Now that we are safely home, and mostly recovered from jet lag, I wanted to write one last post talking about the final few days and our lasting impressions of the trip.
If you want to view several hundred pictures from our trip - you can click on these links.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10201411566557833.1073741827.1434754125&type=1&l=fc064e929e
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10201411381473206.1073741826.1434754125&type=1&l=c62538aa17
The last couple days we drove up to the mountains, about an hour away, to a town called Berastagi - where the weather was significantly cooler! Our plan was to hike up to a volcano that afternoon, but as we drove the clouds came down and it started raining. Instead, we walked down to a huge market and wandered around the fruit and flower vendors. Joanna told us that all the fruit and vegetables in that area of Sumatra came from here, and so there were more kinds of fruit than I've ever seen. There was one kind of fruit called "snake fruit" - or Salak, that looked like it had scales on the outside.
I had the first experience of haggling for the price of something in Indonesian! I asked the price, she told me it was 70,000Rp (7 dollars), and I said, in Indonesian, "Maybe the price is 50,000? (5 dollars). She said no, and I waited...she asked her manager, and he said yes. It is kind of an amazing feeling to negotiate a price in another language.
We hoped that the rain would clear up by morning, and that we would be able to hike up to the volcano then - but when we woke up, it was foggier than it was before. But it was still a very relaxing trip.
We drove back to Medan and headed to the airport. The flight back seemed much longer than the flight there - maybe it was because when we were going to Indonesia, were excited to head to a new place and so it didn't seem so long. None of us slept very much on the plane, so we got to New York exhausted. We knew that we had to stay up until an appropriate time to go to sleep, and we knew that if we didn't go see the city, we would kick ourselves later. The hotel shuttle picked us up at the airport and they let us check in early (very early) which was a blessing. We took a 45 minute nap and then headed to the subway.
The weather was 72 degrees and sunny, so it was the perfect day to walk around Central Park. I started to realize that most of my knowledge of New York City was based on scenes of movies that happened to take place there. "Oh, that was where so-and-so was in that one movie" was heard all afternoon.
We walked from Central Park to Times Square, passing Carnegie Hall on the way. We stopped at a place called "Ray's" and had some New York style pizza, which was HUGE. After we ate dinner, we were more tired than ever. We made it back to our hotel room, and the last thing I remember was laying down on the bed for a minute, fully clothed, while Caroline was in the bathroom. The next thing I remember, it was morning.
We were back in Jacksonville by 11:00am the next morning, pulling up to Chick-fil-A.
FINAL IMPRESSIONS: What We Were Not Prepared For...
- We didn't expect everyone to be smoking indoors. It didn't really occur to me, but that's kind of just an American prohibition, and only recently.
- We didn't expect there to be so many malls and shopping centers that looked so much like America.
- We didn't expect the language to be so passive. No one says direct, exact statements - everything is indirect and inferred. Joanna described it as giving someone a lot of lines to read between. You wouldn't say to the taxi driver "it's this street" - you would say "brother, maybe it's this street, yeah?"
- We didn't expect jet lag to be so much harder on the way back than it was on the way there.
- We didn't expect that the money exchange would give us so much trouble. It's 10,000 Rupiah to 1 USD - so when it comes to paying the taxi driver, you're not sure if you owe him $0.31, $3.10, or $31 because they have a 100 bill, a 1,000 bill, a 10,000 bill, and a 100,000 bill and there are SO MANY ZEROS on every bill. It didn't help that the largest bill they had was 100,000 Rupiah ($10) and that if your bill was less than 60,000 ($6) they wouldn't break the big bill. They really wanted as close to exact change as you could.
- We didn't expect the food to be so spicy! I had some of the hottest food I've ever had there.
- We didn't expect there to be dog sold as meat on the side of the road.
- We didn't expect the time that we were there to feel both like 2 days, and 2 years at the same time. It seemed like we had just gotten there, and also that we had been there forever...it was odd.
- We didn't expect all of the locals to be drinking instant coffee...it's Sumatra for crying out loud, and everyone was drinking instant coffee. I was not prepared for this.
No comments:
Post a Comment