Surabaya and Yogya

After Bromo I went to Surabaya. Surabaya is a huge city with lots of traffic and it's very hot. I went to Surabaya to find the convent where the aunt of my grandmother used to be a nun. At home we have a little book with old pictures of the building and with the old address of the complex of the convent, church and schools. Sadly enough I forgot to take a copy of the book with me, so I only had the address to work with. I decided to stay at hotel Paviljoen, because the Lonely Planet says that the elderly owners still speak Dutch. When I asked the owner if he knew the old address he got out is old map of Surabaya and tried to help me. But the street was not on the map, unfortunately. He also had a list of schools, churches and other official buildings from that time, so I decide to check out 2 of the 3 catholic girl schools. The other one was to far from the hotel. When I arrived at the first school, I could clearly see that this was not the right school, cause it looked very different from what I remembered from the pictures. But a becakdriver told me that that street that I was looking for was not far from my hotel, so I walked back to the hotel and later went to that street the becakdriver told me. But there was not even a school or church there so Im not sure whether he understood me correctly. Afterwards I walked to that other school but that school was again looking very different. So the trip to Surabaya turned out to be invain. Maybe if I wanted to spend more time there and if I had the pictures with me, it would have been easier. But I was happy to leave Surabaya the next day.

I have been in Yogyakarta for 2 day now. And it's a nice city. There are a lot of tourists here, even though I haven't really noticed it on the streets, but many of the hotels are full. I've been walking around a lot. Yesterday I visited the Kraton (Sultan's Palace) where they have free dance performances on Sunday mornings. Today I walked to the Via Via Cafe on the other side of town. The Via Via Cafe is managed by Belgian people and I remembered when the earthquake hit last year the Belgian Radio phoned the manager of the cafe to talk about how bad it all was. When you walk through Yogya today, there's nothing to see anymore of the earthquake, and it's easy to forget that many people were killed and many houses were destroyed. In the Via Via Cafe they have their own little paper in which they write about how they had to rebuild the cafe, but also about how they helped many families of their staff to rebuild their lives...


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