However, on Saturday morning (the 8th), I awoke to a WhatsApp from Professor Tirta saying that both Tim and I were being invited as keynote speakers to two simultaneous conferences at Universitats Tarumanagara (UNTAR) in Jakarta, Java on the 12th and that they needed to know our decision by the 10th. The ICASTE was for me and about engineering and resilience and the ICBHS for Tim (about the connection between humanities and business) This was pretty short notice and made even more complex by the fact that Kalani is flying into Denpasar on the 15th and we needed to be back to Bali in time to get the house ready and meet him at the airport. When we asked Professor Tirta about talk time, he said to plan for 30-60 minutes per talk (yikes!). We agreed to go for two nights and tried to move our return to Bali up by one day so that we'd have more than 24-hours at home before having to leave for the airport but that turned out not to be possible. The best we could do was leave on the Monday morning rather than the afternoon like we'd planned. We were home by early afternoon and spent the rest of the day frantically writing talks. Early the next morning (Tuesday the 11th) we went by taxi to the airport, only to learn that the flight was delayed by 3 hours. So we bought some US-priced coffees in the airport and stayed patient (I tried to get online on my laptop but could not navigate the airport wi-fi, so no talk-writing for us with that time).
We arrived in Jakarta and were picked up by Dr. Hetty who was a really nice social scientist, she took us to our hotel, where we dropped our stuff and (at 5:30pm!) went out to a dim sum lunch. It was delicious. The university had arranged for a 16th floor executive suite for us which was enormous and really nice (living room, two bathrooms and a bedroom) and Dr. Hetty told us that dinner would be provided from 6-10pm on the 17th floor Executive Club and that someone would pick us up at 8:30 the next morning for our talks. |
After the church, we crossed the (very busy) road and went to the largest mosque in Asia (and third largest in the world, after Mecca and Medina). We were taken on a tour of the mosque which is as beautiful as the church but in a really different way. It was designed by a Catholic architect which every seemed to think was pretty cool. It can accommodate 100,000 people inside and another 100,000 in an outside terrace. The main dome is 45m in diameter (which is big, but not that big, I'm re-thinking the impact of a 30-m telescope), the secondary dome is 8m diameter and the spire on the big dome is 17m high: 17-08-45 -- the date of Indonesian independence. It was just before 6pm when we left and so everyone was getting ready to break their fast. They told us that they serve 5,000 "breakfast" meals per day during Ramadan
The final place we went was to New Chinatown on Golf Island. The entire island is man-made and there was, apparently a lot of controversy in it's building. It's only two-years old and it was pretty crazy to be in a place where everything is new. We went to a really famous Taiwanese restaurant there (and I forgot the name) and had a pretty amazing meal. Dr. Didi had recently finished his Ph.D. at a university in Taiwan so he was an expert for ordering and it was really fun to hear some of his stories of while he was getting the degree. |