On the Move

Shortly after our visit to the Imperial Palace the winds shifted and we were able to fly from Java to Bali. What a world of difference! Here are some photos I took on the way to our hotel that night. Of course, that was quite the ride as we went from the airport in Denpasar to Ubud, which is in the center of town.

The airport gave us a good preview of what to expect – lots of grand statuary. There was an enormous statue in the middle of the swooping roads in and out of the airport. From the outside, the airport looks like a rolling, modernnesque wave of a building.

Let me backtrack a little. On the plane their served us something I’d read about in manga. They call it “bread”, but from the descriptions/drawings it seemed more like a sandwich. What we ate was kind of like a tuna fish salad stuffed into a croissant shell. I guess I’d call it a sandwich. Maybe.

Ok, back to the monuments. This one is the back side of Suharto, which was at the airport. The roads ran all the way around.

Big ones, little ones, all kinds of statues could be found. Most of them had to do with the Hindu stories. I saw a few tiny ones mounted on roof tops. They tended to come as sets depicting scenes. Those were always from the Hindu stories. Actually, only the one story that I talked about earlier.

Even the bridges had decorative railings that gave them an artistic flare. Most of them had flat topped posts on either end. This gave people a place to put their offerings. Some bridges collected more offerings than others. Some collected graffiti.

In a similar way there were gateways along many of the roads. Most of them were quite large, running around one and a half to three stories tall. These are meant as a kind of spiritual guardian, and were not attached to walls nor did they have gates. Frequently there would be a demon statue at the bottom. That isn’t a table cloth around him. It’s a spiritual dressing that is changed every so often.

Probably the most noticeable difference between Java and Bali were the homes. Most of the wealthier neighborhoods consisted in these collections of buildings and altars. Each family would have it’s own set of altars with each altar being devoted to a different deity. You can see the collection of small roofs on the left. The rest of the home would consist of a collection of small buildings – each building representing a room.

As to businesses, the architecture there tended to have it’s own flare, too. It managed to be both familiar and exotic at the same time quite frequently.

It was a very long day. At the end, there was one familiar sight I was glad to see.