Selfie, Selfie!
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Bangkok, heading to Cambodia on Monday. I wrote this in January, while we were in Yogyakarta, Indonesia—that feels like a long time ago, rather than just a few weeks.
Selfie, Selfie!
Yesterday we went to see a UNESCO-listed Hindu temple complex. We were told it’s the tallest Hindu temple in the world, but having seen a lot of Hindu temples, I’m not buying that. It is, however, ancient and beautiful and one of the big tourist sights in Yogyakarta.
It’s actually a bunch of temples, all within walking distance. They were built in the 9th or 10th century, or thereabouts. No one’s quite sure.
It was our second temple visit in Yogyakarta (which is exclusively referred to as ‘Jogja’—I tried saying YogYa to an Indonesian friend of Lane’s and was firmly corrected).
We had visited the Buddhist temple a couple of days earlier, and nearly boiled to death (the words ‘Bataan death march’ crossed my mind at one point) even though we arrived at 8:20 in the morning. It’s not too bad here (the island of Java) until about 9, by which point the sun is high enough in the sky to scorch skin and turn the air to steam.
So we started our Prambanan visit even earlier—we arrived by 7:30, assuming it would be mostly empty at that ridiculous hour.
We were wrong. By the time we reached the main cluster of temples, there were already at least half a dozen school groups on field trips. [Editorial aside: one thing I was always grateful for, and still am to this day, was the highly civilized morning start times of our children’s schools—8:30 for middle school, and 9 for high school. If I’d had to get them out the door in time for a field trip that clearly started much earlier than 7:30, I probably would’ve just told them to drop out already.]
That’s when the fun started. I could see a gaggle of girls eyeing me, so I smiled and waved at them. And suddenly, I was surrounded by twenty little girls screaming Selfie! Selfie! So I posed for photo after photo after photo. Lee wandered ahead, seemingly oblivious to the ruckus I had caused. I lost sight of him when I was swallowed up by the jumping, giggling, shrieking girls.
At one point, I said thank you in Indonesian, and that group of girls let out an ear-splitting roar of appreciation. Then they shouted again, when I asked if they were from here, from Jogja.
Eventually I extricated myself, only to round a corner and find Lee—the tiny black dot you see in that sea of yellow above. Each group of kids was dressed in their own matching t-shirts—I still think of them by their colors: the yellow shirts, the turquoise shirts, the purple shirts.
And thus began an hour—a solid hour, I kid you not—of complete chaos. There were probably close to a thousand school kids in that first group of temples, and it felt as if we took photos with about 700 of them. We posed for big group photos, solo photos, one-on-one selfies. We posed together and apart. We linked arms, we high-fived, we made peace signs and thumbs-up. We posed with teens and littles and more than a few adults who didn’t want to be left out.
We’d say good-bye to a group, walk fifteen feet, and another group would come rushing up. Sometimes one group would see a group already swarming around us and come running over, and suddenly we were in the middle of an amoeba of brightly-colored t-shirts.
In all these years of taking photos with random strangers (I almost never say no, especially to kids), we’ve never had an experience quite like that. Eventually, when I got so hot I thought I might faint, we escaped through a side gate and walked off to another temple grouping, which proved to be peaceful and silent and totally devoid of other people. We stayed there, quietly recovering, until we both started feeling dehydrated.
As we walked back toward the exit, Lee said, ‘That was crazy.’
‘Yep,’ I replied. ‘But we’ll never forget it.’
It was the best kind of craziness.
Take care,
Lisa
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