The
House
of Ding.

A day on the train

• Posted February 25th, 2009
• by Chris
• No comments

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.