Surabaya - Surabaya 8.5

Surabaya, is the capital of Jawa Timur province of Indonesia. It is one of the earliest port cities in Southeast Asia. During 18th and 19th centuries, Surabaya was the largest city in Dutch East Indies and the center of trading in the nation, larger than Batavia . It was then a competitor of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Today the city remains one of the important financial hubs of the Indonesian archipelago, arguably second only to Jakarta, and the Port of Tanjung Perak is Indonesia's second busiest seaport. Located on northeastern Java on the Madura Strait, it is the second-largest-city in Indonesia. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population over 2.8 million, approximately 6 million in the metropolitan area, and an 'extended metropolitan area' with more than 9 million inhabitants.HistoryEtymologySurabaya is locally believed to derive its name from the words "suro" and "boyo", two creatures which, in a local myth, fought each other in order to gain the title of "the strongest and most powerful animal" in the area. It was said that the two powerful animals agreed a truce and set boundaries: the shark's domain would be the sea while the crocodile's domain would be the land. However one day the shark swam into the river estuary to hunt. This angered the crocodile, who declared it his territory. The shark argued that the river was a water realm which meant that it was shark territory, while the crocodile argued that the river flowed deep inland, so it was therefore crocodile territory. A ferocious fight resumed as the two animals bit each other's tails. Neither of them won the fight.