After two days relaxing in Ubud, it’s back to work in Bandung. Getting here involves an hour-plus drive to the airport in Denpasar, a two hour flight to Jakarta, and then another two hour drive to Bandung. But getting here was worth it, when I found out that my place for the next two days, the Novotel Bandung, provided free internet. That’s right, free internet. All I had to do was ask the front desk for a cable (which they freely gave me) and I was off and surfing!

This was all the more pleasant a surprise since the Novotel’s sister property in Bali, the Kuta Mercure, wanted to charge me five times the going rate in internet shops to use the internet connection in the room. Really, I’d gotten used to hotels charging $5 for a can of coke and I can almost work out why they need to charge $2 for a free local call, but why do they have to charge so much for internet access? In most places, they’re paying a relatively small fixed monthly fee, which probably works out to just a few cents per room per day. There’s little or no maintenance or support required, if you do it right, so why don’t more hotels give it away? With their attitude of over-charging for everything, I sometimes wonder why hotels don’t charge you for electricity, but perhaps I shouldn’t give them any ideas!

Anyway, today I did what most people come to Bandung to do: shopping! My Indonesian host had a shopping list from his wife, and I realized I needed a jacket for my upcoming trip to the USA, so I went along. We ended up at Summit, which I’ve been to before. It’s on ‘Riau’ street, at an intersection that also has three other outlets (all of them, include Summit, reportedly owned by the same person.) Regardless of who owns them, most of the outlets carry more or less the same thing, but not in every color and size combination. So, finding something is usually a matter of going from one place to another until you find something you like in your size, in a color you like. That’s why clusters like the one around Summit are so popular. I went through four stores before I found the jacket I liked in my size. Going through all that trouble is worth it, when you end up paying only about US$30 for a leather jacket!

Another well know outlet shop is Rumah Mode, which has the added advantage of several food outlets so you can minimize the amount of non-shopping time!

Posted by michael under Just back from...

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