The Hotel Helios has a pretty little garden and a couple birds that talk. One of the birds has quite a vocabulary, although it's in Indonesian. You could tell that a woman taught it some phrases and a man taught it others. It also repeated someone's maniacal laugh very well. One thing it said sounded very much like, "Fuck you." One time I heard it say that then cackle in laughter. It was eerie.

We rode taxis a lot in Solo. It costs about 25 cents to get between any two points. Joan refuses to ride the pedal-powered becaks because the passengers sit in front of the driver. The way everyone drives around here it would be too terrifying for her to be so exposed while not in control of the vehicle. Beside, a becak ride would still cost 10 to 15 cents.

We ate a wide variety of foods. From the little carts along the street we found these miniature crepe things (called srabi) filled with rice pudding and banana, chocolate, or coconut. They serve them on a plate made of a piece of banana leaf. We loved them.

One restaurant we liked was set up in a western style and served some western dishes but had mostly Indonesian customers. It was also cheap even for Indonesia. The western food was hamburgers, french fries, omelets, ice cream, etc. You could also get Indonesian dishes. But more than the food we liked the service. Like many places here, the waiter doesn't take your order but hands you a pad of paper and a pen and you write down the order. But as soon as we finished writing, the waiter came by and the food soon after. If we wanted something else I had no problem getting their attention.

I ordered "Chicken Gordon [their spelling] Bleu" and Joan ordered "Sweet and Sour Chicken." Both dishes were small but well presented. Strangely, they looked and tasted about the same. Also, I thought cheese an essential part of "Chicken Gordon Bleu" but mine had none.

We ate at one fancy Indonesian restaurant that had especially good fruit drinks but the power went out and their juicer didn't work part of the time we were there. The difference in price between a fancy place and eating at a warung on the street is not much in dollar terms. A warung costs about $1 for two people; a standard restaurant about $2; a good restaurant about $3. Of course you can also go to totally western places in fancy hotels and pay as much as $10.

Mostly we ate at the warungs and standard restaurants. I ordered fish several times in Bali and never felt satisfied. It always tasted blandly over cooked and had lots of irritating bones. Since then, I have avoided all fish dishes.

The best food commonly available is definitely chicken satay and chicken fried rice. The satay is served on a thin wooden skewer almost always with a great peanut sauce. The fried rice often comes with tomato and cucumber slices and a fried egg on top which I've learned to love. (The egg is always way overcooked by any American's standard. Exactly once I have had a fried egg that was not overcooked.)

We have tried other dishes, but I keep coming back to those two. Vegetables here are about the same as in North America: cabbage, cucumbers, tomatoes, peas, beans, corn, cauliflower, etc. Just about everything in a warung is rice with some of these vegetables and chicken or beef. I don't like the beef but the chicken is usually OK, although a bad place will serve chicken feet or have lots of bones and gristle in the chicken.

Our biggest disappoint with the eating here is not the food but the coffee. Almost no one uses filters. They just mix hot water and coffee grounds. Every now and then we find a decent cup but the coffee in San Francisco is much better. They grow good coffee beans here for export not consumption. As our friends Kelly and Greg said, "We had great coffee in Sumatra. NOT!"

Most hotels and losmen include breakfast with the room. In Bali breakfast was usually rice or banana pancakes. In east Java we got a rice and beef soup. But most of the time, they serve toast or just bread with butter and jam. Usually we get a choice of tea of coffee.

When we ride, especially on hot days, I often just get plain white rice for lunch. This is the least likely to give me an upset stomach an hour later and I'm not usually very hungry when it's 100 degrees and 98% humidity outside.

We did one day trip out of Solo. Through hotel Helios, we hired a driver to take us to a museum in Sangiran, about 20km north. Around Sangiran scientists discovered several "Java Man" skulls.

We enjoyed talking to taxi drivers but when we tried to ask this driver, an older man, "Apa Kabar?" (how are you) he couldn't understand us. We tried a few times to communicate but couldn't draw anything out of him. Joan thought he might be hard of hearing. We gave up.

I think he was just concentrating too much on traffic to bother trying to understand. He used his horn the way a kid uses the fire button on a video game - he hit it every time something moved and if there was nothing moving, he honked anyway just in case something showed up.

Although all drivers in Java use their horn generously, we had noticed while riding that some used the horn almost continuously. This guy was one of those. He honked the entire way there. When he got over loaded by the number of bikes, cars, buses, and pedestrians, he just held down the horn for several seconds the way you might if you lost your brakes and were heading into a crowded playground at 80 mph.

The museum was not big, just one room, but not bad. They had a handful of skulls of various time periods. Human skulls are always fascinating. They also had bones and skulls of enormous ancient hippos and elephants. Entrance cost about 10 cents each. We signed the guest book. The museum closed in one hour yet we were the first people to sign in all day. Two people signed in the day before. None the day before that. The parking area is lined with about 15 souvenir stalls. It's very sad, but we didn't even bother to look at the souvenirs. I knew the kind of junk they would have and even if they had a real mammoth jaw, I wasn't about to buy it and carry it around on my bike. A would-be guide also approached us in the museum, just as the Lonely Planet guidebook said would happen. He had sort of a price list. If we walked with him 1km we could see some shells; 2km and we could see bones; 4km and we could see a skull! I guess someone believes this stuff.

One night after we walked around for an hour unable to find chicken satay anywhere, we stopped in a very small restaurant clearly aimed at tourists. It was not expensive though and a little off the tourist's normal track and we were starving. We ended up talking at length to the 28-year-old proprietor. He spoke fluent English because he had gone to college at a prestigious school in the west. He had strong student-like opinions about politics. He resents the US simply for being big. He's afraid America will abuse its power. But he's also not too fond of his own government. He says he belongs to the "white party." This is the party of people who don't vote. We talked for an hour about politics and economics. He made dramatic pauses, using his cigarette as an excuse. Surprisingly, this guy had studied tourism. It seems like a waste of education.

One night we went to a "Wayang Orang" performance. "Wayang" as in the shadow puppet show and "Orang" means people. So this show had human actors. Admission was 20 cents each for "VIP" seats. The theater looked like a typical high school gym theater with permanent seats. The front three rows were large soft chairs for us VIPs.

A fairly large gamelan orchestra played in the orchestra pit. They had a curtain and changing back drops on stage and once again the costumes were great. Unfortunately only about 20 people showed up. Everyone could be a VIP. I don't know how a show with so many people can continue while only bringing in US$4 total a night.

The show had interesting dancing at the beginning and ending of each scene. In between the actors carried out long conversations with each other in Javanese. We didn' t understand anything. They did a great job in one scene using a black light to produce convincing ghosts.

Next: Ride to Yogyakarta

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