Arriving in Solo--Church and Housing

Yesterday I arrived in Solo, greeted at the airport by four professors and two students in my field. They took me to a hotel on campus and we had a meal in the hotel restaurant.

Today I went to church, taken there by one of my kind colleagues.

These plants reminded me of some of the yucca we might see down in the San Rafael Swell.

Church was good. Everyone seemed very friendly. They were kind in giving my Indonesian undeserved compliments. In one class the teacher wrote my name on the board and my phone number. And many people copied those down. Then I realized I had given the wrong number. I had given the number of some senior missionaries, which someone else had given to me. The guy sitting next to me tried to clarify and helped make it so my real number was up on the board. And there my true and correct number sat, right next to the wrong number, which went un-erased. So I suppose the senior missionaries may receive a handful of texts welcoming them into town.

After church, some of the students from my host institution picked me up and took me to look at some places I might possibly live. We looked at two places. Here's a series of pics from the first place.

This is the garage.

This is one of three bedrooms.

This is another of three bedrooms.

This is the one bathroom. This room is an adaptation of a traditional Indonesian set-up. See the Western-style toilet, but also consider that the green bucket to the left is something that stands in the place of what many readers will be familiar with as a shower, You fill with water (hot or cold), and the pink dipper is what you use to pour the water on you. So: pour water for the first rinse, soap up, and then pour more water for the second rise. And that's it. But this isn't quite the traditional way even in Indonesia. I think usually in place of the bucket is a large tub of water, made of concrete and covered with tiles I think. Still in that set-up, you wouldn't get in the tub but rather would use the dipper to pour water from the tub onto you.  If you click here and scroll down a bit you can get a fuller description and a look at a more traditional mandi.

I thought I'd get another angle.

Here's the kitchen, which uses a natural gas stove. It has some cupboards up above. It has a rice cooker on the counter. This isn't a granite counter top kitchen, but my hosts assured me that house could get a good internet connection. And that's important.

The second option was at a hotel.

Here we are walking through the corridors.

There was only one apartment available here, and it only had two bedrooms, and the living room was so small I have a hard time  imaging doing much living in it, much less setting  up a make-shift kid's bedroom in it!

It did have a shower.

The toilet itself though was quite comparable to the previous place.

The kitchen was quite a bit more luxurious. But finally it seemed that this one wouldn't work, given the bedroom situation.

My hosts felt like the other one was the best option, and I agreed that between the two, the other one was the best option. Wanting to take a look at it again, I asked to go back to it. Here it is again!

Look at these modern lines superimposed upon the baroque landscape.

And look at the stonework.

And this one already has a dining room table, with a glass panel overlaying carved wood and sand with seashells in it.

This is a detail of the seashells in sand. Note the TV remote in the lower portion of the photograph. 

Looking for another view of the kitchen

A close-up of the kitchen sink.

Rice cooker with cabinet

The refrigerator

Apparently there's a well, and that's where the water for the house comes from. I'm not exactly sure how it works,  but it doesn't seem to require that the home's occupants draw the water themselves. Mostly I would caution kids from playing at the side of the well. It's got walls of about three feet around it.

In the backyard, there's a rambutan tree, with green rambutans on it.

And a few meters away, there's a noni tree. Beware Tahitian Noni; we may return to Utah with a new pyramid business: Indonesian Noni, so that noni businesses might become like the proliferating essential oils businesses. I'm just kidding. We would never do that.

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I walked along the avenue toward the university campus

This is the main hall at the front

A pond. I saw what looked like a telapia in it

I wandered around the nearly empty campus, though I was pleased to see that people use it for exercise on Sundays. I saw a couple of people jogging. As I sweated just walking in a short sleeve shirt, they ran in long pants and jackets!

I had been especially keen to find this building, the Faculty of Literature and Fine Arts

The moss, flourishing on seemingly sterile concrete, is what got my attention here. 

After exploring the campus's interior, I walked out to the main road and took a picture of the famous arch in front of the campus's entrance.

Then I walked back to the place I'm staying.