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 :)

Bali Bali Bali

Sooo I spent Valentine's weekend in Bali with Jon and some of his friends. So as I have mentioned it's rainy season here in Indonesia, so all day Thursday it was raining in bali and we had a 50% chance it would rain each day over the weekend. We got in on Friday and it was raining in the morning but it all cleared up in the afternoon. Luckily we had amazing weather all weekend long, it was sunny every day except sunday when it didn't start raining until 4pm. We had some good Karma thrown our way!!So Friday we spent in Ubud which is a art, shopping, historical district of Bali. It is also very geared toward tourist so it has it's ups and downs. We spent the afternoon walking around the city, looking in shops and then getting some duck which is what that area of Bali is apparently known for. The cool thing about Ubud is that the temples are all mixed in with the shops so there would be this really old amazing temple next to some little art shop which was pretty neat. After our bit of walking around we headed to feed some monkeys. I have to say a bit scary especially if you are holding the bananas. After some monkeying around we headed to this little bar in Ubud for a drink and wouldn't you know it, we ran into a guy who was from NY/NJ, he was born in NYC and moved to NJ many years ago. It's a small small world!
The rest of the weekend consisted of 4 hours in the spa on sat getting about 5 different treatments (thank you Jon!!) and then dinner overlooking the ocean. It was a pretty relaxing and different way to spend a weekend in bali, well very different from the first time I went. Sunday consisted of going down the water slides at the hotel and sitting by the pool drinking pina colodas and soaking in some last minute sun. All and all a perfect weekend especially b/c I didn't plan a thing.
One crazy thing which I unfortunately didn't get to take any pictures of was the rain storm that came through on Sunday night as we headed to the airport. It was a pretty heavy downpour and b/c there isn't much infrastructure in place in Bali the roads floated immediately. It was crazy to see all these motorbikes going through water that was up to their waste. The water on certain streets was easily waste high, pretty crazy stuff, thankfully we left tons of time to the airport since we knew it might be a long ride there.

Well more to come after next weekend, off to dinner now...

Indonesia Part Two

So I am back in Indonesia for a second time with work and it's actually a bit different this time for many reasons. It is actually seems to be the height of rainy season right now, which means it rains in Jakarta just about every day. Most of the time it rains for a couple hours and then clears up but the sun doesn't really come out much in the city which is good and bad. Good in the sense that it's ALOT cooler then when I was here in August and bad well thats obviously why.

So the first weekend I got here, I just got acclimated to being back in Jakarta and spent the weekend hanging around with Jon. Then after a nice long week at work, I headed to the beach with Jon and his friends. It was a great spot and on my list of maybe one of my favorite spots so far and definitely a great place to go with alot of people. The second half of the drive was beautiful, it passed some tea planations, palm planations and other beautiful greenery.Once we got to the spot there were little cabins located right on the beach and they also had these little huts right next to the water where you could get a massage while listening the ocean for $5 USD (including a tip), yeah thats what I said $5 and the massages were soooo good, I decided to get one on Sat and Sunday! AHH so great.
Pretty much spent the weekend relaxing by the beach, getting massages, watching some Australia Rules Football and playing a silly game apples to apples. All and all a good weekend! Below are some pictures of a little late lunch time spot on the side of the road were I tried Martabak, yummy (basically an egg mixture inside fried dough).More to come, I am off to Bali this weekend for some more R&R :)

All good things come to an end...

So when I last left everyone I was off to Wadi Rum for my last weekend in Jordan. After that weekend, I left and headed to Indonesia for some nice R&R over the Thanksgiving break. I went with Jon to Batu Karas which is South East of Jakarta. It was a great time, I actually was able to get up on the Surf Board again and caught some waves all by myself (which I didn't think was too bad given it was only my third time on the board when I caught the wave).
Anyhoo, so I didn't get eat any Turkey on Thanksgiving but did get to see some wild Turkey's running about Indonesia which is a very rare sight but how appropriate since it was Thanksgiving.
After Indonesia I headed back to DC to finish up 3 weeks of work there before headed to NJ for the holidays. So now that I"m back in Jersey don't expect to hear from me until after the New Year when a new adventure might begin!

Happy Holidays!
Colleen

Wadi Rum

So I spent the my last weekend in Jordan at Wadi Rum which has been a recommended spot to visit while in Jordan. I had been told by multiple people in Jordan that it was a must do while I was here....so I figured I would save the best for last. I will admit that it was pretty nice even for the short period of time we got spend there. I went down with my co-worker and Hilary's friend Stacy.We took off early Friday morning from Amman and managed to get to Wadi rum in 3.0 hours (usually a 4 hour drive) and one speeding ticket later (that was after being pulled over 3 previous times and let off since we weren't from Jordan). So we went around Wadi Rum in a SUV and checked out all the famous spots in the dessert, pulled over a couple of times to hike up some mountains, they apparently don't care if you fall and kill yourself here, they let you do pretty much anything without any equipment. After all that we went to this Bedouin camp site where we had a fire and they cooked us a really good dinner. It was just the three of us staying at the camp site so we had the run of the little tent area which was super cool. We drank about 10 glass of Jordanian tea which is a black tea with LOTS of sugar in it. They actually boil the sugar with the water first and then add the tea leaves. After all that we crashed out under the stars which was pretty amazing.

The next morning we found a horse ranch and went horse backriding around the area, it was really beautiful and I am happy to say that my many years of lessons came in handy. It all came back to me and i was able to ride around the place, it was pretty amazing. Sooo sad to say but that was my last weekend in Jordan and now i'm off to Bangkok and Indonesia...more later

Beirut in Beirut

Ok well not really but that city does have a strange energy or feel to it. I had to head up to Lebanon for 3 days for work but don't worry I did manage to squeeze in some time to check out the city. The city felt a bit depressing to me, I'm not exactly sure thats the word but its the closest thing I can come to this late at night. There are 5 star hotels next to some hotels which are war torn with bullet holes in them. It is crazy to think that a 15 year war went on in this country. The entire downtown was completely rebuilt after the war ended, so its beautiful and new looking but it doesn't exactly fit into the cities identity. I went to dinner one night with some friends of friends who live in Lebanon and got an understanding a bit more of the history and what it was like during those 15 years. It seems the perspective is that things are still a bit uneasy between two religious groups in the country. I guess that was part of what you could kind of feel when you are there...however Beirut does have one of the hottest night lives in all of the middle east just so everyone knows.

Wadi Dana

Jordan has some really beautiful landscape which I never realized until I got here. There are a number of Wadi's (or valley in Arabic) and last weekend I went to Wadi Dana which is about 2.5 hours south of Amman. However we left on late friday afternoon and we didn't account for getting a flat tire along the way which I guess is pretty common in Jordan. So we spent about 45 minutes in this little tire station waiting to see if they could get a tube to fix our flat, unfortunately they were not able to fix it since all the shops were closed on Friday. So we drove the rest of the way to Wadi Dana on the spare which was an actual full tire thankfully...We did get lost on the way there since it was dark and you are in the middle of the desert. When we did find out way, we got to this little family run hotel/campground and they had dinner waiting for us. It was delicious.

We pretty much crashed out and then got up early on sat for a hike. The place was beautiful, kind of like the grand canyon only about 100 times smaller. The weather was perfect and it was really cool to be some of the only people along the path or even out there hiking.

On the way we ran into some Bedouin kids who were out with their goats, it was pretty cool, they chatting with us a for a while and then we continued along on our way. All and All an awesome weekend and it was great to get out some and see more of Jordan.