Playing catchup. 3 days in Yogyakarta.

SO! Things have been pretty urban as of late. When I last left off, Adam and I had just arrived in Yogyakarta and found a cheap squat to spend the next 3 nights in. We pretty much figured that after an 11-hour overnight bus, the entire next day would be a write off. And it was. Probably the only thing I managed to squeeze in that day was a walk up JL Malioboro, the main shopping street, to check out the batik markets. Batik, so you know, is a kind of catch-all term for Indonesian art printed on cloth. Nothing I saw really blew my skirt up, and apparently it's really overpriced. Rule of thumb, if guys are running up to you and being waaaay too friendly, you're bound for a fleecing. Dudes were literally jumping over other dudes to get a word in with me. I spoke French to get away from it.

The next day, we did another pre-dawn wake up so we could catch Borobudur, the massive Buddhist stupa, at sunrise. We rounded up two of the guys we waited for rooms with the previous morning and caught a bus. It was about an hour outside of the city. Unfortunately for us, it was overcast, making the early morning rise somewhat pointless. However, we did get a good meander around the place before the flocks of tour groups showed up to jump in the way of our pictures. Then it was back on the bus to another, much smaller Buddhist temple that we could give a rat's ass about after we'd just seen Borobudur.

Back home we napped. That evening I just puttered about the area. I managed to come across an extremely Western-styled mall by chance. It was odd because I haven't seen anything like it, even in Korea. It had brand name stores and restaurants, a huge supermarket in the basement, was relatively uncrowded and completely air-conditioned. I bought some Converse shoes there for $20 too. That night we hung out with the locals in front of a convenient store.

Day 3 in Yogyakarta would be dedicated to seeing the Kraton, or the sultan's palace which was located in the heart of the colonial Dutch area. It was wicked hot that day too. Valerio, one of our Borobudur companions, and Jasmine, a Canadian girl we met the night before, accompanied us for a rather unspectacular tour. Basically info about the old sultans and the stuff they used in their everyday lives and this and that. Funny thing was, because of a rift in the royal family, there were actually TWO entrances to the kraton, and one was a FAKE. We managed to sniff out the real entrance though. Or maybe we actually got the fake one. Who knows. I don't care.

That night, the same crew made a trip out to Prambanan, the other giant temple complex just outside of the city for the sunset. This one was a Hindu however, and it was quite apparent by the architecture. There were separate temples for Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, and the whole thing was surrounded by ruins where other temples stood. Then it rained really hard.

The plan was to see the ballet Ramayana which was being staged at an open air theater nearby, but none of us planned for the rain or the distance to the theater. We ended up running as fast as we could in the direction of the theater in a futile attempt to maybe not get wet. By the end of it, we were completely soaked and thrashing in puddles with complete abandon. My new Converse felt like sponges and everyone had to throw their expensive cameras into Adam's backpack. Turns out Adam's backpack was not waterproof either, and his DSLR got ruined. When we found the place, we looked like complete animals. They wouldn't let us sit down either until we dried off. I stripped completely naked in the bathroom and wrung out every piece of clothing over the toilet in a feeble attempt to get more dry and comfortable. After a hot coffee paid for with soaked money, we sat down for the performance.

We had already caught a performance of Ramayana earlier in the trip in Ubud and it was interesting to see how these two compared. While the one in Ubud had a soundtrack of just voices, this one featured a full gamelan orchestra. The costumes were more lavish, the dance more choreographed and the narrative much longer. They didn't kick hot husks at us in the end too. It was 9 by the time it finished so we caught a bus back for a quick dinner and a goodbye to our brief travel companions.

The next day we boarded a train to Jakarta.

I'll end it there and provide a little addendum. For some reason, people, especially young students, really really want to take pictures of Adam and I. It's quite odd having people shyly shuffle up to you and ask in broken English for a picture. I wonder what they do with them? Maybe it's frosh and they need to photograph as many white people as possible to win a challenge. Maybe they're mesmerized by how ghost white I still am after two weeks in this country. Who knows. At one point, in Borobudur, we walked by a huge tour group of students who were looking at us more than the attraction itself. Matthew, a Dutch guy we were traveling with, uttered a modest hello, and the whole group of them, maybe one hundred strong, yelled "hello" back to him. Then they completely swarmed him for a picture. SO ODD!

Anyways, here's all the pictures this slow internet can muster. I'm in Jakarta now. You'd thing a modern city would have better internet than say, the Gili Islands, but no. Oh well.

Borobudur at sunrise from the top. Not a tourist in sight.

Prambanan at sunset.

Street tattoos in Yogyakarta.