We just returned from our little jaunt to Bandung. It’s about a 3 hour train ride from Jakarta, but it’s like a different world. It’s still smoggy and busy, but not nearly as smoggy and busy as Jakarta. It’s far cooler too. Bogor didn’t seem like much of a difference, but Bandung was a good ten degrees cooler due to its altitude. When we went out for dinner, it was downright cool…probably about 70 degrees, which feels like sweater weather to us now.

The city itself was nice. There seem to be a lot more ethnic Chinese Indonesians in evidence there, and we had some awesome Chinese food for dinner. To tell the truth, it’s not really that different from American Chinese food: still stir-fried, still lots of rich sauce, baby corns, pea pods, etc. But it was really really good; some sort of spice or other ingredient seems to make the difference.

We also saw a neat little store that sold handmade wayang golek puppets. These are the ones made out of wood. We didn’t buy any, but this is going to be the place to visit again, for sure.