me: (to life) ouch: medan ovia

Last week I went to Lake Toba in Medan, Indonesia, for some service learning thing. It was kind of terrible, but not very disappointing because I wasn't expecting much anyway.

Here's some information (read: warnings) for the average first-world traveler:

Everyone smokes. By everyone, I kind of actually mean everyone. Teenagers, men, women. They smoke everywhere, all the time. And they don't smoke good cigarettes. They smoke those really cheap and terrible cigarettes that give off huge clouds of noxious fumes that make you wonder if they're actually inhaling anything at all. Or, like, just fake-smoking like actors sometimes do. Seriously. It is bad.
You may want to get a local card for your phone. Because there's no internet, and whatever internet you get at the hotel is likely to be intermittent and extremely slow. Sometimes it's oversubscribed and you can forget about any internet at all. Data roaming's not much of an option because it's kind of really expensive.
Hot water? What hot water? Because Lake Toba is at a high altitude (Sinabung was at an even higher altitude) there's not much water pressure. Or hot water. At Sinabung all we got was a pathetic trickle of lukewarm water. It took forever to shower with somewhat less cold water, and by the end you're shivering like crazy anyway so you might as well just give up. Heads up: the hot water isn't 24/7.
Much insects. I am not kidding you. Flies are everywhere and so are ants. You might want to seal up your food somewhere lest you discover ants crawling about inside your bag. You need long pants, and/or an abundance of insect repellent. Good insect repellent. Trust me, you will be using it a lot.
I forget. There are more warnings in the post though, so read on.

Anyway, we were there to build a water tank for some school's toilets (school number 17 I think) (side note: usually their toilets are non-flushing, i.e. you need to scoop up water and pour it into the squatting toilet to manually flush it) but there were already workers building it and they just kind of pacified us and let us try out cementing things but we kind of sucked and so had to leave everything to the workers basically.

We were also supposed to teach the primary school kids a bit of English, but due to some fuck ups - like having two out of the four days we were supposed to teach being holidays, and overestimation of the children's English level, and lack of translators, and bad weather, etc - we had to do lots of improvisation. Which was utter hell because I really don't have any energy to deal with children so it was more like me teaching for half and hour and then escaping to go take photos.

Oh yeah, for some reason, I was designated as the trip's "official photographer" (probably because I'm in the photography club). I use quotation marks because I don't actually think there was supposed to be a designated photographer but whatever. It gave me an excuse to loiter around places that I shouldn't really be at.

Also people kept borrowing my camera and taking photos which were usually too dark or too bright because I like using manual. Also now that the trip is over they keep asking me for photos and I'm like seriously I don't know what the shit went on with my camera, okay? I don't know who took all of those one thousand three hundred pictures.

The food was subpar and extremely dubious and almost everyone had a bout of illness (mainly nausea and vomiting and fever). The tap water there is not safe. IT IS NOT SAFE. Do not even attempt. Do not even boil the tap water and drink it. Almost everyone who fell sick fell sick because of food made with dubious water. Also be careful of the food because you never know if a fly was on it two seconds ago. I found three separate bugs in three separate pieces of bread, which almost made me forswear bread forever.

Anyway when we left the school people were very emotional and stuffs and crying lots etc, which made me a little uncomfortable because I felt a total of zero. Zero anything. In fact I couldn't wait to go back to high-tech civilization. I believe that I have mentioned before that I get extremely uncomfortable spending prolonged periods of time in places without accessible internet and very tall glass buildings. Also clean toilets.

The good part about Medan was that things are really very cheap. You have to bargain though, with roadside stalls. Try for half-price, and then walk away and ask another stall, which will most likely be selling the exact same thing. Attempt to convey to them that the other stall said that x price was okay. Ask for lower price. Profit.

Even the supermarket sells things at lower prices. I am really not kidding you. Oh but be careful of airport food - even airport food is not always reliable. We ate at A&W before departure, and it was extremely disappointing. My cheeseburger wasn't even warm, and the cheese was... not even melted. Deep sigh.

Anyway. I made up some mushy non-concrete standard crap for my reflections and slept on the flight. Thus concludes my Medan post. Some photos follow.