Day 18 Road to Indonesia

 Road to Indonesia

(Since we have arrived and are staying for a while, I guess I will drop the "day" count. Not sure where I am with that anyway.)

Jet lagging, which means awake in the middle of the night. Oh well. To be expected.

We did go to the second floor of the building yesterday to have our covid test, along with the 30 other people who came in New Year's Eve. Quarantine like this is a new experience for the hotel, ...and they make it sound like it might be a new experience for the government as well. The hotel said they are receiving new directions all the time and now we need to stay 6 days, rather than 5 days, because the covid results at the end of our stay will not be released until day 6. I pled my case that we did not need to stay at all since we had had covid, and they said they would process the request, but I doubt that our plea will be successful. They also said that they had been mistaken about our being able to move around the hotel after this first covid test. We are confined to our room. That is more what we would expected. We do not mind that part, but it is the lack of being able to get enough physical exercise that is bothering me.

We were also told that we had to pay 800,000 rupiah (about $56 USD) each for the test. And of course we did not have any local currency. We were told we could go to the lobby and use the ATM machine, but it did not accept either one of our debit cards. Of course the front desk would give us money using our credit cards....for a fee. So changed some that way. Figuring out how to cheaply exchange money is always a hassle when you get to a new country. While we were in the lobby we tialked with a young German man who came in at the same time we did. He and his 4 friends are fleeing the covid restrictions of Germany and going to live in Bali for a few months. He had been wandering the hotel all day, at least the places that did not get him into trouble. He was in the lobby late at night waiting for food to be delivered. He is a vegetarian and he said he eats alot. The food delivered to our rooms (from the government menu) could be cut in half and still satisfy Rick and me. It is pretty much the same every meal: chicken, rice, egg, vegetable, noodles. I was worried about gaining weight if we were being fed 3 meals a day, but have decided we would not need to worry too much about that.

As we wait in the hotel, we are finding out things about Indonesia we did not have time to digest before we came so quickly. I will write about some of those discoveries later. The 4 a.m. call to prayer (why is it so early here?) just started, so I guess I will see if I can sleep a bit more.