Malioboro and Batik

Malioboro
If you want a full culture shock of Indonesia, the city to visit is Yogyakarta. It is a city filled with culture and traditions; from the buildings to the public transportation to the stores and simply just the people. There’s just soo much soak in when you’re there. The city is of course filled with tourists so many people there seemed to speak or simply just understand English. And of course I checked out all of the tourist locations and more.

One area is called Malioboro. It’s an area filled with stores where you can buy traditional cloths and lots and lots of souvenirs. And you can bargain your price (if you know how to) and get it cheaper. They will for sure mark the price up once they know that you’re a foreigner. If I wasn’t slow at  figuring out what the numbers meant I would’ve had a chance at bargaining… but the numbers are all in the thousands and it gets confusing between thousand and ten thousands. Anyway, Maliaboro is a lot of fun to visit; it’s a long street with lots of stuff to buy.

Batik 

Just like many South East Asian countries, Indonesia is also famous for its Batik clothes. And the city in which Batik is famous is Yogyakarta. I got a chance to check out one of the batik factories. You would think it’s filled with machines making these awesome designs. But all of the batik is handmade, including the waxing, painting and the final products.

The work is divided into four groups of people.

1)     The artist: who comes up with a specific design that he/she wants to makes. He/she then pencils the designs onto the long white cloth.

2)      The waxing women: they use a wax pencil to outline the artist’s pencil work. It’s a very delicate and time consuming job.

3)      The Colouring people: once the wax dries up the following people remove the wax and add colour to the white cloth. They also add sequence or paint, depending on what the design needs.

4)      The Colour changer: There is a huge pot and when I say huge, I mean like taller and wider than me huge. The pot has different colours where they soak the white cloth in.

And yes, these awesome names are made up by me. I think they should officially be called by these names.

The artist can also be replaced by pre-made stamps with designs. Check out the picture and imagine how hard it would be to do the waxing on some of them. And how much patient one will need to do this.