Karate kid and concrete houses

This is Main Street in Katiet. No room for cars -- that's my kind of main street, especially after three months in Jakarta! One of the local kids is striking a karate pose for the camera.

There were two major types of houses in town: wooden ones with thatch roofs, and concrete ones with corrugated metal roofs. Apparently people want the concrete houses because they're "modern" and look like wealthy people's houses, even though the wooden ones are more appropriate to the insanely hot climate (and much nicer to look at, in my opinion).

That same preference is part of what caused the high death toll in the Yogya quake. Houses made of stuff like wood and bamboo are more earthquake-resistant, and they're less catastrophic if they do come down on your head, but people don't want to live in the kind of houses their grandfathers lived in. The concrete's always whiter on the other side of the fence, I suppose.