Christmas on the beach

Well, I've ended up in yet another huge, noisy, polluted city. Jakarta -according to the guidebooks- has a nice little string of islands, called the Pulau Seribu or thousand islands (I wonder if that's where the salad dressing comes from?) just north of it. I went to the one I could afford, it was OK -they are definitely western prices and Indonesian pollution. Stick to Thailand for the beaches! But just spending Christmas on the beach was good enough.
Tourism is right down at the moment, I think due to last year when there were a number of incidents on Christmas eve. Nothing's happened so far, touch wood.
My airplane ticket got soaked, all the ink was washed off and the magnetic strip stuck to the next ticket. So I tracked down the Lufthansa office with the cunning plan of rearranging all my flights by one day - for free - so they'd have to reprint them all! Turns out I didn't need to do that, they took one look on their computer and offered me a new ticket. I like this service, its almost enough to make be stop buying bargain bucket tickets. Well, nearly enough. Dunno what's happening with United - I'm flying LA to Buenos Aires with them in Febuary, its just they're about to declare bankruptcy.
Next stop: Yogyakarta. Or Parangaranadarenan. Can't decide - one has huge temples (borodubur) and volcanoes, the other really good beaches. Ah, the stress of travelling, the hard decisions that have to be made...