A little "museum"

Last week I visited Roemah Djawa II ( which translates to Java House). It's owned by a couple who apparently lead fascinating travel trips throughout Indonesia. They periodically have an open house where outsiders can take a tour of their home. It is a traditional Javenese style home and includes a lot of very detailed and ornate Javenese carvings everywhere. Walls, doors, ceilings, you name it. I kept asking myself, "how do they dust all of this?" The roof line is very steep to resemble a mountain. Mountain symbols are very spiritual and royal and are seen frequently. When we arrived at the address I'd been given, my driver thought we were at the wrong place. It just looks like a small house from the street. 

In reality it is at least a 3 story house with enough main rooms that I lost count, 2 kitchens, at least 3 bathrooms, a small pool and garden, a classroom area ( the wife teaches classes) and even an exercise room, a music room, you name it. Every inch of it is filled with art they've collected mostly from Indonesia but also from other locations. Just a couple of interesting items included: several real blow pipes for delivering a poison tipped dart into your victim (a warning accompanied this information, "Don't try to touch the darts"), and many very old and well-cared- for textiles and batiks including a small scrap of an early woven textile from Indonesia that was lacking a pattern. Apparently few examples of Indonesian textiles without a pattern survive. This fabric contains symbols of clouds, also very common in Indonesian batiks.

Also of interest was a very large room packed with stuff from Papua, perhaps the most remote area of Indonesia. The bottom photo shows just a part of the collection of body masks of the Asmat people of southwest New Guines. These full body masks typically center around spirituality and the dead ( if I understand it correctly.) At one point he said when he was obtaining one of the masks it had to be covered so no children would see the mask because it was considered very scary.