lawang sewu

well, far as i can tell, tomorrow holds in store adventures like none other. the first part of the day will be spent driving my motorbike to the next city over, semarang. i'm nervous. first of all, i've never driven my bike to a big city. driving around salatiga is hectic at times (it's asia!), but it's a piece of cake compared to the big city. for my hometown friends, imagine someone spending their entire lives driving around placid rural indiana, then one day dropping them in the middle of new york city traffic during rush hour and expecting them to not kill anybody. yeah, that's about what it's like. but in america, there's at least laws. here, there are unspoken rules of the road, and if a cop doesn't like what you're doing, he can invent an infraction and make you pay him money for it. the alternative is to go to jail. the other nervewracking part is that it's a holiday weekend. which means added traffic. AND since i'm going with friends, the plan is that i'll have a passenger, which entirely throws off the equilibrium of driving that i've spent the last 6 months learning in my safe little haven of salatiga. if it was just me, i'd be more ok. but i have a healthy fear of killing someone else.

nerves aside, the reason we are going is to visit a place called lawang sewu (the house of a thousand doors). it is a famous historic building, constructed during dutch rule. and for the record, the dutch have awesome architecture. also, the building is haunted. it has been for years. because of this, it sits abandoned, visited only by thrill seeking tourists. now, normally, i wouldn't intentionally walk into a building that is demon possessed. but i'm making an exception for the sake of... um... i don't even know what. maybe the fact that it's a tourist location so that somehow makes it seem safer? maybe because my friends want to go? maybe because i've never been there before? maybe because i think it will be a cultural experience? maybe because i'm just too curious?

we drive by this building almost every time we are in semarang, due to its central location. it is beautiful from the outside, and i always wonder what it looks like on the inside. i'm taking my camera with me to photograph the place. however, of all the ghost stories i've heard about this place, the only ones i remember are from people saying over and over how they took hundres of pictures while inside, but when they came out, every photo had been erased. i've seen pictures taken from the outside of the building, but never any from the inside.



so i guess we'll see what develops? i may or may not come back with some awesome black and whites tomorrow. i may or may not come back at all depending on how cantankerous the bus drivers are...