Saturday this week: antique market, a palace, and a happy coincidence

After N and W and S got into town, and N and I got the kids into school, we thought things would settle into something like a routine. But it turned out the kids only had school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week, due to Chinese New Year. So, the second half of the week has really felt like a marathon. We can't have the kids sitting around the house all day while we work, since they don't have their normal entertainment mechanisms at their disposal and we can't send them out to play. So we've been squeezing in work in the mornings and evenings and going out during the days, whether to parties or markets. We feel exhausted at this point because of all of the fun we're compelled to have, and are hoping that next week we can nail down something like a routine.

Here are some pictures and comments from our Saturday. 

N had read about an antique market so we called a taxi and went. There were some many things that looked so interesting, but if there's one thing you can count on in this life, it's that you can't fit a herd of deer into a suitcase.

There were even more fossils here than at the other market.

Sometimes I understand all of the words, but the sentences don't make sense to me.

Among some of the statuettes that looked more traditional, I saw this statue of someone in a pink bathing suit.

I mentioned the ring auction earlier, where people seemed like they were bidding on stones. This is what some of the rings look like here. I don't know a lot about them yet (I want to learn more, and I'm sure Wikipedia awaits), so for now I'll just mention that it's the men who tend to wear them, and they tend to be pretty big.

Several years ago N went to London for a work conference, where she found a really cool owl necklace. It was a style she had never seen before and she picked it up as an original item to add to her collection of cool necklaces. Since then, she's been disappointed to learn that the owl necklace isn't as original as she thought. We've seen them in stores in the US and now we've seen them at antique markets in Indonesia.

Statues like this don't fit in the suitcase either, but fortunately every time we see the Coke logo we'll be able to reminisce.

We looked around level one and then were happy to see there was a level two.

We came to a booth that was selling some old coins. Famously (in our family at least), my father once bought some old coins at an antique market in Indonesia. It turned out they were counterfeit. I think these are real, but even if they're counterfeit, I didn't spend much on them. They're all minted by the Dutch East Indies Company: on from the 18th century, one from the 19th, and one from the 20th just as Indonesia was declaring its independence.

The narrator of Bukan Pasar Malam rides a bike through the streets of Jakarta at one point. I thought of that scene when I saw these bikes.

After the antique market, we walked through an area where there was a restaurant. We looked at the menu and W was thirsty so we bought him some water that arrived in a beautiful bottle. Then we moved on.

As we were stepping down from the curb, a man on a motorcycle drove up an parked, He was wearing a set of wings, it turned out for the ongoing festivities of Chinese New Year. He was going to be in some of the events later Saturday evening.

We walked over to a palace and signed up for a guided tour.

Our guide took some pics of us.

A gamelan orchestra played as we walked through.

In some areas of the palace, we took off our shoes. In other areas, we put them back on. This was a place to sit as we put our shoes back on.

A family with all shoes on.

Still trying to hang with the young people by taking selfies. I was feeling pretty good about this one, but then I say a group of teenagers on the palace grounds with a "selfie stick," which no doubt put my frail efforts to shame.

I really enjoyed the bright colors here.

W, contemplating another caged bird.

After the palace, we looked over and saw a big colonial building and decided to walk over and take a closer look.

We walked in through the open gateway and it turned out to be a complex of residences and little stores inside of a big courtyard. At the entrance, we talked with two women for awhile and they welcomed us in. 

As we were headed for the exit, S got a big unexpected hug. She gets a lot of those here. And she's a good sport about it.

At the exit, we talked with some people who were using a cobek. There's something I've always admired about grinding stones so I asked if I could take a picture.

We headed back to the restaurant we had passed through earlier. As we waited for lunch, I reminded the kids about a book W has read in which the father, instructing the daughter on how to write, told her to try to soak in "the familiar spirit" of a place, or the sensory aspects of a place that seem definitive of the place. We devoted 15 seconds to each: sound, sight, and touch (apologies to the other senses: we ran out of time before the food arrived). As we went around the table and commented on some aspects of the "familiar spirit": the sound of motor cycles, the sound of falling water from a decorative waterfall, the sight of a pot with a bundle of sticks sticking out of it, the sight of the wastafel that restaurants often have here out on the open, the feel of the humidity, the feel of the breeze, the feel of a drop of sweat crawling down the temple.  

We passed back by the antique market and I took a pic of the entrance so I could remember the name.

W, insisting that I take a pic of this statue along the side of the road.

Then he wondered why, if I took a picture of one of them, I didn't take a picture of all of them individually. I pointed out that there were many statues. It was just about this time when a family that we know from church drove by and wondered where we were going, and wondered if we wanted to get into their car. We took them up on it.

They took us to a fruit market in search of durian. It's a bad year for durian, so we bought some other fruit.

But our friends were insistent that we find durian, so we went elsewhere. They told us that if durian is the king of fruit, then their family is the king of durian.