A Day of Mountains, Horses and Motorcycles

We've spent the last two days in Rashi's town having a blast.

Saturday we went to the school where she teaches and got the warmest reception of our lives from the students and faculty there. It was kind of like traveling with a C-list celebrity. Mark gave them a laminated poster of Barack Obama that he carted over from the states and they were over the moon about receiving it. Everytime we said Barack Obama, everyone would cheer and shout, "Obama!" They were also pretty tickled by Mark's attempts at Bahasa Indonesia. While I prefer to bow a lot and speak slowly in an Indian accent, Mark jumps right in with a language book and it's pretty impressive how quickly he picks up the local jargon.

We spent the evening at Rashi's house, having dinner with her host family and it was kind of nice to just kick back, relax and eat around a dinner table for one night.

This morning she took us to Gedong Songo, a mountain town in Central Java about an hour away where nine Hindu temples and sulfur springs sit on a hill. The temples have long been destroyed by invaders to the area so the setting was kind of sad -- a lot of piles of rocks and broken deities -- but you also took in a certain history of the region while you were there.

We rode horses to the top (I think every person on mountain knew how ridiculous it was that I'd mounted a horse because every time we approached a different temple the gathered crowd would snicker in a way that I knew they were laughing at me) and I only fell off once on a dismount, though I managed to do it in front of a 50-person family reunion.

When we left, we approached the parking attendant at the motorcycle taxi stand to arrange for motorcyles to the back to the bus stop. Dude walks away and comes back on a bike, abandoning his post at the parking lot to drive us to the bottom.

Rashi and I were on one bike and Mark was on another. Another ridiculous story but one better told in pictures on our return.

Mark and I are also suprised that our trendy interracialness phases no one here. I was expecting a lot of stares (not because we're trendy and interracial, of course) but because we definitely don't look like the locals, but no one really notices. Truth be told, I felt more like an "outsider" in Minneapolis. And when they do stare here, they're more curious than anything else. It's partly because there's no real traditional Indonesian "look" (you see Indonesians with Asian, Indian and Dominican flair) and our traveling trio sort of covers the range. A brave stranger sometimes engages Mark in a conversation about Obama, which I take as an acknowledgement of where we're from, but that's always just more cute than anything else.