Mini Indonesia Garden Park

Today I went with a friend to a 100 hectare park filled with architectural examples from 33 provinces in Indonesia. There also was a wonderful museum that highlighted, arts, crafts, clothes an traditions of these area. The Suharto's planned and built it so you could get a sense of the diversity  of the people here. It was spectacular and we had some interesting experiences will the locals as well.

First let me say that this is one of the largest open spaces around. It has a lot of gardens, too,
but it was just about empty of people, except for the massive water park. As we rode a foot powered surrey around the rectangular lake that sported islands that looked like Indonesia, people snickered at us. There were no other westerners there at all, and I guess we looked pretty silly. The only people who were there were Muslims in their Friday night best having "picnics" in their favorite provincial architecture, without the food.  Friday at dawn, Ramadan is over and the closer it gets to that day more get together's happen. As we stopped to take a picture of some of the kids leaving the life size model mosque with their parents, they swarmed the surrey. As they posed for pictures with us, more kids came over with parents. I invited them to sit in the surrey and we took more pictures. It was amazing to look into their faces. Some were outgoing, others were shy and some looked anxious at meeting us. Some parents pushed their kids over to be in the pictures. When we said bye, they all turned and left waving energetically. After we went to the buildings that were built by people who live in South Sulawesi, where our exchange student Indah is from. It is one of the most interesting people in Indonesia. I've included pictures from the tour we took in a typical rich man's house.

They are unusual because of their funeral and burial practices. In a nut shell. They have the biggest celebration when someone dies. The richer you are the more pigs and water buffalo you sacrifice and eat with hordes of people. Since you need time to save up for this expensive party, when the person dies, they mummify their relative in their bedroom and let them continue to stay there until up to a year. Then they are put in to a cloth coffin and processed around to a Karst mountain, which looks like a shard of glass thrown from heaven into the ground. Each family has a cave bored into the top part. The richer you are the higher your cave entrance. Then someone climbs a ladder with the coffin up to the cave and puts it in. There is a small entrance which gets large inside. No names are placed on the coffins or grave entrance, but there are effigies that are carved in a sitting position and placed next to the rest of your family in effigy sitting on chairs. They look like they are sitting in box seats at the baseball game. Lastly, there houses are made to resemble sailing ships. The story behind his is that they were sailing people who came from China 1000nds of years ago. When they got to Java, there were already too many Javanese living on the coast for them to move in too, so they build houses inland resembling ships, because that is what they knew how to build. They ended up in the highlands and became fisherman. Here are some photos.