Shopping: Indonesian Style

So today we were able to leave the kids with the house help and head out to the city here just off of the camp. (Pekanbaru) Our Principal took Kathi and I as well as the other new teaching couple to several points of interest regarding shopping. Kathi was thrilled because the first stop on the list was a mall. So was the second stop. This was not starting out well for me. I thought I left the States to get out of shopping trips to the mall but apparently that is not the case.

The first mall was very nice and seemed very Westernized, think the Cascade Mall in Burlington. There was even an Oshkosh store in there that Kathi thought was very nice. Also of note was the DVD/CD store that had DVD's priced according to how high the quality was. The fewer people walking in front of the screen while it was being filmed in the back row of the theatre the more expensive. Between $2-$6.

The second mall was a little less Western but had an ACE Hardware. It was very well stocked and so we bought a bunch of cleaning supplies and kitchen essentials. Our third stop was a late lunch at an A&W. Kathi had the Paket 4 and I had the Paket D. Both burgers but mine had curly fries with it. I was surprised at how good the burger and root beer float was.

The final stop was Hypermart. That's right the Indonesian version of Wal-Mart. We spent about an hour there getting groceries. They had to grind all of the hamburger we were buying which for the amount we were getting took about an hour. About 10 lbs. of hamburger was apparently quite the order. All of this time was good as there were very few items that had English spellings on them. Trying to ask for things in English didn't get us very far. But everyone tried to be helpful and everyone always had a ready smile for us.

The best part was when I was trying to find the saran wrap and aluminum foil. Trying to mimic using saran wrap got lots of laughs and bewildered looks from the many who I asked. Finally there was a gentleman who spoke some English and he took me to it. It was in the glassware section. "Of course, that make perfect sense," I told him as I thanked him for his help. All told our bill was 1,600,000 rupiah. It is like playing with Monopoly money. The exchange rate is about $100 US=1,000,000 rupiah.

The best part of the trip came when I bought a DVD player at Hypermart. When you buy one they pull it out of the box and hook it up to make sure it works for you. They popped in a Michael Jackson DVD and so I did some dance moves for the employees which got big smiles and clapping. They wanted to see the Moon Walk but I had to tell them I had on the wrong shoes. Maybe next time.