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Exploring and Snorkeling in the Gili Islands

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On Friday, took a one-hour ride on a jukung, a traditional wooden Indonesian boat to the Gili Islands, a popular destination for divers and partiers and laid-back expats. First stop was Gili Trawangan, the biggest and most lively of the islands, though COVID has turned Gili T, as the locals call it, into something resembling a ghost town. Then we motored to Gili Air.  It was even emptier. However, I liked it much more than Gili T in that it is much more rustic in its commercialization and somehow it seems as though the place is carrying on in a fashion as it may have existed before tourist development started to take place in the 1980s. Off the shallows of Gili Air, my guides took me snorkeling. No photos, I am afraid. I had enough of a challenge figuring out how to deal with my mask and snorkel and float suit and fins to worry about photography.  After I took to the water, I learned why my guides had been carrying a bottle filled with chunks of bread around with them in the b...
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There are Two Choices

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Watched the inauguration and just finished enjoying the Celebrating America Show.  It was a festival of joy celebrating all America. Artists of all genres and traditions performed and celebrated the great Americans, average Americans who have been working to feed, heal, and serve our nation. We have two choices.  We can embrace the good.  We can embrace our diversity.  We can embrace the work and service we need to conduct to bring our nation back. We can embrace the peoples and other nations of the world as we share the planet with the fellowship of humanity and our will is not supreme. Or we can be the mob, embracing grievance, embracing violence, brandishing symbols of hatred past and present. I am choosing the America I watched tonight, where the various hues of our cultural mosaic were on display and celebrated.  I am choosing the America where Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama, political opponents, stood together pledging to work together to rebuild Amer...
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Lawang Sewu

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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 ...
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