Jogjakarta

For New Year's Eve I went to Jogjakarta (Yogyakarta) which is the cultural capital of Java/Indonesia.  There I got to meet with most of the other students and tour Jogja.  We spend a day on Malioboro, a famous street in Jogja full of horses, bejak, and tourists.  There are random statues, and batik shops and street vendors everywhere.  I bought a pair of pants that were originally on sale for 50,000 IDR for 20,000 IDR thanks to Juj's amazing bargaining skills.
On New Year's I went with David's family and the other Americans up to Bukit Bintang which is a hill overlooking all of Jojga. There we all ate in several warungs on the side of the hill, slowly working our way up the hill as the night wore on.  We got Indonesian pizza at the top one, the last food of Dua-ribu duabelas (2012) as David's older host brothers played guitar and sang whatever songs we requested.  From the balcony of the warung we watched the fireworks in the city below until people started shooting fireworks sideways out of the window of the warung next to us into the empty night sky.  We almost died when someone fired one out of the window below us and it back-fired.  It was incredibly hot and loud and we left the warung after that, walking to an incredibly crowded bridge.  There were thousands of people were watching the city below and lighting off their own (illegal-in-America) fireworks.  One backfired gray ash all over Darles.  All in all, it was an excellent start to Dua-ribu tigabelas.
 On the second day of 2013 the Jogja Girls and I went to Borodudur, which is an ancient Buddhist temple from the 800s and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  It is full of tourists, mostly from Indonesia, but also other bule with whom we always nodded and shared a wry smile, knowing that both parties had already and would be experiencing the bule treatment.

At Borodudur there is a tradition that if you can touch one of the Buddhas inside the bell-towers then you will have good luck.

At Borodudur everyone must wear official sarongs over their pants and Juj and I became very hot in the afternoon sun so we sat.  Indonesians started coming up to us to request foto-foto.  We allowed them to take one each and they eventually started to form a queue.  We started to count after a while and decided at 50 we would just refuse foto-foto.  We hit 50 but they just kept coming.  Eventually we met up with the other girls who had been hassled in the same way so we decided to pretend we couldn't speak English or Bahasa Indonesia, so we would just speak aggressive gibberish at the people following us.  A couple of the more persistent ones "picked up" on some of the gibberish and started using the words like "Vhundrschlon" and "Zatta" to each other, even though they really have no meaning but we kept repeating them.  Later a professional photographer from Bandung asked us to model for him.  We were about to ride elephants when it began to pour.