Yogyakarta, Indonesia

My last weekend in Indonesia I decided to head to Jogjakarta (which has many different spellings as you can see). Jogja is a city east which is about a one hour plane flight from Jakarta. It is a pretty popular tourist destination due to the major Hindu and Buddhist temples near by.
Jon and I flew in to Jogja on Sat morning and then went to see the Prambanan Temples which is a Hindu temple. A large percentage of the temple was destroyed during the 2006 earthquake which hit Jogja. They are currently in the process of trying to fix and replace the temple back to it's original shape and as we were told by our guide, they must only use 30% new materials for the site to still be considered a historical landmark in Indonesia. They actually mark the blocks with a long nail going through it at some point to show that this piece of the temple is not apart of the original structure.

It was pretty interesting to see and learn how everyone came to pray and how it was a pretty magnificant temple to build during that time. Of course there were tons of indonesian boys and girls who wanted to take a pictures with me and then with jon as well which is always fun.
After this we headed to another part of Jogja where we took a local cooking class. It was probably the highlight of my weekend. The class was at this little cafe called Viavia cafe which is a chain of local cafes that help to support the local economy through sustainable practices. one of the main drivers of the organization is to give back to the community through local programs they offer. So it was Jon and I and a local teacher, who was great, she explained everything to us and spoke pretty good english so luckily Jon didn't have to do too much translating. We made Gado Gado (which is a traditional Indonesian dish made of veggies and a peanut sauce) and a chicken coconut curry along with carmalized tempe. It was all AMAZING and now I can come back to the states and make this on my own which is the best part.
After that Jon and I headed to Borobudur which is a Buddhist temple about 1.5 hours from Jogja. we spent the night there and then got up at 5am in order to see the sun rise over the temple. It was pretty cool and we got some amazing shots with the sun coming up and the volcano and temple in the background. After a quick nap we headed back to Jogja where we went on a bike tour through a local village. It was pretty cool, I learned about the entire rice process from field to milling along with how tempe is made, how they make local bricks and these sort of fried crackers. It was a pretty cool adventure to ride around this little area and see all these sites. After all that we headed back to Jakarta for my last week of work in indonesia.

Thats all for now but more to come :)