Chapter One: Christmas Trees, Tears and Shrink Wrap

This trip came at the best and worst time. The combination of being sick the weekend before and missing out on two whole days to get up for the following week and starting my first week of teaching full time made for one of the most difficult weeks since I have been here. Lessons were tough, the to-do list was long, and my energy level was low. I left school on Thursday burnt out, discouraged and about ready to quit. God is good though, he knew that I needed not only a break away from school to recharge, but an adventure that would challenge all the things I never thought I was cut out for.
We successfully left the school at 11:45am on our way to Jakarta. Jennie planned to use various discriminating tactics to make sure the taxi rides and room placements were random. So all the tall people rode in one car, and the shorter people in another:) The ride to Jakarta was really fun. We agreed to try only to talk about school unless absolutely necessary. This provided for quite the conversation in the vertically blessed taxi:) We talked about everything from car accidents to Christmas Trees! Praise God for hardly any traffic, we were able to get to Jakarta in about 2 1/2 hours, which got us to the airport with about three hours to spare.
While waiting for our turn to check in, we sat on the floor near a machine that shrink wrapped luggage. It was rather fascinating to see the items that people wanted shrink wrapped, still not quite sure what the purpose of that was, but it was entertaining nonetheless.
In the three hours we had to wait, we filled the time by playing the game Phase 10. Who would have thought that that game would have become a theme of the trip, and the bane of my existence. Seriously, it was awful. The object of the game is to get through ten phases of card combinations, if you don't, then you collect points throughout the game for cards you have left over. Apparently, the object of the game for Molly was to fail miserably and rack up more points than all the other players combined. It took about four or five rounds for me to finally make it to Phase 2.
We were able to check in without any issues, and got on the plane without elbowing too many Grandma's in the process. On domestic flights there are no assigned seats, so it is a free-for-all when the lady announces that the plane is boarding. We ended up sitting relatively close to each other, and the majority of the flight was spent resting up for the crazy bus ride that awaited us in Medan.