Trip Day 1

So my first story began when i left Jogja to Surabaya last Monday using Sancaka at 7.30 AM. We were leaving from Tugu train station because it's near my house. We arrived there at 7.15 AM, so we still have plenty of time before the train departed. We get on the train and we were a little bit surprised when we saw Amien Rais was on the train. It appears that he's not leaving Jogja, but his relatives did (his daughter i guess).

At 7.30 AM (no delay), the train departed and we were having five and half hours trip. We arrived at Surabaya around 12.30 PM and we went to the hotel to checked in. The hotel that we picked was Surabaya Plaza Hotel, which is close with the train station and also with any other malls in Surabaya. In front of the hotel is Surabaya's WTC building and in the left side is Delta Plaza (one of the oldest mall in town). If you want to go to Tunjungan Plaza, then it would only take about 10 minutes using a taxi from the hotel. It has a strategic location for those who likes shopping

After unpacking our stuffs at the hotel, we went down and ordered a blue bird to go to Supermall Pakuwon Indah SPI. It was big and quite far from our hotel. It took us about 20 minutes (my rough estimation) to reached Pakuwon which was a big mall, just like TP. In this mall (actually it's not only in this mall), i saw an interesting thing about their book store (Tri Megah Book Store, but also in Gramedia in other malls). They dare to uncover one book as a sample book (not all books though) so people could see what's inside the book before they buy it. Sometimes, people wanted to buy books, but they wanted to see what's inside the book first to know exactly the content of the book (mostly for references and imported books because it's expensive).

They also provide some seats for people to sit down and have some time reading books without having to stand up for hours. I also saw a higher reading habit in Surabaya rather than in Jogja, mostly for books that requires more concentration. Maybe it's the effect of the sample book i mentioned above. Perhaps Gramedia in Jogja should try this out for several of their books. Give people a chance to take a peek on the book and if they like the book, they will buy the book, since it's inefficient to go to the book store just to read per chapter every day and people usually won't have much time to read the whole book in one day.

Pakuwon was a great mall, but i guess they lack of E-Directory services. New people (like me) who haven't been there will be confused and find it harder to shop if we don't know what's in the mall. Also if we get separated, we don't know a good meeting point. By providing a E-Directory services, we will know what floor are we now, how to get to area 1, or any other direction that would help us.

We spent our day in Pakuwon and went back around 8.30 PM. After arriving at the hotel again, we rested and watching TV and went to bed earlier since tomorrow, we will have one day shopping