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Nirvana

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I decided to escape the giant glass tower, where I have spent 98% of my time this year. So last weekend I enjoyed a 24-hour vacation at the Grand Kempinski Hotel in Downtown Jakarta, wearing my N95 mask and face shield.  Ate lunch at Oku, the Japanese restaurant inside the hotel that flies its fresh fish directly from Tokyo's finest seafood market. I can say that my sushi was as good as one can obtain outside Japan. When the tuna is as smooth as butter and tastes as fresh as the treats from Neptune's table, you know your sushi is special. Add some tempura and gyoza and I attained something about as close to Nirvana one can reach on this plane of existence, with apologies for trivializing the divine with my excessively happy rhetoric, but when one is perfectly contented...
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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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Saturday Excursion: Prambanan

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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...
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