East Java

This past weekend was filled with action, fun and beauty. Matt and I headed off to East Java with our friends, Deeksha and Rajeev.

We went to see Mt. Bromo, an active volcano up in the sky, as well as Malang, where Matt studied abroad in the fall of 1997. We ended up seeing much much more.

Highlights included:

• Seeing the sunrise over Mt Batok, which was actually much cooler looking than Mt Bromo
• The cool weather and fresh air everywhere we went
• A surprise root beer float (no, we don't have A&W root beer. We have awa root beer.)
  
• Eating a quail egg (for the first time)

Lowlights included:

• Getting lost in Malang after being in the car for about 8 hours already that day. Our driver called and got directions at least five times, but each time he kept driving for 20 minutes before he figured it out that he wasn't going the right way. Literally it took 45 minutes to drive where we could have walked in five minutes.
• Seeing an area where a company drilled in 2006 - and it started a mud volcano. Since then the mud hasn't stopped flowing out. 14 people were killed and 25,000 people have been displaced. It's a super smelly, gross lake now, and they can't figure out how to get it to stop. So sad.
• The tea plantations - which wasn't really a LOWlight, but it was not as cool as we expected. The Cameron Highlands were definitely way cooler than this tea plantation.

Interestinglights included:

• Peeing in a bathroom that was just a floor. You just pee on the floor, and it goes into a hole in the back. That was weird.
• Another pee story - after walking to a Candi (temple), I had to pee, so I went next to the river and squatted. When we walked further down the path, we saw some army guys that pointed to a toilet and said that only children pee in the river. Adults go to the toilet. Oops. How was I supposed to know that the one structure (that looked like it was going to fall over) was a toilet?
• We came out of our "hotel" in the mountains and ran into a guy with a gun. Just walking around. With a gun.
• We took a jeep ride up to the top of the volcano where we saw the sunrise over the other volcanoes. It was the roughest ride ever. It reminded me of driving through the desert in Israel with the guy I was dating while at Hebrew U - he owned a jeep shop and he would take me jeeping through the desert. I think it was more fun when I was 21.

A link to more photos is here.