Happy 715th Anniversary, Surabaya!

May 31 this year, Surabaya celebrated its 715th anniversary. This city is my hometown, the place where I was born, spent most of the time growing up and be educated, and now live and work. It's one of metropolitan cities in Indonesia. The city that I believed was built as a trade center, a port city back in the old history before this nation was born.

Maybe because of its background as a trade center make Surabaya only have very little caracteristic of its own culture. Even I, who has spent most of my life live here, am difficult to name what its specialty food is. Every traditional food here is originally from other places around Surabaya. But the trade center caracteristic makes Surabaya rich of any kind gourmet. One could find anything from eastern food till western food, from fine gourmet till fast food, from restaurants till simple food stalls.

The else thing Surabaya is rich of is malls or shopping centers. There are many malls here with different concepts to spoil shoppers. Well, it's not unusual for a metropolis to have many malls. But differs from Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, one doesn't need much time to go to a particular mall, 45 minutes is the longest. At Jakarta, you need at least an hour to go to any places closest from you, that's not included the time you need to break through any traffic jam and the stress you've to endure as its result. Many times visiting Jakarta, I never could go and visit half of the places I want to. Only one place for a day! Here, in a mad time I went to three different malls with quite distance between them only in a day, say from 10am till 7pm. Mad, huh?

Maybe I am not too familiar with this city after all, that I always have no idea where I would take my guest to spend the visiting time at Surabaya. One thing I could think of is spending a day at shopping mall, or go to Ciputra Waterpark (oh, no....make it two things!) But, hey, it's not a bad idea to spend a day at a mall here! Like Plaza Tunjungan, my favourite place to hang out. One could browsing many kind of shops there, from clothes till books, till you drop. Hungry and tired? There's three food courts and many others eating places, that one could fill his stomach and rest his feet. And to close the day, there's a cinema where one could watch the newest movie. Good, eh? And need money, too....hehehe...! Oh, well, the consumerism culture!