brian, beads, books, and bird

brian returned from taiwan last saturday morning, and it was a happy reunion! sierra made a card that we all signed, and she even wrote a lovely poem for him. we were all very happy to have b back. and we were, of course, excited to see the oleh oleh he brought back for us from taiwan.

 here we are with our taiwanese booty.

 as you'll recall, b went to a glass bead factory while in taiwan, and he picked s and i up some necklaces there. he also got w a cool bolo tie and bracelet. then there are also three hour glasses and a couple sculptural pieces he picked up. wah!

 i love this picture of the three of them. i don't remember what i said to elicit this response.

b flew all night long to get back to solo. he was tired, but he powered through, and we decided to check out a pasar buku (book market) we had seen awhile ago. 

 it was interesting to see that the book market had "wild animus," which, for those who haven't read it, is a crazy book. i found it at the di several years ago and sort of read it in horror. it is truly wild that it made it's way all the way to indonesia.

 the book market was a bit different than i expected, but interesting. nearly all of the books were in indonesian--so i didn't buy any for myself. we did get a couple Pramoedya Ananta Toer books for b. and we also found an old superhero comic book with figures like batman and spiderman with wayan character faces. so we bought that too. 

 this is the oldest book that b found. it's fairly rare and a good find. pelangi means rainbow.

we met a man at the book market who had a book store near the kraton. he said he had a lot of old books--so we took a couple becaks over to his book store. thankfully, we all got there, and we looked around a new book market. i got an indonesian cookbook in english, and b got a couple of books too.

after the book buying, we walked through the antique market and found a new place. there were a few men inside--one who was painting wayang kulit as shown below. and another who was painting a big gamelan.

 

 the musical instruments were large and beautiful. the smaller red drums were pretty reasonable. i may want to go back and get one (if i can figure out how to bring it home).

 a neat statue outside the gamelan/wayang place.

 we then took a taksi to the bird market because b promised the kiddos we'd get a pet bird. we looked around and settled on getting this kind (in equal part because it was cheap and only needed to eat bananas).

 here the kids are with the new family bird. 

so we got home with the bird, and b opened up the cage to get the water in. sadly, brian's hand wasn't big enough to close off the exit, and our bird flew out! b and s saw it fly away. we were all disappointed since we had been looking forward to our pet bird for a long time.

we came in to the house and sat down to have lunch. while warming up the left over rice and noodles, i heard a sound above the cupboards, and we noticed a large cicak eating something.

s kept asking if the bird would come back, and saying how much she wanted it to come back. b said that the chances of it coming back were about 1%. s, undeterred, heard that and said that she thought it would come back. she said that many times. 

then, as we were eating at the table, there was a sudden flutter and flash of wings. our bird flew into the dining room and landed on the chair next to w! incredulous, b carefully went over and grabbed it. none of us could believe that it returned or could understand why it had returned--none of us except s!

 

 you can see how excited we were to have our new pet return. in honor of his miraculous return, b thought we should name it bumerang (as in boomerang, but also Bu Merang (women here are called (i)bu)). so bumerang is back and has a great name!