Wednesday, July 21, 2010

I have to have a berth or I cannot get to sleep.

Ban Phe, it seems, sucks the will to blog even about places I've already been to and enjoyed.

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.

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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."

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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!
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And a handful of the 13 thousand Indonesian islands I didn't visit on my trip!
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And then I was back in Thailand.

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