Dear Readers,
The last week has been very productive. In the clinic I finished a very large assignment from Dr. Tetty which involved looking through medical records from February to July, collecting data, creating statistics and then evaluating the clinics performance based on 10 different criteria. All of this is more complicated when there are no electronic files and everything isn't in a language that you know. I also did significantly more hands-on work with the patients (although, strictly speaking, I'm not allowed to do this).
Almost every day after work I went straight home and worked on my PTCAS application for physical therapy school. These applications take an insane amount of work. Every school requires several essays, supplemental applications, transcripts, references and answers to a bunch of questions. At the same time as this I'm emailing with two community colleges to try to work out a class schedule for some prerequisits that I need to take, I'm applying for jobs and I'm arranging more shadowing time for when I return to the states. Pray that I don't take my stress out on other people. Have I yet said on my blog that I've decided to return to Washington on October 15th instead of in December? Now I have.
It seemed dumb to fly all the way to Indonesia and then not to leave Jakarta, so when Tyler, a friend from church, asked if I'd like to accompany him on a three day trip to the city of Yogyakarta I jumped on the idea. The plan was to go rafting with a group and then to split off from them and continue to Yogya.
On Saturday morning I got up at 4 am and walked about a mile to the busy road where I was picked up. The GPS said that it would take us about an hour and a half to reach Sukabumi where the river is, but we knew that the traffic would make the time much longer. But nothing could have prepared us for just how bad it would be. At one point we got stuck head to head with a very large truck and neither of us could move because of the cars that had wedged up directly behind us. So we sat there for at least half an hour. It took us 5 hours to go 100km. But we finally got to the rafting spot.
It was a lot of fun! It is the end of the dry season here so the water was quite low. As a result is was more like a lazy river with a few water jets than an intense rafting adventure, but that was fine by me. I just laid back, closed my eyes, and got sunburned. At the end of the trip we got a free massage! I've never had a massage before and I was very excited, but it turned out to just not be my cup of tea. I like to have my back and neck rubbed, but that is it.
Then Tyler and I hopped back into the car and headed to Bandung, where we planned to take an overnight train to Yogyakarta. But again, the traffic was awful. It took us 6 hours instead of 3 and as a result we missed our train.
We found lodging in Bandung and bedded down for the night. This was Saturday night and Sunday was a very big holy day for the Muslims. It is the day that they celebrate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ishmael (that's right, they don't think it was Isaac) and for the last few days there has been a lot of livestock around. On Sunday every butchers an animal. But in preparation for the holy day the call to prayer (which usually happens 5 times a day) goes on all night. There was a loud speaker directly outside of our window and we didn't sleep very much.
But that was ok because we needed to get up at 4 again. Up we got and headed to the train station where we caught the 7 am train to Yogya. It was a beautiful train ride and I'm glad that I had a chance to look at the landscape instead of sleep through it. But I still don't think it holds a candle to the beauty of Manipur. I alternated watching the scenery, sleeping and reading. It took us 9 hours to get to Yogya. When we arrived we went straight to our hostel and dumped off our stuff, then we explored for a while.
Yogyakarta is second only to Bali in tourism and we saw many more foreigners than one sees in Jakarta. This was nice in a way, since we weren't constantly the center of attention but there were also many more experienced fleecers and hagglers and I'm-not-going-to-stop-trying-to-sell-you-this-postcard-until-hell-freezes-over kind of people. But they weren't nearly as insistent as their Indian counterparts.
We walked around the markets, looked at the sultan's palace, and then tried some street food that the man at the hostel had recommended. It was the second spiciest thing I have ever put in my mouth. My entire face was tingling.
The next morning we got up at 3 am to join a tour that was going to watch the sunrise over the Hindu temple of Burabudur: one of the seven wonders of the world. I was feeling really sick after the spicy food and the two hour bumpy ride on bad roads with no breakfast with
9 other people in a tiny Angot was very difficult.
We went to the top of a small mountain where we supposedly could see the
sun rise above Burabudur. Unfortunately it was cloudy and we couldn't
see much. There were several hundred people there (most of them
foreigners). Tyler just slept on a bench and I read and looked at the
view and kept having to run to the bathroom for unpleasantness. I'll be
grateful for western style toilets again.
Burabudur itself was impressive. It had better be because they charge westerners $25 each for Burabudur and Prambanan. I had a lot of extra time waiting around and I'd lost the
others so I went around talking to school groups. Teachers send their students to find tourists and practice their English. So I granted many interviews. And took a lot of pictures and got sunburned. Then we drove for another hour and a half to Prambanan. I like it more than Burabudur
but most people wouldn't agree. I think the architecture is more
beautiful and the smaller scale makes it more manageable to look at (and
photograph). By this time we we're so tired. Three days in a row of
getting up before the sun. We went back to the hostel and crashed in the
common area. (Since we already had to check out).
Several hours later we went to the airport and had an uneventful trip back to Jakarta. I got home at about 11 and went back to work at 7 the next morning. I have so many email to reply to and loose ends to pick up!
The last week has been very productive. In the clinic I finished a very large assignment from Dr. Tetty which involved looking through medical records from February to July, collecting data, creating statistics and then evaluating the clinics performance based on 10 different criteria. All of this is more complicated when there are no electronic files and everything isn't in a language that you know. I also did significantly more hands-on work with the patients (although, strictly speaking, I'm not allowed to do this).
Almost every day after work I went straight home and worked on my PTCAS application for physical therapy school. These applications take an insane amount of work. Every school requires several essays, supplemental applications, transcripts, references and answers to a bunch of questions. At the same time as this I'm emailing with two community colleges to try to work out a class schedule for some prerequisits that I need to take, I'm applying for jobs and I'm arranging more shadowing time for when I return to the states. Pray that I don't take my stress out on other people. Have I yet said on my blog that I've decided to return to Washington on October 15th instead of in December? Now I have.
It seemed dumb to fly all the way to Indonesia and then not to leave Jakarta, so when Tyler, a friend from church, asked if I'd like to accompany him on a three day trip to the city of Yogyakarta I jumped on the idea. The plan was to go rafting with a group and then to split off from them and continue to Yogya.
On Saturday morning I got up at 4 am and walked about a mile to the busy road where I was picked up. The GPS said that it would take us about an hour and a half to reach Sukabumi where the river is, but we knew that the traffic would make the time much longer. But nothing could have prepared us for just how bad it would be. At one point we got stuck head to head with a very large truck and neither of us could move because of the cars that had wedged up directly behind us. So we sat there for at least half an hour. It took us 5 hours to go 100km. But we finally got to the rafting spot.
It was a lot of fun! It is the end of the dry season here so the water was quite low. As a result is was more like a lazy river with a few water jets than an intense rafting adventure, but that was fine by me. I just laid back, closed my eyes, and got sunburned. At the end of the trip we got a free massage! I've never had a massage before and I was very excited, but it turned out to just not be my cup of tea. I like to have my back and neck rubbed, but that is it.
Then Tyler and I hopped back into the car and headed to Bandung, where we planned to take an overnight train to Yogyakarta. But again, the traffic was awful. It took us 6 hours instead of 3 and as a result we missed our train.
We found lodging in Bandung and bedded down for the night. This was Saturday night and Sunday was a very big holy day for the Muslims. It is the day that they celebrate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ishmael (that's right, they don't think it was Isaac) and for the last few days there has been a lot of livestock around. On Sunday every butchers an animal. But in preparation for the holy day the call to prayer (which usually happens 5 times a day) goes on all night. There was a loud speaker directly outside of our window and we didn't sleep very much.
But that was ok because we needed to get up at 4 again. Up we got and headed to the train station where we caught the 7 am train to Yogya. It was a beautiful train ride and I'm glad that I had a chance to look at the landscape instead of sleep through it. But I still don't think it holds a candle to the beauty of Manipur. I alternated watching the scenery, sleeping and reading. It took us 9 hours to get to Yogya. When we arrived we went straight to our hostel and dumped off our stuff, then we explored for a while.
Yogyakarta is second only to Bali in tourism and we saw many more foreigners than one sees in Jakarta. This was nice in a way, since we weren't constantly the center of attention but there were also many more experienced fleecers and hagglers and I'm-not-going-to-stop-trying-to-sell-you-this-postcard-until-hell-freezes-over kind of people. But they weren't nearly as insistent as their Indian counterparts.
We walked around the markets, looked at the sultan's palace, and then tried some street food that the man at the hostel had recommended. It was the second spiciest thing I have ever put in my mouth. My entire face was tingling.
The next morning we got up at 3 am to join a tour that was going to watch the sunrise over the Hindu temple of Burabudur: one of the seven wonders of the world. I was feeling really sick after the spicy food and the two hour bumpy ride on bad roads with no breakfast with
9 other people in a tiny Angot was very difficult.
We went to the top of a small mountain where we supposedly could see the
sun rise above Burabudur. Unfortunately it was cloudy and we couldn't
see much. There were several hundred people there (most of them
foreigners). Tyler just slept on a bench and I read and looked at the
view and kept having to run to the bathroom for unpleasantness. I'll be
grateful for western style toilets again.
Burabudur itself was impressive. It had better be because they charge westerners $25 each for Burabudur and Prambanan. I had a lot of extra time waiting around and I'd lost the
others so I went around talking to school groups. Teachers send their students to find tourists and practice their English. So I granted many interviews. And took a lot of pictures and got sunburned. Then we drove for another hour and a half to Prambanan. I like it more than Burabudur
but most people wouldn't agree. I think the architecture is more
beautiful and the smaller scale makes it more manageable to look at (and
photograph). By this time we we're so tired. Three days in a row of
getting up before the sun. We went back to the hostel and crashed in the
common area. (Since we already had to check out).
Several hours later we went to the airport and had an uneventful trip back to Jakarta. I got home at about 11 and went back to work at 7 the next morning. I have so many email to reply to and loose ends to pick up!
