Gamelan

One of the few things I really enjoyed in college was playing in a Javanese gamelan ensemble. One of the colleges I went to, a small college in the Midwest of all places, actually had a full gamelan (made out of metal from a decommissioned ship, no less), and every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon during the two years I was there I crammed into a tiny room in the music building along with a bunch of other hippie-ish students, stepped carefully over the instruments which were packed in about as tightly as possible, and banged on loud pieces of metal for an hour or two (you can actually see a video of us performing with dancers on YouTube — well, you can see the dancers, and hear the gamelan orchestra, in which I would have been playing.

Anyway, since we were driving by, I thought I'd take the kids in to see the instruments, especially as S is now taking drum lessons and in general, likes to bang on things. The college has since built a much larger music building, so the instruments are laid out with much more space — safe to let a couple of kids around: