Sarinah and the Red Devils
I wanted to test out my Flip Mino HD, so here's a short video of Sarinah Mall, which is along Jalan Thamrin in Mentang, Central Jakarta.
Sarinah is Indonesia's first shopping centre and also the first place to have escalators (and the first McDonald's restaurant). It was commissioned and opened by then-president Sukarno in 1966, who named the mall after his nanny Sarinah.
The mall is going to get a facelift (here's an article about it in The Jakarta Post) to keep it in touching distance with the other glitzy malls springing up everywhere in the capital city. I guess the owners need to make money, but it'll be a waste to lose a sense of what Indonesia was almost half a century ago.
Sarinah is also home to English football team Manchester United's Red Devils Cafe (hence my headline). Indonesians are football-mad -- there's even a Goal TV cable channel with feeds from ManU TV, BarcaTV etc. I'm hoping to pop by one of the days to watch a game at the cafe and check out the crowd.