TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsPaws for reflection: Jakartans tag strays as city mini-destinations
In a metropolis shaped by speed, pressure and long commutes, brief encounters with street cats have become small rituals of joy, lifted by online trends, shared care and a growing appetite for bite-sized escapes in the city.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Tasty treat: Food left by a passerby sits in front of a ginger cat, which has gone viral online, at the FX Sudirman shopping mall in Central Jakarta on Nov. 24, 2025. (JP/Iqro Rinaldi)
A brief encounter with a soft, fluffy animal now offers Jakartans a welcome pause amid the rush of daily life in the capital.
As the nation’s center of government and business, Jakarta rarely slows down, yet a handful of cats lounging around a Central Jakarta mall have unexpectedly created one of the city’s most charming micro-destinations.
In front of the FX Sudirman shopping mall, a gray-and-white tabby shifts positions, yawns and slow-blinks, its paws tucked neatly beneath its body. Other cats living around the mall hide in the bushes or nibble from bowls placed near the pedestrian entrance stairs. But the star of the area is a ginger cat, playful, plump and unbothered, who roams confidently around the mall as if it were his personal estate.
Office workers routinely stop for a few seconds to pet the cats, snap photos or drop off food before heading toward the nearby Transjakarta bus shelter or MRT Jakarta station. What used to be a quiet patch of sidewalk has now become a small social hub, largely thanks to the internet.
The cats surged in popularity after an anonymous user tagged the area as a tourist attraction called “Kucing Oren Depan FX” (Orange Cat in front of FX). The location quickly collected five-star Google reviews, including one from user Karissa Aisha, who wrote, “8/10 petting experience, because Oyen would not budge one bit.”
Elmo, a 42-year-old copywriter who often visits FX Sudirman for meetings or to meet friends, also shared his photo with the ginger cat, whom he knows as Bolu, on X (formerly Twitter). He said he had known the cat long before the viral moment, as his gaming friends had been sharing Bolu’s pictures on Discord. Even his friends in Sidoarjo, East Java, made time to visit after hearing about the celebrity feline.
