Selamat Hari Natal dan Tahun Baru 2012!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Yes, I know I'm a bit late with that greeting, but I'm immersing myself in the Indonesian concept of jam karet (rubber time) ie: time is flexible and things will get done when they get done. I hope you are all enjoying your holidays, whether you are travelling somewhere or simply beating out the heat wherever you live. Just remember while you eat your yummy tossed salads and dips with bikkies that I am still at uni at the moment. Classes are all done (they finished two days before Christmas), but I still have assessments to hand in. I'm actually quite lucky that they're assignments/take home exams, which means that I can get them done whenever I want before the due date. It also means that I won't have sat an exam the entire time I was studying at UGM (except for my gamelan exam, but that was actually kind of fun). So as I procrastinate from finishing my hardest assignment, due tomorrow, I decided that updating my blog would be a good use of time.

Yesterday, I learnt how to use bluetooth. I have been called tech savvy because I can do things like rename folders and use 'print screen' to copy images, but the truth of the matter is that I'm really not. So figuring out how to get all the photos off my phone and onto my computer (as I'm pretty sure the data cable is still in Australia) was pretty darn exciting. 


So following are a jumble of photos from various occasions:

These are the tiles at a friend's kos, I really liked them because they look like broccoli soup! Yummo!

This is at Via Via, a restaurant found in various places around the world including the south of Jogja. The food was really nice, however I thought it was hilarious that fish and chips comes with french fries.

You can see Mt Merapi in the background of this photo, not particularly clear here, but on that day it was the clearest I had seen it in four months. This photo is taken at the northern edge of UGM campus.

Teal trying on a batik hoodie at the Sunday market near my campus.

Just an example of the English found on signs around Indonesia. Another example that I saw at Ngurah Rai Airport (Bali), where they are currently doing renovations/expanding: "We apologizes for the inconvenience".

This was taken way back in August during Ramadan. I thought it was a cool play on the words ngabuburit + bowling. Ngabuburit is the act of hanging our with friends, looking for food to break the fast at sunset.

This was taken at my first ever wayang performance. Wayang is a type of Indonesian theatre, the most well known is this style, known as wayang kulit because the shadow puppets are made of leather. Even though they are shadow puppets though they are beautifully decorated. The dalang (who is the puppeteer and voice performer who decides what will happen in the loosely planned plot) sits in the middle of the screen. All the other people on the stage make up the gamelan (kind of Indonesian percussion orchestra). 

There is a very, very, VERY good reason why durians warrant a ban from many places, including hotels. I think durians are a fruit that taste quite gross and smell horrible (however I realise that many Indonesians feel the same about Vegemite).

The Malioboro Mall was crammed full of people for a couple of kilometres, waiting to see the Sultan's daughter and her new husband on one of the days of the wedding. We stood in the hot and sweaty crowd for an hour and a half without seeing anything before deciding to got home. 

Check out the size of this snail!!!! It's massive! We were walking home after Javanese tutoring one day and were amazed at how massive it was!

Cute little smiley sun in my hot chocolate :)

Dede trying Vegemite...

Mas Rachmat (Java) and Swantje (Germany) trying Vegemite. Neither of them really liked it, Mas Rachmat is just pretending....

So there's just a few random things I've been up to the last 5 months. Now that I know how to get photos off my phone things will be so much easier! Hope you're going snazzily! 


Selamat Natal dan Tahun Baru 2012, 


Katrina