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We just returned from Jogja and it was one of my favourite Indo trips that we've taken so far. I have had some excellent trips thus far and so was a little curious as to why this would be so. After I thought about it for a while I think it's because I have been inside our house for a lot of the last 4 months due to being a little under the weather off and on. However, there was something a little magical about the place, and I think it had something to do with the centrality of the hotel, which in itself was cle
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We stayed a total of three nights and four days, and although we did a lot of touring around we did spent a good part of each day near the pool. When asked, I'm sure that each of the kids would say that one of their favourite parts of the holiday would be the pool time. On our second day we woke up almost as early as the previous day (4:30 verses 3:30 the day before) and rode our re
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Some of our other highlights will remain in our memories but unfortunately for various reasons not on camera. One of them is the bird market, which contained not only birds but mice, rats, snakes, ferrets, dogs, cats, bats, owls, eagles, maggots, fire ants, probably rabies and who knows what else. Matthew's conclusion about this market is that it was "interestingly sad." Both kids comment on how both their grandma Bea and Grandma Sunny as well as Aunties Laura and Jenny would probably come into the market and turn over the stalls (like Jesus did in the temple of Jerusalem) because of the horrific treatment of the animals. There were so many sad, sickly animals crammed into such small spaces. SPCA would have years of work to revamp the mindset of the treatment of animals here. One of the reasons it was a highlight is because the bird market was built at the base of the remains of an old, old castle. We had a self-appointed tour guide lead us from the bird market up some stairs (no workers compensation codes of safety here) into the crumbling walls of the castle. After a quick peek at the top we descended into a tunnel which led us to the 4 pools that the Sultan and his wives and family shared many years ago. My favourite was when the fellow lead us through the village to reach our becaks again and we just saw the people living at the foot of these ruins, their rooftops leaning against the castle stones.
Another unrecorded memory was of a Javanese (Jogjakartan) ballet called Ramanaya. It was a story of love and war accompanied by music and Javanese singing. I enjoyed it and I think the others did too, especially after intermission when we realized that there was a sheet written in english interpreting the ballet for us.
Overall we had a great time celebrating Easter holidays and, of course, Tris' completion of his courses. If you want to see more photos, I will be posting some more on my Facebook page. It's way easier to put in comments etc that way.
Thanks for reading!
1 comment:
You certainly had a jam full holiday . You probably are righy about the bird market and all of the animals stuffed into little stinky cages-I would have struggled with that whole situation-as would the White girls in the family!Too many stairs but I liked the idea of the horse drawn carts-the animals didn't look like they were skin and bone like they did in Jakarta.Great blog! Love, Mom.
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