Museum Day

 Day 5, January 15

Day number 3 in Bandung. Same morning routine as previous days. Rise, morning stuff, and write while Bonnie does her exercise. Some days I write more than others. Also putting reviews on TripAdvisor for hotel, attractions, and eateries. I use the reviews so seems only right to some of my opinions out there for other to see. Some people actually find them useful.

Breakfast was pretty much the same this morning with the addition of little omelets. They were tasty. Breakfast has been very good during our time here. We were again supposed to meet Arief at 8 AM. Alas, it was not to be. He had texted pictures to me for your time together yesterday at about 7 so thought he would be here but he laid down and fell back to sleep. We did our best to keep busy while we waited.

Upon Arief’s arrival we took a taxi to the the Geology Museum. This is a place I was very interested in visiting. There was a problem. The museum is closed on Friday. We did tramp around on the grounds. If the grounds are any indication of what is inside this is a place to go when you come to Bandung, Indonesia. There was a display of early oil technology, a number of displays of petrified, and a basalt sculpture that was just beautiful. There was a display of the three different types of rocks. This building yard is more informative than many full museums.

From here we walked over to the Indonesian Postal Museum. As a stamp collector this was interesting for me. I enjoyed looking at all of the memorabilia, including post boxes, scales, and vignettes of postmen from decades past. And of course there were stamps. Stamps from all over the world that were very accessible to the general public. This is not a museum for everyone but I had a good time.

Saung Angklung Udjo is an Indonesian cultural show. There was dancing, music, and puppetry. The puppet show was a demonstration of how the puppets are used to tell a story. There are the good puppets and the evil ones. The puppets fight and of course good wins over evil. The demonstration was brief but in reality the stories that are told with the puppets take hours. Then there was singing and dancing by the children. They also played the Angklung during their singing and dancing it was quite enjoyable. After the children were finished Angklungs were distributed to every member of the audience. The master then proceeded to teach us how to play songs following simple directions from him and his son. With good direction we were actually able to play a Beatle’s song and another which I forgot the title. Near the end of the show about 10 people used banks of Angklungs to perform one of Queen’s greatest hits. It was a very interesting musical demo. As the last hurrah the children came back out, sang a song, and then proceeded to bring members of the audience down to the floor to dance with them. A good time was had by all.

We had dinner at the Cisangkuy Market. It was quite tasty and very inexpensive. Since this was a day and a half ago I don’t remember what anyone had to eat. I only remember it was delicious and they only take debit cards.

After dinner we went to see the movie, The 5th Wave. I had seen previews in the theaters in Anchorage about this movie and I wasn’t impressed and didn’t expect to go see it. Well turns out the movie was quite good and we saw it a week before anyone in the States. It won’t be released there until January 22.