Everything changed!!

Apologies - we've been neglecting the blog this week! We spent a week in Penang (Malaysia), but we'll have to do a post-dated post on that. Penang really is king when it comes to food.

Anyways, our trip has radically changed. Janet is back in Hong Kong working on grad school applications. I'm in Sumatra going solo with just a day pack. This pack is so small that I had trouble packing it for a weekend trip back home. Janet kindly took all of my unnecessary stuff back to HK.

If you've heard of Sumatra before, it's probably because of natural disasters. This island is very disaster prone. Devastating earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are frequent. Perhaps you've heard of Sumatra because of the very strict sect of Islam practiced in the province of Aceh. Sumatra is also known for its diversity of wildlife. Here, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans still live in the wild.

My general itinerary had me flying out of Padang in a few weeks, but apparently an earthquate/tsunami combo just hit the region. Current plans are very fluid..

I'm currently in the city of Medan. According to the guidebook, it's "featureless transit point" with not much to do. This might be true, but its a lot of fun being completely immersed. I'm actually at the point where I can [painfully] converse in Indonesian. People are so surprised to see a white guy speaking Indonesian (in addition to their initial surprise of seeing a white guy, full stop), I have to admit, it's fun.

On another note, Obama arrived in Indonesia on the same day as I did. Its much nicer to have strangers excitedly talk about Obama (who spent his childhood here) than talk about American priests burning Qu'rans. Most of the little food stalls had their TVs tuned in to his speech today. It was subtitled in Indonesian. I was thinking back to any time a foreign leader speaks for an American audience, and realized that it's always dubbed [poorly]. Are we too lazy to read?

Oh, yeah. No more pictures. I don't have a camera. I do have my flip though.. expect plenty of videos and low quality screenshots of the videos in place of pictures.