Hello my dear friends…
In this post, i want to share about my special encounter with a train station structure reminds me a lot of my childchood’ home. But, how come? Train station and a house surely have quite a big difference, its also hard to find the relevance between the two of them. Maybe i am missing my childhood home so much to the point that i grab any kind of frail resemblance i can find to that house.
Last month, me and my husband went for a short trip to Jakarta. Despite Jakarta being the capital of our country, and i visited them a lot of times before, surprisingly there’s so many places i have never visit before. Its also for their most popular and basic touristic place. So, when i went there with my husband, we’ve decided to visited some of them that we can visit despite our limited time. One of the place that i think a must visit is Kota Tua (Old Town). There’re many things i can share about the old town but that is not this post about. Just right in front of the old town, there’s a train station. As we can see that this is what the train station looks like from outside (from old town point of view). Like many other building in old town, we can tell that the building of this train station is old, and have a lot of Netherlands’ influences. The Netherlands’ influences is the thing that reminds me of my childhood homes. Our grandparents’ house was build with a strong Netherlands’ influence in the architecture and design. I think that for many Indonesian like me, building with Netherlands’ style of architecture will feel and smells like childhood memories.
When we look at the picture i attach in here, if i only changed the color to black and white, and then said it was from 40 years ago, it will be believable right?
Despite the fact that they’re one of the biggest train station in our country and looking quite big from the outside, this is a small train station. When i said that its small i dont mean that they’re small in size, i mean that the stalls and everything is quite minimum. In other train stations we can see that they shoves as many stalls as possible in such a limited space. Maybe because they want to keep the renovation to a very minimum to preserve the Netherlands’ architecture design they have. This building was opened for almost 100 years, its so old. If we look at their old pictures, even the one from 1930, it looks the same. Bareky any chance. I love that when we preserve old building like this. Despite the beautiful and advances technology and designs in today’s modern world, lets keep that for the new and untouched lands. Preserving an old building like this is one of a sign that we are a nation whom honouring and never forget histories despite always trying to move on and follow the time.
Maybe i am just so easy to please, but just by looking at the flooring that they have already makes me so happy. Well, i am sure they already changed the tile from the 1930 tiles but they still have an old looking one. As we can see, the tiles in the floor have two different color, its white and grey and i dont know what pattern that they choose but it looks botched. Well, i think it looks botched in a beautiful way maybe i feel that way because of the sentiment i have for this very old building. I am not quite well informed in floor tiles so i dont know how to explain that but we can see the big difference the tiles in the hall and the tiles in near the peron. The one near the peron is the shiny tiles, which makes it looks newer. I dont know the reason why they use a two different style of flooring despite they use the similar color for both of them. Why not just using the same one?
Many confusion, unanswered questions, but i have so much more admiration and love for this building.