More Batik for the Collection

This weekend we headed to Central Java for the wedding of one of our colleagues. A dozen of us from the office left on the night train on Thursday after work. (We would have gone on Friday but it's school vacation week and tickets were sold out.) After a nine hour train ride we got in to Solo around 2AM and went to our hotel.

On Friday, Haviva and I wandered the city, which is famous for its batik, looking for an outfit for the Saturday night wedding. Surprisingly, Haviva had more luck than I did, finding a modern-style batik top. My big problem is finding a shirt that has sleeves that are long enough but which wasn't made for someone 300 pounds heavier than me. Eventually I gave in and bought a rather tent-like shirt with plenty long sleeves.

Friday night we had dinner at the same fish restaurant that we went to in January - the one with the owner who took us to the market the next day. We had a great dinner and a nice time catching up with the owner. Saturday we had big plans to visit some nearby ruins but found it difficult to get up in time for an early bus due to the lack of windows in our hotel room. Instead we slept in and did some more wandering.

The wedding was scheduled for 7PM but we were clued in that there would be a family-only ceremony beforehand that we could watch. The actual wedding had taken place in a private church ceremony (it was a Christian couple) on Friday morning, so the rest was just for show. And quite a show it was.

The families were each decked out in their respective batik motifs and the bride and groom were dressed in traditional Javanese garb. We weren't quite sure what was going on, but it was all very cool.

The wedding as a whole was quite different from anything we'd been too before. For one, the bride and groom never left the stage area, well away from the reception. Guests would arrive, sign the guest book, drop an envelope in the lockbox and walk down a long reception line of family members until they reached the bride and groom to pay their respects. After that you proceeded out to the reception area, where you stuck around for anything between ten minutes and a couple of hours.

Our coworkers were there for litearally 15 minutes. They didn't even bother to eat, which was just silly. The food was excellent - especially the desserts. There were about a dozen food stations set up under a giant tent and there must have been well over 500 guests. The entertainment was traditional dancing, which was done by two women who arrived on the backs of men dressed as chickens.

Another fantastic tradition - at least we assume its a tradition - was that guests left with virtually anything that wasn't tied down. We're not talking flowers and centerpieces. People left with all the decorations, including melons, beans, eggplants, gourds, potatoes and our favorite, a bird cage with two birds in it.

Sunday we took the train back to Jakarta - a really impressive ride through rice fields and volcanoes.