A Goodbye Party and a Mountain of Rice

Tim's colleagues held a lovely going-away lunch for us this week.  The main dish at the lunch was tumpeng, a traditional Javanese ceremonial/celebratory dish featuring a large cone-shaped mountain of rice surrounded by a variety of meat and veggie dishes (tempe, stuffed chilis, sambal eggs, and omelette, among many other things in our case).  The cone can be regular white rice (nasi putih), but more often it's more fancily prepared with coconut milk for richness and turmeric for the pretty yellow color, like we had:

 

(please note that it is also decorated with shrimp and quail eggs)

The cone of rice mimics Indonesia's mountains and is usually served at ceremonies/events to show gratitude. 

The guest of honor gets the top slice of the cone, and from what I've seen, a VIP also typically cuts the top off ceremonially.   Tim got cutting duties (although he was instructed to hand over the precious top slice to me, along with a full plate of food, mwa ha ha!):

Here we are, in front of the tumpeng and other goodies (and yes, this is an iPhone photo of a Polaroid, well, Fuji, photo):

And here is Tim and I with his colleagues, who are an awesome bunch.  They have been nothing but welcoming, helpful, friendly and sweet to us, making our 2 years here go pretty smoothly!  Thank you guys!!

(we thought this looked a bit like a wedding photo, but they insisted that we be front and center, which required us sitting)

Jogja Jaunts

After Prambanan, Martha and I did some sightseeing around Jogjakarta proper. 

First, at the grocery store by our hotel, Martha marveled at the durian, king of fruits, stinkiest of stinky, spikey as all get out:

Then we hopped (well, squeezed, really) into a becak, Jogja's transportation mode of choice.  These bicycle rickshaws are all over Jogja (many of them parked, drive napping/lounging), used by locals and tourists alike.  Liz, Meghan and I had wanted to try them when we were in Jogja last, but three American butts is just too much for the becak...  two was pushing it (and pushing it is what our driver had to do occasionally on the inclines!):

We requested to be taken to one spot I had read about on the internet where you can take a batik-making lesson, and after some confusing back-and-forth in a garbled Bahasa Indonesia/English mix, we ended up at this place, which was not our intended destination (thanks, Indonesia, for making things confusing by having multiple streets with the same name), but worked out just fine!

We got to see the whole batik-making process, from tracing the design, to stamping the border design, to hand drawn batik (batik tulis, like Martha and I tried in Jakarta) and cap batik (where the wax is stamped onto the fabric using intricate copper stamps or cap), dyeing, hand-painting with dye, re-waxing and re-dyeing, and finally drying:

Tracing the design (for the batik tulis):

Prepping the fabric and stamping the wax borders:

It seemed that there was a division of labor along gender lines, at least at this factory, which the men doing the stamping and dyeing, while the women did the hand work, including applying wax with the canting and hand applying dye to certain sections of the design:

Here are the dudes doing the dyeing... red was the color of the hour:

Wax removal:

Blue-dyed batik drying in the rafters:

Here we are, trying out the cap process...  first the borders.  Dip the cap/stamp in the hot, hot wax:

Then carefully stamp the fabric, lining up the design in key places so it looks continuous:

My turn:

Next we applied the main design, a large square-ish stamp:

Re-dip in the wax between each stamping:

Post-waxing, pre-dyeing: 

And post-dye!:

After our batik cap adventure, we hit the road for some more sightseeing and a whole lotta batik shopping on Jalan Malioboro... here are some scenes from the road, via becak:

The walls of the keraton, the sultan's palace... lots of becak and motorbikes:

Martha posing with her batik stash... she brought an entire suitcase just for batik and filled it: