The last time we visited Jogjakarta--just 18 months ago--it was a dirty, chaotic, loud, polluted city on the scale of the worst of Asian cities.
And now, miraculously, against the backdrop of our seven months in Chennai, it has been transformed into a clean, orderly, lovely city that hums along charmingly as we move from place to place. Here there are no mountains of garbage and rubble lining the streets; instead, there are rows of trimmed shrubs and flowers, swept sidewalks and neatly covered baskets for rubbish. People obey traffic rules here as traffic moves along effortlessly while in Chennai there are no rules; stray cows, bulls or goat herds stroll into the flow of traffic at will and drivers cross over into the wrong lane to get around them. The hum of motorcycles here is like a gurgling brook after the jarring cacophony of horns, unmufflered auto-rickshaws and motorcycles in Chennai. It is truly amazing how much experience effects perception.
And so we are enjoying our ritual visits around Jogjakarta visiting with Widi's father, now 78, and brothers and sprinkling fresh rose petals on the many ancestral graves on the two sides of Widi's family. These visits take us out of the city through the bucolic rice fields of Central Java into small hamlets for tea and conversation in houses with low doorways. Widi actually banged his head on one this time--which is usually my role. Hard to imagine a doorway that low, isn't it?
There's a thriving aquarium hobby store/pet market in the city and John wants us to look into International Schools here. How fickle he is. It was just last week he wanted to move to Singapore after he found milk tea in the rapid transit station.
Tomorrow we move on to Bali where I'm hoping our social obligations will cease. In addition to visiting all the village folks, we've also paid visits to Widi's two brothers and two sisters living in this area--we spent today at a water park with the cousins. On top of all that the past three nights Widi has orchestrated class reunion dinners: college friends, high school friends, and tonight, middle school friends! John and I finally drew the line and said we needed a night off and sent him off alone. The dinners were a lot of fun, I have to admit, but while I'm craving some quiet time to read my novel and do some writing, I'm hearing that the old Galang gang is meeting for dinner in Bali, which will be fun--these are *my* friends too--and his old friend Michael and youngest brother Dono are also visiting us there. Most of all these events have been brewing for months, it seems, through facebook (FB, as Widi likes to say), his favorite hobby these days.
I've got some nice photos of John and his cousins, but they don't seem to want to upload at the moment. Soon I'll tell you about our nostalgic trip back to Galang Island and post the photos then.
