Into Town

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A trip to Jakarta

We decided, along with two girls from work, to go into town for the night last weekend.  Senddi and Ayu helped us navigate the trains and we made it to "Old town" Jakarta.  This is the old Dutch capital area.

It was pretty crowded on some commuter trains.
Thankfully, ours weren't this bad.  There was even a little
AC on most of them.

We enjoyed the colonial high life
while sipping on some cappuccinos.

Built around 1805, Batavia Cafe is one of the oldest
buildings in the city.  It overlooks the main square
of the old town.

wandering the streets

There is one Chili's in the middle of the city.  We couldn't
wait to taste some real Tex-mex.  It was a rare treat,
bottomless chips and salsa and fajitas.

Around Here

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Sanity

To keep ourselves occupied, we had to make a few adjustments to our lives.  First, we found a kitten in the street and decided to nurse it back to health.  Then we bought a motorbike so we could take trips around town more easily.  This really opens up our possibilities to explore on the weekends.

At first, we named him "Scraggles" for obvious reasons.

He's growing big and healthy now, and he
loves to be outside.

safety first

This is our Suzuki SkyDrive in our driveway

Having fun in a toy store

All of the malls have things for kids to ride around on.
This unicorn actually walks.

We found BagelBagel in Jakarta, maybe the only place to
find bagels.  That's real pork bacon inside!

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Bogor

We took a ride down to the next city south of us.  It was a little more than an hour drive.  It turns out that there is literally no way to escape traffic on this island.  The drive wasn't so bad though, and when we got there we got to relax.  There is a huge botanical garden in the middle of town that was created by the Dutch a few centuries back.  They used it to experiment with and develop cash crops like tobacco, spices, and coffee.  It has an amazing diversity: there are hundreds of species of palm trees among many other things.

giant lilypads a meter across

Julia in the orchid garden

some interesting flowers

banana plant with small pink bananas