Weekend In Yogyakarta

We made a weekend trip to Yogyakarta which is about 3 hours' drive from Salatiga for a change of scenery. We took a "travel" which is like a shuttle-van there. Yogya is a larger city with more modern amenities. One of the things we did was to buy some batik to go on our walls at home. There were so many beautiful batik paintings and in the end we were limited by our budget. Here Iris is getting an explanation about the different batik techniques used.

The second photo here is when we checked out a mall in Yogya and took a photo from the top floor looking down to the ground floor which was a hive of activity and colours with many little booths selling their wares.

Bandungan

Bandungan is a small town up in the hills where the plants grow green. We popped up with friends on Saturday in order to buy some of them. Here, Philip seeks to bargain the price down. He also had the enjoyable experience of riding along in this cart with little Timo. The horse enjoyed the experience considerably less than we did.















Later that same day we visited Gua Maria (Mary's Cave) which is a Roman Catholic shrine celebrating the appearance of Mary to believers some years back. While there this little dragonfly caught our eye.

at home

working...
resting...

We have been working hard setting up 'home'. Our house is a neat little concrete building and with a little love, care, elbow grease and a fair amount of painting and plants, we're confident it will come up right. Here Iris is working on the base of our kitchen sink.

Sawah...

We took a drive among the sawah (rice fields) nearby Salatiga and enjoyed the thoroughly agrarian scenes of rural Java full of life, patterns, colour and greenery.