Well after visiting the two big temple complexes in central Java, I visited the Sultan's Palace. Central Java still has a Sultan, and he still lives at the palace, which means that you can't actually go inside any of the buildings. Here is a picture, taken from as close as I could get, of a hall of some sort.
I visited a market, and another market, and a batik place, and a Muslim hospital where a new friend's nephew was recovering from... "How do you say it in English? Blood fever?"
Wai-wai-wait, I thought. What kind of bizarre medeival illness will I take with me from this hospital? I went anyway, and it turned out it was Dengue fever. Oh. Dengue fever. I can deal with that.
(The first month in Thailand my TEFL class and I were all deathly afraid of Dengue. One fella thought he had contracted it but it turned out to be not-Dengue. The symptoms were described to me as "you feel like you will absolutely die, for about two weeks, and then you get better.")
Luckily, I did not come out of it with Dengue.
Other highlights of my Fabulous! Nine! Days! On! Java! (You really must go, you really must. I just can't write much about it right now in this Internet cafe...) include the bicycle rickshaw! I felt ickily colonial being escorted in a carriage behind a motorbike in Cambodia. But in Yogyakarta, the rickshaw drivers propel you through the streets by the strength of their worldly bodies. I took one trip on one, to the train station when I left, and all I could think the whole time was "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."
That's my bicycle rickshaw guy. He's cool. Then I took the night train to Jakarta, which is not suited to photographs. The trains on Java do not have berths and I had to try to sleep in a (very comfortable, Executif) seat. In the morning went to the airport.
Look, it's the airport!
And a handful of the 13 thousand Indonesian islands I didn't visit on my trip!
And then I was back in Thailand.
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