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Banten’s Sawarna: A hidden paradise facing the Indian Ocean

Sawarna is an under-the-radar holiday destination in Indonesia. Even among Jakartans it remains relatively unknown as these city dwellers rarely make the five to six-hour drive to this hidden beauty on the southern shores of Banten province.

Most of the local tourists I met there were from nearby Bandung, West Java’s capital city.

Sawarna’s neighbors — Pelabuhan Ratu in the east and Anyer and Carita in the west — have made a name for themselves and are popular weekend destinations. They have developed to support a range of hotels, resorts and tour packages.

However, there are exquisite features only Sawarna can offer.

There are two ways to reach Sawarna from Jakarta, both of which take between five and six hours, or even more if you make occasional stops for food and rest.

What to expect at the Ghibli exhibition in Jakarta

Fans of Studio Ghibli in Jakarta can finally experience the Japanese animation world created by the famed studio, as the exhibition opened its 39-day exhibition in the Pacific Place Ballroom on Thursday.

Several installations at the ‘The World of Ghibli’ exhibition on its first opening day however were still under construction due to technical difficulties, as stated on its website.

Studio Ghibli president Koji Hoshino along with an interpreter, led an introductory tour to the first group of visitors on Thursday, where he cited the goal to achieve a perfect exhibition as the reason behind delayed completion. 

The event in the Indonesian capital city, which will run until Sept. 17, is the biggest exhibition of its kind held outside of Japan. 

“That is why we want it to be done properly,” Hoshino said on Wednesday as quoted by tempo.co.

All the things we’ve lost in translation

One moment you’re sitting on a couch somewhere in Jakarta, listening to the soft hum of the air conditioner. The next, you’re in Saigon, making your way through a street in war-torn 1960s Vietnam. Or perhaps, watching the sun rise and fall through a small window from a prison somewhere in the French-colonized Algeria.

Stories have the ability to take us to places that we have never been, to see sights that we have never seen; an access to the foreign and strange and familiar, however brief and fleeting.

Ultimately, literature tells us about how people lived. It tells us about what people have cried about, what they have lost. How people wake up in the morning and make their coffee, and how the moon looks before they fall asleep. It tells us about how things fall apart, and how people fall in love. It may even remind us of emotions that we too have felt; whether it be something that we vaguely remember feeling at some time and some place, or something that comes to us with such an intensity that it washes over us and consumes us.

Instagram photos can reveal signs of depression, study suggests

If your Instagram is filled with photos with darker, bluer and grayer hues, you may want to check the state of your mental health, as a recent study has shown it could be a sign of depression. 

Scientists had analyzed over 40,000 Instagram photos from 166 people who volunteered their mental health records in a study published on EPJ Data Science earlier this month. Approximately half of the participants revealed they had been diagnosed with clinical depression in the last three years. 

By uploading the Instagram photos into a computer program, researchers found that individuals with a depression history tend to post picture with tones that are more blue, darker and grayer, as opposed to vibrant colors. Further, pictures with faces in it tended to be fewer faces per photo.

The program was also able to identify individuals who were previously diagnosed with depression, which was correct in 70 percent of the time.