Shopaholic in Bandung Day 1

Woke up crankily at 6 am in the morning because we need to check in for our early flight to bandung at 7am. 6am in peninsular time is super-early ok, it's like 5am in kk, it was still dark when we left the house. But I was surprised when I saw plenty of cars already on the road at 6.30 in the morning! Talk about traffic jam.

Flight to bandung takes about 2 hours, and the time difference is an hour. We got there around 10.00am local time which was 11am Malaysian time. My neck was already felt a-bit-strained after sitting on the-very-straight-not-posturepedic-seats of AA. After getting our (almost empty) luggage, I went out and saw a man holding a paper with my name on it. Luckily I wasn't called 'Ibu Rozaidah'. Hahahaha... We were brought to our hotel which is a renovated guest house named Petradissa Hotel. The hotel actually looks like a guest house rather than a hotel, it's quite small, but the inside is pretty nice and the room is quite clean too and not forgetting price is reasonable.

Our supir(driver) is Pak Tedy, a gentle man who's driving an Avanza, just nice to fit the 6 of us. We were informed that our hotel was still not ready then, but we decided to just leave our luggage at the lobby and head straight to the famous Bandung pasar baru.

Pasar Baru

The pasar baru is a 8 floors pasar (6 'lantai'/floors and 'dasar 1'/basement 1 and 'dasar 2'/basement 2) full with everything-you-need-inside. From telekong, women blouse to kiddie clothes to kain kebaya sulam, kain lace, kad kawin. I even got the time to peek at the folders of kad kawin, pretty-pretty designs... Ehemmmm... brides of 2009, please take note.

Pretty laces ehemmm especially for future brides ;)

We spent mostly on first and second floor women blouses/textile shop, even checking out the pretty laces, which I even persuaded to get a pink lace for 2 metres. Now where am I gonna wear my pink lace? Too over for raya? But the collections of lace memang soooooo pretty, I think if I'm a bride, I would want to have 10 pasangs of baju sanding after seeing all those lace. Not that I know the exact-price, but after having experience accompanying mom to maya textile in kl, I must say that the lace are sold cheaper too.

overly sulam telekung

Some of the women blouses also sold in pasar baru too, BUT they're not all the boring mommy style. Some are pretty fashionable for young people and good thing about it is you can bargain the price down. Although, I must say that Indonesian women are quite small in size, if you're wearing malaysian medium-size, you might found out that you fit into their large/x-large size. So, now resolution must be, have to be skinny to fit into small-indonesian size.

tudung shop in pasar baru

Oooh, and another thing, don't worry about having to climb 8 floors of shops. They have escalators and elevator here. But note of advice, please take the elevator if you want to go straight to lantai 6 where the foodcourt was. In our experience, we took the escalator to go to 6th floor, and we stopped for at least half an hour every floor just to check out the shops that we saw! Also, good news for smokers/bapa-bapa who are waiting for their wives but not-so-good-news for me and others, you can smoke in pasar baru. Imagine in a crowded arcade shops full with people, then got people smoking while you imagining your wedding dress in your head, added with weird-smell-of-air-freshener . Hmmm... Not a good combination. But maybe you'll forget about all those while shopping eh?

Handbag shop in pasar baru

Finally stopped for lunch and we were already too hungry from all the shopping cardio. We went to a recommended stall, Pak Chi Met which is famous for its ikan bakar. I like the ikan bakar, it's a bit sweet and crunchy on the outside and soft in the inside. I think it's called ikan gurame? But this is just for me, since sis didn't think the fish suitable for her throat.

RP60,000 for lunch: ikan bakar, ayam goreng, sotong bakar, and udang bakar for 4 persons approximately rm21

After lunch, we went back to our shopping in pasar baru until it closed at 5-ish....

Our avanza was already full with our stuff at the back. Imagine 6 girls shopping in 8 floors of pasar baru. Crazy i tell you... Even after spending about 5 hours in pasar baru, we still feel we didn't get all the stuff we wanted. That was why we intended to go again the second day:) - "banyak barang tertinggal" was our excuse ... hehehehe

***Sorry I didn't take a lot of pictures in pasar baru, too lazy to take out my super-bulky d70 from my backpack. And for FOs, cannot take pictures inside :

Happening Factory Outlet

After getting out from pasar baru, our supir brought us to another place which bandung is famous for, its Factory Outlets. We went to Happening, Summit and Terminal Tas. They have all the branded items at discounted price. But the kiddies clothes, sooooo cute and cheap.... Lana, you gotta go to happening & summit, they have cute tops for little seth! I didn't get many things in the FOs since they already turned off the aircond (maybe because they were closing?). It was hot and stuffy, so I just got cute little tops for little kiddies.

Factory Outlet, nice huh?

Initially our supir wanted to take us to a restaurant, but when we got there it was already closing. All of us decided to go western and went for mcDonalds . We were walkingshopping the whole day, we deserve some big Macs!

Went back to hotel at 10 (11 malaysia), I was already sleepy/headach-y/nauseated by then... But do check out our shopping, it took away my nauseousness.. hahahah...

first day of shopping! Crazy kan? it's like we were deprived from shopping for a year!