later.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do you manage to go around a pasar and taking pictures without people staring at you ? Not to mention that you are a 'bule' which I don't remember seeing a lot of you guys in a pasar :), unless Jakarta is now such a hotspot of expatriates that you can see bules all over the city.
Anyway, love your blog, oke banget lho.

Anonymous said...

ahhh... pasar palmerah. used to drive by it everyday since i used to work around that area. thanks for the picture.

Trish said...

People stare all the time, whether I take pictures or not! And I love outdoor markets. Unfortunately, Jakarta is definitely not a hotspot for expats at the moment; taxi drivers always ask us to "tell Americans that Jakarta is safe."

Glad you like the blog!

Diny, you must be happy not to drive in that crazy traffic anymore ....

mr_john said...

You think you get stared at???