Sultan Palace and The Beach

So the one thing the locals love to talk about is how Yogyakarta has a Sultan. So there is this weird and recently very strained relationship between the Indonesian President and the Sultan of Yogyakarta. The people there love their Sultans and we were quite excited to go visit the palace where he lives. Unfortunately, it was a disappointment. You know it's time to leave when they have the oven mitts that the Sultan used once, on display. They did have a cool ceiling in one of the rooms.
Once we got out of there, we ate some lunch where Andrew managed to con the entertainer into letting him play his gamelon, and then we decided to go to the beach.

The nearest beach is a little ways away, but it was an interesting drive through some rice paddy fields and countryside. The beach was super crowded because it was a Sunday, but it was still fun and quite the experience riding in these horse carts along the beach. The boys loved it even though we hadn't originally planned for the beach so they had to play in their normal clothes...but thank goodness k

ids never really care about stuff like that. On the ride back to the car, they took us on a detour and made us get out at this weird spot where these people were waiting to take us somewhere. Tanner and I were both feeling really weird about it, and we ended up walking to this area that was surrounded by a cement wall with a couple of large boulders in the middle...literally nothing to look at, and these people were telling us that someone important got married there. yay. We realized on the walk back to our horse drawn karts that these people were pretty much just trying to get money from us and acting like they were showing something important to us. It bugged us both, but it is just one of those things...I think Tanner gave them the equivalent of 50 cents. Anyway, all in all it was an interesting day and I think it was good for the kids to have some play time on the beach after we dragged them around all day seeing more touristy stuff.

P.S

(yes, that is a mini motorcycle, and yes that is a monkey...a real one. He entertained my children while we were shopping in a batik store. There are so many wrong things about this picture, I don't even know where to begin...but the craziest part is, this isn't the first time I have seen this in Indonesia. Trained monkeys riding motorcycles...who comes up with this stuff????)