Day 29: Whoever said "There's no such thing as a free lunch" has never had lunch in Indonesia

We arrived at the Singapore airport extra early to enjoy its modern marvel. The futuristic and minimalistic design was impressive, as were the amenities available. You can pay for a hotel room by the hour (in Thailand, we would be suspicious of such marketing, but in a transit airport it makes perfect sense), work out in a gym, swim in the indoor pool, and even surf the web on the free wireless - not to mention the endless hallways of luxury shopping. Despite all of these perks, their airport security protocol was a bit perplexing. Rather than having one security checkpoint, each individual gate has a scanner and a staff of 5 to check people right before boarding. We assume it's a method of job creation for the heavily populated island nation.

After deplaning onto the tarmac in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Ashwin realized he had left his Tilly hat in his seat (if you have been keeping up with the pictures, you know how important these are to us). Being some of the first people off the plane, we had to wait until all of the passengers had exited before retrieving the hat. This put us at the end of the hour long visa application line. After paying the 25 USD non-refundable fee, we looked at the board of eligible countries for visa on arrival and the US was not one. It turns out they call it "Amerika Serikat", which translates as Kingdom of America. That's an interesting way to think about things.

It is hard to take the currency seriously here and not think of purchasing experiences as a game of monopoly, as 1 USD gets you 10,000 rupiah. On top of this, everything is dirt cheap. We had a filling lunch, complete with drinks, for 0.50 USD. It might as well have been free.

Not wanting to waste any more time, we headed straight for the bus station (which oddly enough was part of the international airport and train station - a very convenient transportation hub for this small city) for Prambanan, the largest Hindu temple compound in Java dating from the 9th century, and yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Unfortunately, the temples were severely damaged by the 2006 earthquake, but we enjoyed seeing the amazingly well preserved relief panels depicting various religous stories.

While walking the streets of Yogyakarta (or "Jogja" as the locals call it) we were stopped by many bicycle rikshaw drivers, pointing to our hats and saying we look like John Wayne, or pointing to our skin and saying we look Indonesian. In our minds these two are mutually exclusive, but apparently they see the similarity. While purchasing our daily milk at the minimart, we noticed condoms on sale being marketed as "Single Use Condoms". The fact that they have to point this out explains the rampant problem of overpopulation in these countries.

Our first dinner consisted of 4 different items, only one of which we could actually identify - the steamed rice. We thought we had ordered chicken (the menu didn't have a word of English) but the bones were miniscule and as we left we noticed that the pictures on the wall were of pidgeons. As if this weren't bad enough, we couldn't even begin to identify the other two items on the plate. While paying, Danny tried to give the woman the equivalent of 0.20 USD for our 2 USD meal, a simple mistake to make with the ridiculous number of zeros on the bills and no commas. Earlier, we had taken out one million rupiahs - we felt like kings until we realized this doesn't even buy a pair of brand name shoes.

Still hungry, we headed to our second dinner in a more tourist-friendly establishment with English on the menus. After stuffing ourselves with chicken satay and an Indonesian beef curry, we asked if glasses of water were free, to which the waitress said "Yes". She returned with two empty glasses. I guess we shouldn't complain given that the whole meal was 4 USD.