So... once in Bogor, as I said, we headed to the Kebun Raya/botanical garden, where we ate lunch (Tim had the Dutch-named rijsttafel (rice
table), which is a big pile of rice with about a zillion tiny servings
of all sorts of stuff from veggies to chicken to beef to tempeh and tofu
to sambal to eggs...) and then wandered around for a while. The
gardens were full of peeps hanging out, picnicking, playing badminton
(Tim and I have noticed an uptick in the number of kids playing
badminton in parks and on the street since an Indonesian doubles team recently won a major championship), walking around.
We took a look at the orchid (anggrek) house, too, which was quite beautiful:
The Kebun Raya is adjacent to the Presidential Palace that I mentioned, a large columned building used as a weekend retreat:
The palace is surrounded by a really strange sight: a massive herd (700+ head, from my
understanding) of spotted deer, originally placed there for hunting purposes by the Dutch governors. These somewhat mangy beasts look really out of place in the middle of the city, roaming around, snagging carrots from tourists walking around outside the palace gates (carrots and greens are sold by roadside vendors just for this purpose):
As we were out and about in Bogor, we saw hundreds of apple green angkots driving around, honking, pausing to let street musicians and/or kids on and off to minta-minta:
Hidden amidst all the angkots were a whole bunch of horse-drawn carriages, which seemed fairly anachronistic:
We also noticed that the siren song of the ice cream man is truly the international language:
Finally, we saw some interesting food carts, including one I hadn't yet seen in Jakarta- strange green, crepe-like discs... maybe pandan?
