Bule on a Bicycle

     Starting this past week I have begun biking about the city of Yogyakarta and it has been wonderful. I bike the 4 or so kilometers to and from school everyday, which is pretty darn short, but usually takes about twenty minutes because: a) it's always hot so nobody rides a bike very fast except at night otherwise you will sweat profusely, and b) the traffic here is crazy which makes going anywhere a bit difficult.

     Speaking of traffic, I'd like to attempt to make you understand what I mean when I say "traffic here is crazy". First off, lanes are suggestions. Actually, lanes aren't even suggestions, they are just lines painted on the ground for the amusement of the government. Anybody can drive anywhere at any time. This includes using turn lanes to go straight, not having turn lanes to pull u-turns causing traffic to back up, and the "bike lane" existing simply as another car lane. Additionally, the motor (a term used for pretty much any two-wheeled vehicle with a motor, be it true motorcycle, scooter, moped, etc) to car ratio is about 5 to 1. Even fewer rules apply for motor and they freely whiz about, weaving between cars and slower motor drivers. Right of way as we know it does not exist. Pretty much whoever is going fastest and is most aggressive gets the go ahead. This is particularly true when pulling out onto roads, pulling u-turns, and backing out of parking. You just slowly creep forward until you block the entire lane forcing any oncoming traffic to stop, allowing you a chance to get out.

     Parking is another fun aspect of life her. There are rarely parking lots and the streets are by no means wide enough for a parking lane. Usually in front of all shops there is just a slab of cement that you pull into or sort of parallel park in so that at least you aren't in the middle of the road. Because the cost of labor is so cheap here, pretty much every place, be it a restaurant or a perfume shop, has a parking attendant. These guys helps you park as close together as possible and then yell at oncoming traffic, sometimes they even have whistles, to get them to stop and let you out. They also collect the 2000rp it costs to park a car or 1000rp it costs to park motor anywhere in the city. The price is standard for every parking space except at special events. By the way, 2000rp is only about 20 cents.

     Getting back to riding bicycles, I have also ridden down to Molioboro, which is the main shopping and tourist visiting street here in Jogja, which is only 15 minutes or so away. The best, however, is the Jogja Last Friday Ride. For the last Friday of every month, teenagers from all over the city gather at the stadium near the center of the city and go for an hour long bike ride. I'm talking hundreds of people with all different types of bikes, including these crazy 6ft tall bikes that everyone here seems to own, riding in a mob that occupies half the street they're on. This last Friday, a couple of my friends from school took Samantha from Brazil, Romane from Belgium, and I along for the Jalafara (Jogja Last Friday Ride). Sadly I did not snap any pictures because I forgot my camera, but I plan on going again next month so I'll try to remember then.

     As for the term "bule" which is something along the lines of the Spanish term "gringo" but a bit more endearing. It's used specifically for white foreigners I believe, but I'm actually not positive on that one. Sometimes when I'm with my family or friends, I can tell when a stranger is asking about me because they will usually refer to me as bule. I can't understand what they are saying about me, but at least I know it's about me.

     That's all for now, I'm just about to leave to visit Kraton, the Sultan of Jogja's palace, so expect a post about that soon-ish. Cheers.

It's been a while, let's have a chat

Alright, so first off I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up with this in the slightest. As of tomorrow I will have been in Yogyakarta for a month and I've only done one post since arriving. I've been exceedingly busy doing things that, quite frankly, I'd rather be doing than sitting at home on my computer. So here I'll just be posting some highlights of my first month. Maybe I'll dive into some cultural aspects along the way, we'll see.

One of the first events that I took part in was a part of this thing called "Hash". Now I've seen some banners that refer to it as the "Hash House Harriers" but I've done no research and still don't fully understand it. Regardless, it is essentially just a bunch of people who go on short hikes, 4-7 kilometers depending on how adventurous you are feeling, and then eat soto (asian style soup, as opposed to sop which is western style soup) with bakso (essentially meatballs but, well not exactly meatballs. I think they're made with chicken, which is why I think the have a texture akin to chicken sausage, but it's rather hard to explain) once you return. It's not like a group hike, everyone comes and goes as they please, but its organized as a group. Well, at least the first two to Merapi, the rather active volcano just to the north of the city, were like this:

 Pretty much all of the fertile parts of Merapi look like this due to the nutrient rich soil. Lush vegetation would be a bit of an understatement.

There are small roads up and down the mountain and plenty of people living both in the foothills (like this picture) and further up. Most of the people immediately around the volcano are taking advantage of the fertile soil and are farmers.

A week or so later, however, my host family took me as well as Samantha from Brazil, who is being hosted by the same Rotary Club here, to the Pan-Indo Hash. Apparently these Hashes take place all over Indonesia (possibly even many parts of the world, that was hinted at but never made clear) and once a year there is a single Hash in a single location in Indonesia and this year it happened to be right here in Jogja. For four days straight, right after school, we would go to some location and this time everybody was walking together; roughly 2000 people, sometimes wear the same clothes, sometimes not, walking beautiful routes right here in Yogyakarta:

 The first walk was down Molioboro, which is like the Champs Elysees of Jogja. There are an absurd number of shops, tons of street food vendors, and its full of tourists. Except on this day, there were too many Indonesians wearing red for tourists to get by.

Did I mention there were elephants walking down the streets with us?  Because there were. Samantha and I walked with these two for the second half and chatted with one of the zookeepers who works at the local zoo where these elephants are from.

 This photo doesn't do a sliver of justice to the awesome reservoir we started beside. We then walked across the dam and the through some of the hills further downstream.

 In addition to walking amongst hills we crossed a river that had only bamboo poles lashed together to form a bridge. It was shaky and bowed in the middle as anyone crossed it but we didn't see anyone fall in so I suppose it works just fine.

 The third day was at Ratu Boko temple, which is a rather old (think built in the 8th century) Hindu temple that is right next door to the better known Prambanan Hindu temple seen in the distance, slightly right of center.

This is the entranceway to the temple sight. It is actually a pretty large facility because it was also a bath house specifically for women. Most of the pools are still around even though most of the actual temple is gone.

 This is looking north of Parangtritis beach. The cliffs are pretty much gorgeous.

This is the beach itself. The waves are incredibly active and the sand is very fine and black. The whole place is absolutely beautiful and I can't wait to visit other beaches here in Jogja.

Since arriving, I've also had the opportunity to go to a couple of parties. The first was a birthday party for the daughter of a friend of the third host-mom. When I heard birthday party I thought, alright, sweet, a chance to meet some people and maybe other teenagers. Well I was right, but what I didn't know is that in Indonesia they have sweet seventeens, and this was a mighty sweet one. It was on the top floor of a very nice hotel owned by yet another friend of my third host-mom. There were fancy bartenders, the kind who flip around the shakers more than they actually make drinks but it looks really cool so no one complains about the fact that it took him six minutes to make a rum and coke; an absurd quantity of food that was all very delicious; a live band who almost exclusively played American pop music, American music is sort of a big deal here in general and usually I'll hear more English than Indonesian on the radio; and fireworks towards the end. The whole thing was pretty impressive.

The second event was a wedding reception which must have had at least five hundred guests and may have actually been a couple hundred more than that; the space was so huge it was hard to tell. The food was served at a series of stands, basically a cross between tapas style and a buffet. Of course everything was delicious, as pretty much everything here is, and there was more than enough for everyone.

Last week I had a bit of a change of pace and I attended the city-wide orientation for Yogyakarta. There are seven exchange students, including myself, in the city. For a week we studied Indonesian, learned more about Indonesia and Jogja, and just had fun. Most of the orientation was conducted by Rotex, former exchange students who all live in Jogja now and range from exchanging last year to exchange in 1997-98. There was also one guy, Max, who happened to be both a Rotex and a form inbound to Jogja. He exchanged to Indonesia two years ago, returned to Germany for a year, but decided that he'd rather go to university in Indonesia, so he returned and is in his second year now. Every day after several hours sitting in a room with copious amounts of snacks (if food isn't an obvious theme yet then it should be, I have never been this well-fed, particularly against my will), the exchange students, Rotex, and few Rotarians would go and do something such as:

Go swimming at Pak Candra's house, a Rotarian and all around nice man (fyi, Pak is not part of his name, the terms Pak and Bu, short for Bapak and Ibu which literally mean Father and Mother, are used in roughly the same manner as Mr. and Mrs.)

Go paintballing because it only cost $6 with everything you see here! And it's entertaining to try to communicate battle strategies when not everybody can fluently speak a single language.

Go to the local zoo and see some pretty sweet animals, including the native Komodo Dragon.

Celebrate the Chinese Mooncake Festival. I'll take advantage of this lineup to name the other exchange students I'll be seeing off and on throughout my stay here. From the left: Samantha from Brazil, Angelica from Columbia, Roman from Belgium, myself in a batik shirt from my host-family, Amy from Canada, Jiang-Wei (goes by James) from Taiwan, and Hideto from Japan.

To end it all we had a closing ceremony/party that was also a speech contest. Every day at the end of our Indonesian lesson, we had to write a short, four to eight sentence speech that was then filmed and would be watched the next day. So to cap it all off we had to write a two to three minute speech and present it to all of the host-parents, Rotex, and several Rotarians.

Another lineup with appropriate flags. Except James who managed to forget his.

I took second in the speech contest behind Romane and followed by Samanth. There were tons of host-parents there so there were tons of cameras, thus we all are looking in different directions, particularly away from this one.

Most recently, yesterday in fact, I visited Merapi once more and Borobudur. At Merapi this time around, I took a jeep tour through what used to be a riverbed, but following the eruption in 2006 is a barren ash valley. Before the eruption there were several rivers that led down the mountain; today there still are but in different locations than before. When the volcano erupted and the lava began flowing, it tended to follow the paths that were already laid out for it in the form of rivers. With the water being replaced but lava, the water was forced to redirect, creating the rivers that exist today. after the lava cooled, the riverbeds were nothing more than rock and ash. Today that ash is essentially mined and mixed with of dirt to create nutrient rich soil for farming. Here are some awesome pictures of all of that:

 Merapi in all its glory, although seriously this doesn't do the thing justice. Also, that is just a conveniently placed cloud, not smoking rising from the top of the volcano.

 Driving through a riverbed composed of ash.

 This is a bunker with Merapi in the background. The bunker was designed to protect those who could not escape the mountain fast enough but could get there from ash. Unfortunately for the three men who holed up in the during the 2010 eruption, it was not designed to protect from lava and the three were basically cooked inside. Morbid, but historically important. Also the people of Jogja are pretty superstitious and no one else in my group would actually go inside the bunker because ghosts remain there.

 The jeep that took us around along with some of my classmates who I went with.

Some burned out remains of homes.

After the merapi tour we went to Borodudur which is the largest Buddhist temple outside of India. Rather than bothering to describe how immense and beautiful it is, here are pictures:

 The approach from the East side

 A portion of one of about 600 reliefs, this one depicts Siddhartha Gautama attaining enlightenment.

 The view to the South. Pretty much every direction looked like this though, the entire surrounding area was gorgeous cliffs and expansive farmland.

 One of a couple hundred statues. Most no longer have their heads and all are in slightly different positions.

The statues on the top two tiers encased in cage-like stone structures. This temple was a sight for pilgrimage and you are supposed to climb the temple, pray, then reach in to the cage and touch the statue's hand to aid in your journey for enlightenment. Today people just say that if you can touch the statue's hand while keeping your feet on the ground you will have good fortune.

So that's what has been happening in terms of major events and sights. From here on out I think things will be slightly less hectic so I will be trying to post with some regularity. Cheers.