Paintings at an art exhibition

In Jakarta, well it seems like all over Indonesia, the tables get turned on you when you visit a museum or some kind of tourist attraction. You suddenly become the exhibit. We went to Yogyakarta during the holidays and we were photographed almost as much as Borobudur temple. Every school group or family that came by either wanted a photo of us with them or they were snapping pictures with their cell phones as we walked by all sweaty from climbing the steep steps of the temple or being doused by a heavy rain storm. Man! Are we celebrities or what?

At the National Museum in Jakarta things got a little out of hand. We could not even walk around the museum and look at the exhibits. There were huge school groups touring the museum the day we went and they ALL had phones and or cameras that were strictly dedicated to photographing bules, not museum exhibits. Well almost. It was either photograph the bules or photograph themselves and their friends with the bules or them posing cutely in front of some antiquities that could possibly be considered as cool as bules.

We could not stop and read or really look at the displays. We had to keep moving while swarms of students followed us around just waiting for an opportunity to pose with us. Every room you went in there was a new group. We were accommodating at first. But then we realized that this would go on until closing time and we would not have moved more than about 20 feet. After about 30 solid minutes of this, we decided to use the tactic of moving quickly from one thing to the next and finding displays where there were as few people as possible.

I think it would not have been as bad if we had not just been through the same thing in Yogyajarta. For my son, who is 6'3" and a first time visitor, it was a little overwhelming. Now if those crowds of girls had maybe been over the age of 18, he might not have minded quite so much. But being surrounded by cute little Indonesian girls is still fun. They are very sweet and very cute and you can't help but get caught up in their enthusiasm about it all. To a point.

However, being a "rock star" gets old. I now have a better appreciation for celebrities who get mobbed and photographed when they are not necessarily at their best. The only difference is, my son is just a poor graduate school student and the pay differential is huge.