Padang.
I arrived in my hotel, at least three hours later than I expected, and I was very tired. The hotel is large and clean and caters, mostly for conferences and weddings; If you imagine a Holiday Inn or something similar, you won’t be far wrong. I am the only European today. The following day I wanted to rest after getting some simple tasks done. Most importantly, getting an Indonesian Sim card for my phone. This turned out to be far more difficult than I had remembered and in the end I spent over two hours in the Telkomsel office a further hour back in my hotel working out how to activate the card. Later something I had been dreading happened. An ATM machine ate my card. I had forgotten how Indonesian ATMs swallow your card if you don’t remove it in time. I was trying to work out the exchange rate to find out how much I needed to take out and then the card vanished. I had to make a visit to the main branch of the bank in question and then spent an hour or so queueing only to find out that the card would be destroyed by now. It is not a great disaster because I have my debit card and another two credit cards with me, and I have a virtual card as well, but I’m not sure how much use that might be. But all in all it was a day wasted and I ended up feeling just as tired as I had been when I arrived. Much of my Indonesian is coming back to me, but when it comes to talking about things like Sim cards, all I can do is nod and pretend I understand. Another problem is that people assume I know a lot more Indonesian than I do and tend to speak for too fast and use words and phrases I’ve never come across.
that evening with an app called Gojek installed on my phone I decided to treat myself to a pizza and beer. Beer is very hard to find here, and I thought that if I went to a Pizza Hut, that might be the place to get a cold there as well as my pizza. My motorbike took me to what was supposedly a Pizza Hut, but it was Pizza Hut only in name. It had little to do with the famous chain of restaurants that can be found around the world. A disappointing end to a disappointing day except that I have the transport booking app and I bought a new black short sleeve T shirt.The following day I visited the Minangkabau museum. A splendid building with they turned up gables like Buffalo horns, that are the signature of Minang architecture. Apart from some marvellous gold wedding headdresses, the contents of the museum was a little disappointing. Outside was an intriguing statue, which I think may have been of the God Vishnu. Perhaps as old as the eight century. Inside the museum, there were a few Neolithic arrowheads and stone tools, but nothing that I can remember from the Hindu and Buddhist periods. As this is a very Islamic town, I wondered if this omission had been deliberate. After the museum, I went for a wander around the town and was an object of curiosity as I went by because I have not seen another foreign tourist here since I arrived. Dark clouds started to come in and as I called for a motorbike to take me home and began to rain, and I came back to my hotel room, soaked this time in the water, and not in sweat. In truth, it was probably both.
I arrived in my hotel, at least three hours later than I expected, and I was very tired. The hotel is large and clean and caters, mostly for conferences and weddings; If you imagine a Holiday Inn or something similar, you won’t be far wrong. I am the only European today. The following day I wanted to rest after getting some simple tasks done. Most importantly, getting an Indonesian Sim card for my phone. This turned out to be far more difficult than I had remembered and in the end I spent over two hours in the Telkomsel office a further hour back in my hotel working out how to activate the card. Later something I had been dreading happened. An ATM machine ate my card. I had forgotten how Indonesian ATMs swallow your card if you don’t remove it in time. I was trying to work out the exchange rate to find out how much I needed to take out and then the card vanished. I had to make a visit to the main branch of the bank in question and then spent an hour or so queueing only to find out that the card would be destroyed by now. It is not a great disaster because I have my debit card and another two credit cards with me, and I have a virtual card as well, but I’m not sure how much use that might be. But all in all it was a day wasted and I ended up feeling just as tired as I had been when I arrived. Much of my Indonesian is coming back to me, but when it comes to talking about things like Sim cards, all I can do is nod and pretend I understand. Another problem is that people assume I know a lot more Indonesian than I do and tend to speak for too fast and use words and phrases I’ve never come across.
that evening with an app called Gojek installed on my phone I decided to treat myself to a pizza and beer. Beer is very hard to find here, and I thought that if I went to a Pizza Hut, that might be the place to get a cold there as well as my pizza. My motorbike took me to what was supposedly a Pizza Hut, but it was Pizza Hut only in name. It had little to do with the famous chain of restaurants that can be found around the world. A disappointing end to a disappointing day except that I have the transport booking app and I bought a new black short sleeve T shirt.The following day I visited the Minangkabau museum. A splendid building with they turned up gables like Buffalo horns, that are the signature of Minang architecture. Apart from some marvellous gold wedding headdresses, the contents of the museum was a little disappointing. Outside was an intriguing statue, which I think may have been of the God Vishnu. Perhaps as old as the eight century. Inside the museum, there were a few Neolithic arrowheads and stone tools, but nothing that I can remember from the Hindu and Buddhist periods. As this is a very Islamic town, I wondered if this omission had been deliberate. After the museum, I went for a wander around the town and was an object of curiosity as I went by because I have not seen another foreign tourist here since I arrived. Dark clouds started to come in and as I called for a motorbike to take me home and began to rain, and I came back to my hotel room, soaked this time in the water, and not in sweat. In truth, it was probably both.