Japan Joins the Fun

     About a week ago, a group of Rotaract members from Japan came to visit Yogyakarta for a weekend. To start, for those of you who don't know about Rotaract, it is a division of Rotary from university students and young professionals. Having people usually between the ages of 20-30, the structure and goals are generally the same as Rotary clubs and all have a parent club. There are three Rotaract clubs in Jogja and they hosted the Japanese guests together, taking them to Borobudor and Prambanan Temples and I, along with three other exchange students, got to tag along.

     I couldn't make it to Borobudur in the morning because I have school on Saturdays (real fun, I know), but I met them at Prambanan in the afternoon, which was my first time being there. Needless to say, the temple was spectacular in every way, especially since we were lucky enough to be there during sunset, making for some mediocre pictures due to poor lighting, but some amazing views such as these:

 One of the side towers, I never got a good shot of the whole temple complex but it consists of a large central tower and several smaller ones around it. The central tower is in the foreground.

 Probably my best shot of everything, you can see the large tower on the left with a few of the others on the right.

 With the sun setting, the eastern towers were lit up beautifully.

My camera definitely couldn't do justice to the silhouette of the temple as we were leaving.

     The central tower is surrounded by a fence and you need to get a helmet in order to go in because rocks because loose after the earthquake in 2007(?) and apparently fall off from time to time. Other than that though, the temple is incredibly well preserved. Some of the carvings are replacements but the vast majority are not. The carvings depict the entire Ramayana, which is a Hindu epic poem that explains the duties of relationships and outlines the ideal father, ideal brother, ideal servant, ideal wife, etc. If you don't know a lot about Hindu epics, there are two of them: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These are as close to holy texts as Hinduism gets, not having a single book like the Bible or the Quar'an, because they were written by Hindu sages sometime in the 5th or 4th century BCE. Its something like 24,000 verses so there was a lot of carving to be done. Here are some of my favorites:

 I am in no way qualified to speak about just what these steles are off, but based off my limited knowledge of the Ramayana and the prominence of this figure, I'm pretty sure this is one of Rama, one of the avatars of the main Hindu god Vishnu

 Again, not a scholar, but this is probably Rama (just left of center) again seated with his wife Sita (just right of center) who will go on to be abducted Ravan, king of Lanka.

 Can't really speak for this one, just looks really amazing.

Extremely unsure about this one as the central figure doesn't resemble other depictions of Rama at the temple. Maybe this is Ravan, but I can't be certain in any way.

     After visiting Prambanan, we had a pretty fancy dinner with all the Japanese Rotaract members, Rotaracters from Jogja, as well as several Rotarians from Jogja. We got to chat with some of the people from Japan and later on in the night, we from Indonesia performed a very popular little dance that I can't recall the name of but think of it as the Gagnam Style of Indonesia, which was followed by a dance from Japan by all of the men from Japan and then another from all of the women. Lesson from that night: Asian people can't really dance, but they definitely try harder than anyone else I know.

     The next day, Sunday, we met them for lunch, snagged a bunch of pictures (none of which I actually have because my camera was dead from the day before, plenty are on Facebook though if you check out "Pictures of Jason" which are ones that I'm tagged in), then saw them off at the airport. From there, we exchange students took a bus into the city since it only costs 3,000Rp (about 30 cents) as opposed to a taxi which is 100,000Rp (about $10). It took roughly forever because there were so many people at the bus stop by the airport and the bus system just isn't very good. And then of course once we arrived in Malioboro, it began to rain.

     A few weeks ago marked the start of the rainy season here in Indonesia. It includes more clouds, slightly lower temperatures, a reduction in dust due to the rain, and daily torrential downpours. At least once a day - sometimes twice, sometimes four times - the skies become dark, a very slight drizzle commences which can last for ten minutes or for thirty seconds, then the sky unleash absolute furry. There is no in between, it is either barely noticeable or you feel like a flood is about to take place.

     As I write, it is downpouring, and has been for around and hour now. Sometimes the rain lasts for ten minutes, sometimes it will start at 6pm and still be raining as you go to sleep at 10pm. As far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or reason to this weather other than the inevitability that it will rain at some point today, so I suppose in some ways I never left Wisconsin.