Surabaya

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Flew very cheaply from Singpore to Surabaya - north east Java.
practically no other tourists on journey there but it felt fine. from the start, local people were amazingly friendly & helpful - really good feeling about the place & i felt at home right away.
Hostels of the dorm kind don't seem to exist here - just private rooms with private mandi (basically a toilet with a hose pipe thing as a shower in the same room - great tho, as no sharing needed).

really busy & hectic city - continually buzzing. quite amazing amount of traffic - roads a never-ending rush of cars, motorbikes, becaks (rickshaws), food & fruit sellers on bikes, all coming from everywhere going all over the place with no real system. almost impossible to walk across, despite the traffic lights (which aren't always conveniently placed!).

sweet little chinatown, & temple. found a wonderful little market hidden away in an alley - masses of all kinds of wonderful fruits, foods & spices i've never seen before, lovely arrangements of differents colours & smells, people really content peeling their veg or going about everyday business - noone spoke engligsh here but they were all amazingly friendly. ended up sending ages here just chatting with the locals (or trying to with a mixture of sign language & laughter) & helping some lovely ladies with their onions. such wonderful people, such a happy, comfortable feeling being here...quite honesly didn't want to leave!

also came across Tunjungan Plaza right near my hostel - amazingly huge shopping mall, ridiculous to try & walk around - no systems to try & find where anything is, but the locals love it & seem to just know where everything is - got very easily lost in side & amused trying to find my way back out again! no locals seem to speak english so great times of charades & silly fits of laughter occured!! eventually made it out again!

at night - fabulous little stalls set up in the street (warungs) - look like little tent things with benches, strange kinds of foods all over the place, meats, veg, stuff i didn't recognise at all & loads of people sat eating at the benches. actually turned out to be a big festical celebrating the independence of surabaya (or somthing like that was all i could make out from the pigeon english i got fom one guy) - bands playing, music...wasn't brave enought to try out the warungs at first, seeing that not a single other westerner was around & i didn't have a clue what the foods were - seeing an animal head with stuff hanging out of it kind of put me off too! but after a day in indonesia - the warungs became my main source of food - delicious!!

unfortunately lack of time (needing to meet up with other friends in 2 weeks) meant i had to leave this wonderful city in order to move on to be able to do the other things in indonesia - hoped desperately that i could return here at some point soon.

From here - took local bus to get to Mount Bromo

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