What a week...

It's been pretty heart-rending, to be honest. We are really, really going to miss this place. Miss it right down at some visceral level that feels like it's always going to hurt. We chose to go. But we're so very sad to be going.

I'll draw a veil over all the frankly tedious stuff that has to be got through when you move house, move job, move country. We've done this so many times, and it never gets any better...

I'm going to focus on the positives.

Goodbyes don't feel very positive. Colleagues, students, neighbours, service-providers who became friends -- we'll miss them all. But I guess the pain of parting is a reaffirmation of relationship. I'm very grateful for the presents and the kind words. Above all, I'm grateful to have known all these people.

And every time I say goodbye, I emphasize that it's au revoir and not adieu. God willing, we'll be back. Or they'll go to Malaysia. Or both.

Another positive is that we have had a week in which to revisit just a few of our favourite food outlets. (Worries over weight gain prohibit the revisiting of ALL our favourite food outlets...)

And we've even discovered some new favourites, such as Pak Pong's tengkleng. This looks like a bowl of bones, but the meat sucks off so effortlessly and the sauce is so tangy and good that you wonder why you're only just encountering this redoubtable dish.



IPIREL kindly held our farewell lunch at Bale Raos. They really do make some tastily different things: perkedel, but made of maize, rather than potato or cassava; timlo (a flavoursome soup); another soup featuring what is apparently the sour cousin of the starfruit; and an entirely different take on gudeg: gudeg manggar, which consists of the standard krecek, chicken, and egg, but instead of the usual jackfruit uses coconut flower. Unique and delicious.

There have also been new experiences. Like ordering goodbye cake from Bu Tatik for our neighbours. What size box? Round or square? What kind of cake? How big? Standard, or with extra ingredients? Decisions, decisions... When the cakes are ready, the next new experience is motorbiking home with stacks of large, quite heavy cake boxes on each knee.



Because long experience has taught me it's impossible to clean a place you're still living in, we moved out to Tembi Rumah Budaya for our last two nights. Very much a positive. We have an enormous, wood-panelled fale, with an L-shaped bedroom, a four-poster bed, two bathrooms (indoor and outdoor), and an ample porch. Outside is a little stream -- or really a series of connected ponds. The little plops we hear are the fish jumping from one to the other. In front of the house is a rose-apple tree. Big ones. Not the tiny, button rose-apples we got from our tree.

Across the way lives a perkutut. Nearby lives another. Both have flute-like tones, because that's what perkutut are famous for. But one goes: "tu tu-tu-tu-tu tu tu-tu-tu-tu" (a kind of frilly sound), while the other goes: "tuu tuu tuuuu" (a kind of sober sound). I love listening to them. They are the sound of Java.

In the other direction is the pendopo, where people practise gamelan or Javanese singing every afternoon. Just lovely...

There's also a nice feeling of coming full circle. The museum at Tembi was our first little trip, and since then we've been many times for lunch. So spending the last two nights of our current Java sojourn in this gracious and welcoming place somehow feels very fitting.

And now we've just had our last dinner... The food was wonderful: cassava leaf soup; fried fish, with rice, sambal, and trancam; pink coconut jelly... The music was nostalgic: classic Javanese, campursari, keroncong...

But our mood was not buoyant. I know we'll be back. But at the moment, that thought is not helping.

I'm trying to focus on the positive. But at the end of the day, we're leaving our home, our friends, our neighbourhood, and our Rufus. And that's hard.

I'm trying to focus on the positive. But let's be honest: goodbyes suck.