The Horse Show

I spent a large portion of last weekend out at the local horse farm. They were hosting a huge national level dressage and jumping competition Friday – Sunday. Stables from as far away as Jakarta sent horses, riders, trainers, and grooms! I love competition and I love horses and I love weekends and I love excuses to be outdoors. So basically, it was a great weekend! I could pretty much care less about dressage, but I really enjoy watching jumping, because let’s face it – someone could fall and break their face, and that makes it that much more exciting. I took a lot of pictures. A lot of random pictures. Of horse parts. And people. And scenery. But only on Sunday when they did the small jumps (20 – 70 cm). I didn’t bring my camera on Saturday when they were doing the big, impressive jumps (up to 120 cm). Sorry. So anyways, here they are. Enjoy!

                

That last shot is my personal favorite. The horse’s expression cracks me up every time. He looks like he’s about to die going over this 50 cm jump!

On another interesting note, I found out that since we’re still at the tail end of rainy season, the stable hired what’s called a pawang hujan to keep it from raining during the 3 day competition. Just to be safe, you know. Apparently this man has the power to know which clouds have rain, and then to move those clouds to a different part of the sky. It rained every day leading up to the competition, but there was not a drop of rain over the weekend! The pawang hujan said to watch out though, because Monday, there would be a HUGE rainstorm. Since he’d held back the rain for so long, of course. Unfortunately for his credibility, it didn’t rain again until yesterday (9 days after he predicted it would rain), so I’m skeptical. I was talking to Hotjaga about this though, and he told me a story of how one time he was playing soccer (he’s a locally famous goalie) and it was raining so hard. A pawang hujan happened to be in the crowd, and he made it stop raining on the field. It was still raining on all four sides of the soccer field, but not ON the field. CRAZY! Anyways, here is a picture of the pawang hujan the stable hired for the weekend. It’s the only picture I got of him before he stalked off, inevitably to check for rain clouds to the south.

And speaking of clouds, here is the last picture I took of the last day of the contest, right before heading home.