Medan
Halfway through the outreach we had an opportunity to travel to Medan, the capital of Sumatra, to serve at a Pastor’s conference that was being held there. I thought it was a pretty sweet idea to begin with, but when it was time to go we had just begun to get to know everyone properly and it seemed like really bad timing to leave Nias then.
The journey was pretty long, lots of driving and an overnight ferry. The roads in Indonesia have no law!! There were a few times I thought we were going to see our Father face to face!! But we survived and got to Medan on schedule. We stopped at Lake Toba on the way up, which is a huge lake in the crater of an extinct volcano… awesomely amazing. We stayed on an island in the middle of the lake and it blew my mind trying to imagine what that place has been through from the beginning of creation to now. It was so huge, and thinking about it full of larva or erupting was insane!!
I didn’t like Medan that much. It was big and dirty after the calm of Nias. We stayed for about 10 days, as after the conference ended 5 of us had to fly out and back to Kuala Lumpur for a visa run as we were on 30 day visas. We slept on the floor of a church on squeaky foam mattresses with one stupid fan (with a timer that switched it off after 3 hours, not what you want in the middle of the night!!) and far too many cockroaches keen to share our beds. It was a bit frustrating because we thought we were going to serve the conference but in reality there wasn’t really anything for us to do except sweep the floor each evening (and truth be told we probably didn’t do this very well!). We sat in on the conference every day and got a lot of sweet teaching on leadership, and we went to the plaza every night and had Starbucks so we could use the internet. I found myself singing back up vocals in worship one morning, in Indonesian. How did that happen…?!
We did quite a bit of travelling that week. As well as getting there and back, Bree, Becaa, Jade, Paul and myself had to make a random trip to KL to get new visas. It was quite annoying but KL airport is one of the best airports in the world, with free wifi and really comfy seats, so I figured that it would be fine – a chance to catch up on major emails and skype my parents at a normal hour, plus a fairly good chance I could find a comfy place for a nap. It turned out though, that we were flying Air Asia, into the Low Cost Carrier Terminal, rather than the international all-singing all-dancing one we were expecting. On arrival we found only MacDonalds and a REALLY expensive coffee shop (which sold me the most disgusting cup of peppermint tea I have ever tasted) open, no seats to sit down on let alone stretch out on and most annoying of all was that the wifi didn’t work on my computer (it seemed to work on other people’s, but not on mine. Typical). I was not a happy camper!
The journey back was interesting… we first endured an overnight road trip all the way down Sumatra to the port, before getting the “fast ferry” across to Nias. Of course as it’s Indonesia, nothing is really “fast”, and this trip certainly wasn’t speeded up by the guy on the boat who insisted on taking our passports away to photocopy them. After a lengthy argument over whether we need passports for a domestic ferry trip (Kodan didn’t even have his, as he never left the country!!) I refused to let him take any of them away from us, and his superior sorted it out. What a faff!
The journey was pretty long, lots of driving and an overnight ferry. The roads in Indonesia have no law!! There were a few times I thought we were going to see our Father face to face!! But we survived and got to Medan on schedule. We stopped at Lake Toba on the way up, which is a huge lake in the crater of an extinct volcano… awesomely amazing. We stayed on an island in the middle of the lake and it blew my mind trying to imagine what that place has been through from the beginning of creation to now. It was so huge, and thinking about it full of larva or erupting was insane!!
I didn’t like Medan that much. It was big and dirty after the calm of Nias. We stayed for about 10 days, as after the conference ended 5 of us had to fly out and back to Kuala Lumpur for a visa run as we were on 30 day visas. We slept on the floor of a church on squeaky foam mattresses with one stupid fan (with a timer that switched it off after 3 hours, not what you want in the middle of the night!!) and far too many cockroaches keen to share our beds. It was a bit frustrating because we thought we were going to serve the conference but in reality there wasn’t really anything for us to do except sweep the floor each evening (and truth be told we probably didn’t do this very well!). We sat in on the conference every day and got a lot of sweet teaching on leadership, and we went to the plaza every night and had Starbucks so we could use the internet. I found myself singing back up vocals in worship one morning, in Indonesian. How did that happen…?!
We did quite a bit of travelling that week. As well as getting there and back, Bree, Becaa, Jade, Paul and myself had to make a random trip to KL to get new visas. It was quite annoying but KL airport is one of the best airports in the world, with free wifi and really comfy seats, so I figured that it would be fine – a chance to catch up on major emails and skype my parents at a normal hour, plus a fairly good chance I could find a comfy place for a nap. It turned out though, that we were flying Air Asia, into the Low Cost Carrier Terminal, rather than the international all-singing all-dancing one we were expecting. On arrival we found only MacDonalds and a REALLY expensive coffee shop (which sold me the most disgusting cup of peppermint tea I have ever tasted) open, no seats to sit down on let alone stretch out on and most annoying of all was that the wifi didn’t work on my computer (it seemed to work on other people’s, but not on mine. Typical). I was not a happy camper!
The journey back was interesting… we first endured an overnight road trip all the way down Sumatra to the port, before getting the “fast ferry” across to Nias. Of course as it’s Indonesia, nothing is really “fast”, and this trip certainly wasn’t speeded up by the guy on the boat who insisted on taking our passports away to photocopy them. After a lengthy argument over whether we need passports for a domestic ferry trip (Kodan didn’t even have his, as he never left the country!!) I refused to let him take any of them away from us, and his superior sorted it out. What a faff!
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