Visit to the National Museum

Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of Indonesia.

This is a huge place with an old wing and new wing. We're not sure we saw everything. We even think we missed an entire floor, but we spent 2.5 enjoyable hours wandering the exhibits.

The museum starts with a series of maps showing all the different islands in the archipelago. There are also drawings of men and woman in "local" garb and headdress. All in all there are approximately 300 ethnicities and 500 languages spoken across the country. The photo below is just one of the maps.

The museum continued by exploring the "ethnography" of the different peoples showing scale models of the traditional homes, how some made clothes out of tree bark because they had no contact with those with textile weaving skills, and jewelry made out all sorts of materials including one necklace made out of human teeth (we'll let your minds think about that), copper, bronze, and gold. There was one ankle bracelet made of bronze that might have weighed 4 or 5 lbs or more and earrings of ample heft (yes, they enlarged earlobes with disks, heavy weights, etc.)

Of interest was this scale. Can you guess what it's for? The bottom pans of the scale are resting on display posts. The posts are not part of the scale.

Need some help? These are tax scales. The sultan sat himself down on one side and taxes were collected  (in the form of food crops) which were added to the other scale pan until the weight of the food crops balanced  that of the sultan.

One last thing we photographed was this model airplane. The actual plane first flew to Indonesia from the Dutch mainland from October 1 to November 24, 1924 according to the sign.

Obviously a small plane with a small tank so it must have taken many, many hops and stops to make the trip between the two locations. It had three Dutch passengers.

Next it was off to lunch and, guess what, some shopping.