Goodbye Indonesia

I love you.

We started our day at the Sultans Palace for local music and a bit of dance. Guillaume is a couch surfer at heart and left us the night before, but met us here. We sat at listened for a couple hours before deciding to go explore the grounds. The architecture was magnificent and everything was generally lavish. There is a museum on the grounds of the palaces china (ex. a pink tea set with the sultans face on it), silverware, and the sultans personal items (such as his gloves and measuring spoons). It was an entertaining way to spend the morning.

Once we left we went to a rather popular (and pricey) Japanese restaurant for lunch. They only offer one dish and you choose your meat. We sat on the floor at a low table and drank exciting teas while we waited on our food. I very much enjoyed the cooked jack fruit but was unable to eat the meaty bit that the place was known for.

Poor miss Kathleen wasn’t feeling well after lunch and went back to the hostel, while Guillaume and I went market hopping! We spent the day ridding about on his scooter, learning about markets (especially spices) and eating all the street food we could find! Which was a lot. They serve drinks in bags here. Literally they concoct your beverage in a plastic bag and hand it to you with a straw. It’s so fun!

Later that night Kathleen, Matthias and I took rickshaws into town and went to a shadow puppet show! We watched the same beautifully hand carved and painted puppets we learned about a few days before, come to life! There was a large band behind the screen, and one man that told the story and moved the puppets. You could chose to sit behind the screen and watch it as it was meant to be seen, or in front of it to see all the action. We did both. The production was in Indonesian so we couldn’t really follow the story but it was fun enough just to watch and listen.