Merry Christmas from Indonesia!

First of all, I want to say Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you all are having a wonderful Holiday Season and that you are able to spend it with your loved ones. Of course, I am not so lucky this year as I am in Indonesia this year for the holidays.

I know that I should have expected this doing what I do and I keep trying to tell myself that it isn't too big a deal, but that line of thinking is starting to get harder and harder. Especially because this is my nephew Jackson's first Christmas. And it never hit me so hard until lunchtime today.

I was sitting at work, yes you heard that correctly, at work and it was just like any other day. Now, my lunch typically comes in a cardboard box and consists of rice and an assortment of other food. And so they brought in my lunch just like normal and I started eating. I was barely into the meal when it hit me that I was sitting in a refinery in Indonesia eating my Christmas lunch from a box. Of course, I am not technically alone, but I am surrounded by people that I only met 2 1/2 weeks ago. It's not exactly the same as being at home with the family. But this is no time to get down about the state of my job. Instead, I should be telling you all about the great things I've got to see here in Indonesia so far.

So, I got into Indonesia back on Dec. 4. I flew over in the morning from Singapore. The first thing I had to do was to go to the immigration office. Don't worry, I'm not setting up camp here for long, but you have to register when you come into the country. So, someone from the travel agent picked up my passport in the morning and then, in the afternoon, I got picked up to go to the immigration office. I got to sit around for what seemed like 1 hr, but was probably closer to 20-30 minutes waiting. Finally I got my picture taken and went on my way. My passport was to come back to me the next day.

Then on Friday, I slept in for one of the last times before I started work. In the afternoon I had signed up to go on a guided tour to Miniature Indonesia. What is Miniature Indonesia, you ask? Well I'm glad you did because now I have more to talk about. Miniature Indonesia is a tourist attraction in Jakarta that will give you a brief insight into the Indonesian culture and give you an idea of what the different parts of Indonesia are like. Indonesia is made up of thousands of islands (17,508 according to Wikipedia), so you can imagine how vastly different they all are.

Miniature Indonesia has a couple of different parts to it. The first area we stopped at (in the early afternoon to stay out of the heat) was a museum about Indonesia. I know that's a broad topic, "Indonesia", but they had everything from musical instruments to pottery to puppet show supplies to clothing etc...

In fact, the bird you see pictured at the beginning of the blog is a Garuda and is part of the coat of arms of Indonesia. The Garuda is a mythical chimera that has the head, beak, wings and legs/talons of a hawk but a mans arms and trunk (what is it with asian countries going with the symbols with parts from different types of animals?). The Indonesians tried to go a little more natural with their depiction and based it off of the Javan Hawk-eagle. And they did something really cool with it to remind everybody of their celebrated independence day of August 17, 1945. The tail of this bird has 8 feathers in it, each wing has 17 feathers, the base of the tail (below the shield above) has 19 feathers in it and the chest has 45 feathers. Put these all together and you get 8/17/1945. Pretty cool eh? And if you really want to read more about the coat of arms, you can here.

The other part of the attraction surrounded a decent size lake. In the middle of the lake, there were islands that were laid out in the general orientation of Indonesia's thousands of islands. Of course, they didn't have that many islands in this lake, but they put the big ones in there. There was a road that went around the lake and a cable car that spanned over the top. As we drove around the lake we passed a lot of small, segregated areas that each showed some of the typical architecture and hosted a few museums of cultural items from the different areas of Indonesia.

From going around Miniature Indonesia, I tried got a sense of the different types of architecture is used around areas. While to the untrained eye (that would be mine) the architecture looks pretty similar, our guide had a lot to say about the different areas. The most common look for the buildings shown here was actually kind of like a boat as shown in the picture here. Of course, the ends tend to shoot upwards, but some of them were somewhat blunted (like the one shown) and some were more pointed. Yes, that is my analysis of Indonesian architecture as of now. I know, it's not insightful, but then again I'm not writing a thesis about it, so deal with it.

Now we had the choice of whether we (there were 2 Chinese gentlemen that were on the tour with me) wanted to take a ride on the cable car or go to see the infamous Komodo Dragon. I was actually pretty excited about the possibility to go see the Komodo Dragon, so I chimed in and made my vote clear. I mean, who wouldn't want to see the largest lizard in the world. So, we went to this area where we got to see snakes, alligators (not of the DJ variety), and of course the Komodo Dragon. Here's a picture of me very tentatively bending over to touch it. Yep, we had one of the "groundskeepers" there open up the door and we got to go right in next to it. I guess I was thinking that the skin, being scaly and all, would be harder than it was. So I was kind of surprised when I could feel it push in a bit when I touched it. But, when I really think about it, why wouldn't that happen. After all, it's not an exoskeleton...it's just scales.

After going back to the hotel, I got my passport back from the travel agent. Then I grabbed some dinner at a local bar/restaurant and had a couple of drinks before coming back to the hotel and getting some sleep. At 10:00am the next morning, I was off in a taxi for a 3 1/2 hr drive to Indramayu. On the 7th I started work and have worked almost every day since...including Christmas.

On that note, I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays again. Enjoy the time you may (or may not) have off. I hope I will be able to join you shortly.