Sunday Return to Jakarta
Sunday, July 30
Today we return to Jakarta to meet up with the rest of The Adventure Cohort. At Lampung airport, we said farewell to Lasma and her family. I sure hope to return and couch surf at their house! Friends, Lasma loves to have visitors to Bandar Lampung -stay at her house!
It took a while to get through check in. The process is a bit convoluted if your baggage is over and of course ours was so we had to go to another desk to pay the fine. Then the clerk made a mistake and issued the receipt in my name rather than Christy's. It took him for ever to figure out his mistake, but once he did, we were on our way!
As we were waiting on our flight to arrive, we saw 2 groups of bule arrive at the airport. Looks like we won't be too missed by the town!
Soon we were settled into our seats and ready to fly. The window seat remained empty so as we taxied out to the runway, we hopped over a seat so we could see out the window!
We saw lots of ships both big tankers and cargo as well as those bright fishing ships we saw at the fish market. I expected the water to be more turquoise but it was standard blue-grayish.
The big puffy clouds reminded me of the Grand Canyon! You could get lost in them! Approaching Jakarta, we flew over several islands and were once again reminded that Indonesia is a chain of islands (about 17,000 most uninhabited) as long as the US is wide! See my blog post "Thanks Mike" to see a visual of how Indonesia physically measures up to the US.
I wonder if one of those with trees is affordable on a teacher's salary?!?
And then...just like that, we were back in the big city. We wandered down long, gigantic hallways that were a bit eerie because there were so few people in them. It felt like baggage claim was all the way over in Lampung! We walked for a while.
At least there were lots of fun wall art to look at as we wandered toward claiming our bags. Even though it took about 15 minutes to get to the right place, we still had a few minutes to wait for our bags to arrive on the belt.
Then it was off to find our driver and back to Le Meridian. Where we met up with the rest of the cohort.
We ate dinner at Pepenero. Good Italian food! Taking pity on us, our great leaders decided to give us a stress free dinner of Western food! Even had a belated birthday celebration for Matt! We traded stories and enjoyed each others company before heading off to dreamland!
Tomorrow we start wrapping up this wonderful experience!
@tgc_irex @ecaatstate #tgcgoglobal #exchangeourworld #culturaldiplomacy #globaled #Indonesia #learning #teacherexchange @goapel #learningabouteachother #teacherexchange @goaple
