Letters: Jakarta Museum and surrounding

Sat, 04/25/2009 1:33 PM  |  Reader's Forum

This is a comment on an article titled "Fatahillah Square, heart of derelict town," (The Jakarta Post, April 18).

I'm an expatriate from Swedia, who moved to Jakarta a few years ago and I'm trying to learn and experience as much as possible about my new country.

I read this article about the "Old Town area" Saturday morning and got excited, it sounded so nice. People joining on a square - where else can you do that in Jakarta?

I took my wife, new born son and one of my daughters with me and we took off to Fatahillah Square. We walked around for a while on the square and it was great, it was great to see people enjoying a day off together.

People having picnics and watching some street entertainers, it was a great family atmosphere. We entered the Jakarta Historical Museum and were guided around by a very nice guide; he explained a lot of the history and showed many nice historical items for us.

But it made me sad to see that lots of people, mainly high school students don't have any respect for these things.

There were students using the furniture, students sitting in the windows with their feet on these beautiful historical items. It's great to see that students are coming to these places, but please respect your history.

The Jakarta administration should invest more money to restore this museum, surrounding buildings and maybe add some security to protect what's left for the future. This area has big potential for being a nice place for people to come together and interact; it's also a place for tourists.

We all know that tourists bring in money to Jakarta and Indonesia. It's like some readers earlier have commented, open up Monas much more and make it more available for the people to come together.

Per A.
Jakarta

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