Hello, How Are You, Where Are You From?

Wow. We are in Asia. I can hardly believe it. Feels very odd to be in a continent we've never been to before.

We arrived yesterday in Jakarta after a really long couple of flights: 3 hrs to LA, 13 to Taipei, and 5 to Jakarta. (There will be a post about the Taipei airport coming, but I don't have the pictures here at the internet cafe.) But we made it, as did our bags, and were met at the airport by my cousin Sam, and my uncle Dwight arrived about 45 minutes later. We drove, through some of the hairiest traffic I've ever seen, out to their house in Bogor, in the mountains south of the city. Very nice place.

Sam, incidentally, is about to turn twenty and has stolen from me the honor of Most Successful Actor In The Winkler Family. He's an extremely good-looking young man and got "discovered" when he was asked to be on an Indonesian reality TV show by a friend. That wound up turning into a gig on an Indonesian soap opera in which he plays "Dodi," a rich kid who is the friend of a main character. So he is frequently off filming until 4am, but he was gracious enough to take a little vacation time to spend with his "wannabe" cousin. *snicker*

Bogor Botanical Gardens

Today, after sleeping for about twelve hours straight, Lynn and I visited the very famous (President Bush came here on his last Asian trip) Bogor Botanical Gardens while Dwight took his daughters Alex and Miranda shopping for new clothes. The gardens are incredibly beautiful, but the most interesting thing was the attention that we drew as westerners. I read in my guidebook that the Indonesian people are extremely friendly and warm to visitors, but I wasn't quite prepared.

Our Loyal Fans

Nearly every time we passed someone and smiled, they wanted to stop and talk to us. "Hello!!! How are you!!! Where are you from!!!" It was kind of infectious, and I found myself intentionally smiling at people as we passed just to see if they would talk to us. Sometimes the girls just giggled. We were pretty sure we heard one group taking pictures of us from behind as we walked up the trail. Lynn said, "I hope I don't have something on my butt..."

Lynn the rock star

One young man who was leading a group of tourism industry students wanted to know, "McCain, or Obama?" We smiled and confessed "McCain," and he laughed as he said, "I like Obama! He is from Indonesia!" Another family came up to us as we looked at the lotus pond, and wanted to pose for pictures with us. Seems kind of funny; we can just imagine them showing them... "And here we are with some white people we saw at the botanical gardens!"

We're going to have to learn to deal with the papparrazzi, I guess...