Today was May 19th. My eyes opened at four o'clock in the morning of Java. I calculated, it would be three o'clock in the morning on the island of Bali and it would be twelve o'clock in the night in India. How strange is this body! The biological clock in it automatically adjusts itself to the local time. How does all this happen! How little do we ourselves, longing to know the whole world, know about the capabilities of our own bodies! I noticed that other family members also got up at exactly five o'clock. As if they are in India and it is the right time to get up!
Mr. We had given Anto's time to come at 9 in the morning. He came with the car on time. The sky was clear at this time. The sun was not shining and the weather was pleasant. We had had breakfast in the morning and had taken lunch with us. Therefore Mr. It didn't take us long to walk with Anto. Our first target today was the Borobudur Buddhist Monastery, but before going there we wanted to do at least two things. Our Indonesian currency had run out, so we had to take Indonesian rupees for dollars from a reliable money exchanger. We weren't exchanging our dollars together because we didn't want us to have to pay the fee to convert our Indonesian currency back to dollars when we depart Indonesia. The second task was that we wanted to go to the railway station and get the boarding pass for tomorrow's train journey. Vijay had made an online booking for this train from New Delhi, whose print-out was with us but it was necessary to get the boarding pass before boarding the train.
Currency Exchanger
Mr. Anto took us to a five-star hotel in the Jalan Malio area of Central Java, which had a reputable and reliable money exchanger's office as soon as we entered. We exchanged few dollars as per our requirement. We saw that here too, at all the counters, twenty-two-year-old girls were exchanging currency with foreigners who had come from countries all over the world. The girl sitting at the counter asked us to fill out a small form and show us our passport. We asked her how many Indonesian rupees she would give us for one dollar. He beckoned us to look for an electronic board displaying the international rates of the time. We nodded in satisfaction and gave him the dollars. The girl calculated again and wrote us on a piece of paper showing us how many Indonesian rupees we would get. Absolutely settled proceedings, no concealment anywhere. All the behavior very soft and in short words. He matched our form details with our passport and handed over the amount to us. This whole task would hardly have taken five minutes. We left the money exchanger's office and came to Jalan Malio.
Sightseeing in Jalan Malio
We decided to take a walk for some distance in Jalan Malio. In the Javanese language, Jalan means street and Malio refers to the people of Java with the Malio surname. The surname of 55 lakh people in Java is Malio. This street is known by the name of one of them reputed Malio. Jalan Malio in Central Java Province is a crowded area like Connaught Place in New Delhi. Here stand gleaming malls. Foreign tourists keep flocking. The number of four-star and five-star hotels on either side of Malio's wide road cannot be crossed. Beechak and Dokar were seen walking in large numbers in this entire street, on which foreign tourists can easily be seen roaming.
Tugu Stesyan
Mr. Anto took us from Jalan Malio to Tugu railway station in Yogyakarta city. It was not far from Jalan Malio. Although this railway station is currently called Yogyakarta Stesyan, its old name is Tugu Stasyan and the same is prevalent among the local people. In Java the station is pronounced stasion. On the main building of the railway station, only Jogjakarta is written in big saffron colored letters and Roman script on the outside. This area used to be the famous place of Java in the Dutch colonial era. Almost all major Dutch colonial officials resided in this area. The king of Yogyakarta also used to travel between Batavia to Tugu station during that period. In AD 2000, this station was modernized and given its present form. Then it was named Yogyakarta instead of Tugu. From this it can be inferred that the word Tugu may have been related to the Dutch rulers of the colonial period.
Vijay and I went to the cabin of a railway officer sitting in a glass cabin at the station and asked from where we would get the boarding pass. The officer said that there is a vending machine outside, print it from there. The officer was speaking in English, but his tone was as if speaking in a language from the island of Java. That's why I could not understand a single word of his words, but I do not know how Vijay understood his point! I am still amazed to think that how did Vijay understand his point! The vending machine was fully automatic. As soon as Vijay showed the bar code on the printout of the online booking in front of the scanner of the machine, our tickets came out. If I had to do this work, I would have understood how to print out the boarding ticket only after several people explained it! It was the generation gap. Working on modern machines that understand coding bars is difficult for my older generation to understand.
Indonesia equipped with state-of-the-art facilities
Till now I had experienced this thing many times that even though Indonesia is a poor country and the largest Muslim country in the world, but everything here is surprising. State-of-the-art computerized equipment is installed at every place including shops, temples, government offices, stations and trains. Little girls operate them indiscriminately. India is still far away from these facilities. From Indonesia's cities to villages and towns look very beautiful due to good cleanliness. It will probably take many centuries for India to reach this level of cleanliness. There is no crowd, noisy and noisy anywhere here. It will probably take several thousand years for the people of India to reach this civic sense.
Despite being a Muslim country, girls and women of all ages in Indonesia work freely in commercial organizations, public places and government departments. No woman wears a burqa. They cover only their head and ears, that too is not mandatory. Many girls appear in mini skirts. All the girls are skilled in their work. We did not see any girl or employee talking among themselves or on mobile phone. Dress code is applicable in most places. All the girls follow the dress code. Except for the prayers played on loudspeakers, there is no noise to be heard in the streets and on the streets, neither during the day nor at night.
Fruit Shopping
When he left the railway station, as soon as he sat in the car, his father said that he has to buy fruits from a shop on the way. We have Mr. Requested Anto to stop the car at such a place from where we can buy fruits. Mr. Anto kept driving the car but could not find any place where the car could be stopped. Traffic rules in Indonesia are very strict. If any driver or citizen ignores them then he can get into big trouble. We moved out of Central Java and came to the countryside. Eventually at a kiosk-like shop, Mr. Anto stopped the car. He apologized to us as to why he could not stop at any fruit shop in the city. Since there is no difficulty here, so you guys can buy fruits from here. We understood his difficulty. That's why we thanked him for staying here without any spoiling.
It was a small shop in which many types of fruits were kept. There was not a plethora of exotic fruits available in the gleaming huge malls, but native fruits that were grown in Indonesia. These included small yellow colored bananas which are less sweet and more sour in food. We took those bananas. Similarly, there was some brown colored fruit tied in bunches like small litchis. It could have been called Java's native litchi. It had less pulp, juice and aroma. The size of the oranges was also very small. Apples must have been exotic, but they were also small.
The fruit seller did not understand a single word of English, but he did not swell with joy on seeing the foreigners at his shop. It was a matter of pride for him in that village to sell fruits from his shop to foreigners. That shopkeeper may not understand, but by now we had understood very well how to do shopping in Indonesia. That's why we took a small quantity of various fruits from him. The shopkeeper's hair was blown away. He could hardly have imagined that one day he would successfully sell his deal to foreigners whose language he did not even know. He was surprised to see that we had Indonesian money in our pockets, which we knew very well to use. Fruits were bought. Mr. Anto's car again started moving towards Borobudur Monastery. We were surprised to see that there was no garbage or peels lying around the town fruit shop.