We've finally moved!

Finally. Our bags have been packed, we'd left on our jet planes and are now sitting pretty in our hotel suite here in Jakarta. The suite has a hall, dining area, a kitchenette, two rooms and two baths, so it's not too claustrophobic.

We've grown tired of the hotel menu, so we went out and shopped for groceries and cooked dinner on Sunday night. On Sat, we went exploring in Kemang which is where we'll be living when our house is ready in July. We found this nice restaurant called Koi Gallery. It's actually a furniture shop-cum-restaurant. When I looked around the dimly lit, tastefully furnished restaurant, it was filled with mainly gwailo expats and well-to-do Jakartans. How did I know they were well-to-do Jakartans? Easy! They had Chanel bags and Imelda Marcos hair!

Food was quite good. We had duck spring rolls with hoisin sauce and chicken tempura with wasabe mayo for starters and the portions were just right. Dear Hubby picked a shrimp salad with ginger sauce for his main course while I went for the home-made fettucine with pan fried lamb. The home-made fettucine tasted a lot like pok mee, a noodle that can be found in my hometown but not in KL. This plus his two beers and my two pink guava juices cost us Rp280,000++ (Approx RM90). Not bad hor. I think a close local equivalent would be something like... oh crap... forgot the name... the place in Bangsar which is located at Jln Bangkung and serves great pasta in small portions? Dang. Memory going. Been that way ever since I got pregnant.

We're planning to go back to Kemang again soon to look for more restaurants. One had caught our eye that night, it was an eatery above a bookshop near the Duty Free area. Yes, Kemang has a duty free shop but I'm told only those with diplomatic passports can enter. Dang.
Another eatery I'm eager to try is a lively hawker stall area that's quite close to McDonald's, Kemang. This McDonald's is my landmark in Kemang. Since I'm not very sure of where I am yet, I always tell the cab driver to drop me off there and from McD, I can get my bearings and make my way around.

All our wordly possessions are now sitting pretty in a warehouse somewhere in Shah Alam. We can't ship them over yet as Dear Hubby has yet to receive his official work permit. We expect to get them at the end of this month though.
It was a very busy week for us last week as we hurried to pack our carry-on luggage and had to direct movers to pack our other belongings. The company settled on Asian Tigers and they were pretty efficient. They came in on Sat morning and packed up the stuff in our hall, save for the sofas and tv, and stored the boxes neatly under our Stairway to Heaven. Then on Monday, about 10 of them showed up at our place at 9am and by 5pm everything had been neatly wrapped, packed and labelled and wheeled out to the truck for transporting.
Credit to Dear Hubby who stayed behind and did most of the work while I was off at the Canadian High Comm securing my visa. He stayed up on his feet all day supervising the movers and helped them to carry stuff. So at the end of the day, he was rewarded with a nice massage from me, the least I could do to say thank you for shouldering most of the work.

Right now, all we have are two suitcases of clothes each, his golf clubs, my guitar and about six pairs of shoes. And Dear Hubby's cowboy hat. He dragged it out of storage and insisted on wearing it, saying he would wear it as well when we go to Canada in June. He went on wearing it until he realised the combination of his hat and my guitar made him look like the latest country and western singer employed by the hotel pub. The hat came off real quick then! HAHA!

All I felt when I stepped on the Jakarta-bound plane at KLIA was a sense of relief that this was all over. After months of shuttling back and forth and house-hunting and feeling like we were hanging in no man's land, we have finally settled that bit of our lives.

So yep, looking forward to this new phase in our lives, absolutely looking forward to checking out all the eateries in Jakarta (the Malaysian in me speaking there) and looking forward most of all to the arrival of our Little Monkey in Nov this year.