The decapitated brides

Sinta arranged for a bunch of people to meet at the inculs drinks room, from there we were going to go watch a ceremony that was being held in memory of the first sultan of Jogja (I think) We all met up at 10:30 am, but for some reason (I blame jam karet) we didn’t end up leaving until 12:30… and just as we were leaving it started pouring! Haha, we could have left two hours earlier when it was still fine… anyway, I was a little worried, cause Ijo said his performance was on at 5:30, so it didn’t leave much time to get to where we had to be and watch this ceremony…

There was a parade down one of the streets with hundreds of people both in the parade and lining the streets to watch it, some playing instruments, some dressed as warriors, some carrying oggoh oggoh, and just my luck, my camera went dead after taking just one photo! … I should have checked it before I left… all this time it was still raining, so I was getting a lille wet. We moved on to another area where the actual ceremony was going to take place. We were told if we weren’t paying attention then we would be possessed by old spirits… lil spooky… and that as a part of the ceremony two brides would be decapitated… don’t ask the reasoning behind this, I have no idea… of course I immediately asked… and REAL people are no longer used for the ceremony, but they use dolls instead. We were waiting outside this fenced off area, but then for some reason we were allowed to enter (apparently because we’re bule… white people.. Haha) so we went in, they just told us to be careful cause at the end of the ceremony they throw fruit out to the crowd, who will go nuts for it… they weren’t wrong.. Haha… everyone was scrambling everywhere trying to get some of the fruit, adam was lucky enough to have one basically thrown right to him… haha… intentionally or not, I dunno.  Wait, I skipped a bit… the decapitation.. How could I forget.. Yeah… they used dolls, except they still had blood in them :S … so they cut the throats of these two bride dolls, and all this blood started pouring out over the alter. It was definitely interesting tho, even if a little strange.

By this time it was already 5:30 .. Seeing Ijo dance didn’t look promising… on the way out we were stopped by a couple of young Indo guys who wanted to interview us about what we thought of the ceremony… I managed to avoid the camera, so Adam got stuck doing the whole interview.. It was pretty funny.. They were asking him questions in Indonesian.. And I dunno if he realized or not.. But he was answering them all in english.. Haha.. The strangest interview ever.. I dunno if they had any idea what he was talking about.

A few kms and thousands of people away, we got  back to out bikes, It was now already 6 pm, everyone wanted to go for dinner, but I wanted to go watch Ijo dance (if it was anything like his rehearsal, then he wouldn’t start til about 6:30 anyway) but the thing was.. I had no idea where I was, or how to get to the dance place from there. So I just had to follow with the others. It wasn’t so bad, we went and ate at a warung, (oh, all this time it had been raining too, so I was cold and wet by this stage), Yodim looked like he was gonna get sick, we all ordered hot tea to get warm. After dinner it was definitely way too late to go see Ijo… So I missed it :( .. But he said he has another performance coming up… so maybe I can watch him then. Then there was the drive home…. Also in the rain… you know, I never thought I would be cold in Indonesia… but on a motorbike at night, its always cold, add rain to the mix and its freezing! The ice cold mandi in the morning isn’t something I look forward to either...lol… a hot afternoon on the other hand, just never want to stop pouring the water!