The Puzzling View from my Hotel Room

Take a fast look at this picture.  If you didn't know where I was, by simply looking at this picture, what country would you guess I was in?  When I, half asleep, opened the curtains of my hotel room this morning, I had to rub my eyes and put on my glasses, because the view from my window didn't "read" Indonesia at first glance, especially with the old domed church dominating the horizon. But after a while I spotted the clues to my location, like the Indonesian flags and the distinctively tropical flora.  It will be off to explore this anachronism after breakfast--an old Dutch world not in its proper place and time. It is Semarang, the multi-faceted capital city of the province of Central Java.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20 Years Ago Today: My New York University 9-11 Experience

Image
Originally Published:  9-11-2021 9-11-2001 seemed like any other beautiful late summer day at the New York University campus at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy.  I was responsible for the student life of our campus.  Each semester we housed 100 study abroad students in two of the five villas on our 200 acre estate of gardens and groves of olive trees and cypruses.  And we were also responsible for 300 students scattered throughout the city in apartments NYU leased for them.  As you can tell from the pictures, La Pietra was a romantic Tuscan setting that seemed to come straight from a movie.  Mid-afternoon on the 11th got a call from the Head of Student Life for all the NYU abroad campuses who was situated about 20 blocks from the towers.  He told me that there had been an aviation accident and one of the Twin Towers had been hit.  At that point it sounded like a freak airplane crash.  It was when we learned of the second tower being hit th...
Read more

Lawang Sewu

Image
If there's something the Dutch love more than tulips or windmills, it's their trains.  And it stands to reason that when the Dutch were colonizers of Indonesia, that one of their first impulses was to create an extensive train system to criss-cross Java. And from 1860 to 1940 the Dutch did precisely that, building over 6500 km of rail lines on Java during that time. Toured Lawang Sewu, the architectural monolith that housed the Dutch Railway headquarters after its completion in 1907. Semarang served as HQ due to its central location as the hub of the system. It is an imposing building, given its local nickname of Lawang Sewu, meaning "1000 Doors," by the city's inhabitants whose minds were boggled by this symbol of colonial power. After WWII and the Dutch departure the building fell into serious decay. But this art deco/colonial hybrid has been restored and now serves as the national railway museum. The massive stained glass windows in one of the towers are truly ...
Read more

Saturday Excursion: Prambanan

Image
One of my main goals of this trip was to visit Prambanan, one of the most magnificent ancient Hindu temples in the world. The Prambanan temples were constructed in the 9th Century, but were abandoned in the 10th Century and most of the complex collapsed in the great earthquakes of the 16th Century. The site, which had largely been covered by volcanic ash and jungle growth, received worldwide attention in 1814 when Sir Thomas Raffles publicized its existence. It took over 100 years to sort out all the stones to figure out how to reconstruct the temples we see today.  During an approximately 20 year span, in the mid-1900s, most of the current temples were reconstructed, though restoration is an ongoing process. Nevertheless, about 200 temples have not yet been restored, though because much of the old stone was plundered for other buildings after the site was abandoned, a much larger reconstruction might be impossible.  Not only is the temple architecture extraordinary, highlight...
Read more