A day on the train
We’ve all slowly been getting sick one by one since the reception. Nes was in so much pain this morning that she went to the hospital to get checked out. They ran some tests and concluded that she (and several others) had some mysterious intestinal virus. I suppose shaking hands with over 400 people probably isn’t the most sanitary thing to do. After the hospital visit Nes and I boarded a train to Jakarta to pick up her passport and visa.
Nes forces a smile from her hospital bed
The US embassy here gives you a 45-minute window to pick up your visa so we had to get on the early train to make sure we made it on time (just in case). We took the Argo Gede train to Jakarta; it’s the nicer of the two available. It was comfortable and clean. A US movie was shown, “No good deeds” with Samuel L. Jackson. I couldn’t hear any of the dialog, but it looked like a really, really bad movie. They also played some weird old German cartoons.
We arrived in Jakarta about three hours later. We had a quick lunch in the train station and then walked to the US embassy. It’s a quick 10-minute walk to the embassy, but it involves crossing several busy streets — not a trivial task in Jakarta. I waited for Agnes outside the gates and tried to chat it up with the guards. It turns out they’re not there to help Americans practice their Indonesian. They’re there to hold machine guns and look intimidating. Nes appeared several minutes later — not with with a one-year visa, but with a 14-day visa. Ugh. It’s enough to get her back into the country. We’ll worry about that problem later.
Kids climbing atop a passing train (this train is not stopped; it’s moving — quickly)
From there, we walked back to the train station and bought our tickets for the ride back to Bandung. To avoid an additional two-hour wait, we purchased tickets on the grungier of the two trains. By the time we boarded, I was starting to feel like Nes did earlier this morning. I took one of her mystery medications and it helped, but it was still painful. The ride was supposed to be three hours, but it turned out to be almost four. We had to keep stopping to let another train pass on our track (the nicer train I suspect). To make things worse, the door on our train car was broken, allowing the smell of the bathroom to waft into the passenger area. But finally, we arrived in Bandung. Om Thomas picked us up from the station and brought us to several food vendors to pick up dinner to bring home. Another long day.
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