Getting Acclimated

This was a post from August 10th that didn't make it on.

Well, we made it to ________ on Sunday afternoon. Visa paperwork was started on Monday morning and will continue throughout the week as things are ready to move to the next step.

We are so thankful for a safe trip, no lost luggage and an easy time through customs and immigration. In fact, we praise God for going above and beyond our expectations. We thought that we had it all covered with our luggage, but as novice world travelers, we didn’t know to choose the flight that had shorter layovers. As a result, when we checked in they told us that we couldn’t check our 22 pieces of baggage through to the capitol city. We had already paid excess baggage fees and thought it was covered. But God…(isn’t that a great phrase??) But God had His man in place in Milwaukee, overseeing the handling of our baggage. What an encouragement and provision he was for us. He made some calls while we were in flight and had our 16 action packers stored for us at San Francisco which allowed us to take some time to go to a hotel with the kids for our 10 hour layover – to relax, swim and have a nice meal and a short nap before we continued with our journey!!

Our time in the capitol was both relaxing and a good time to start learning. The diversity was amazing to me – from 4 storey malls to tiny “warungs” (convenience stores) at the end of the streets.

We got an idea of how the money works – you give it to them and they take it! Just kidding – it’s fairly easy and yet confusing to me at times. 1 million rupiah is about 110 USD, so if I spent 200.000 on groceries (which I did yesterday), you take off 4 zeros and you get 20 dollars – that’s the approximate conversion. The main bills you use are 100000, 50000, 20000, 10000, 5000, and 1000. My problem is the many thousands and that the colors on the 100000 and the 10000 are similar. So, when I see the total on the cash register is 193.175, I have to figure out if it’s 10 thousand or 100 thousand that I need to give her. At one place where I was buying some flip flops for the boys, the lady finally said – “blue one” – which I didn’t have! But we had it straightened out pretty quickly!!

We’ve had some great local meals here already. One meal of note was Beef “Bakso”. It’s a soup with greens and noodles, bean curd cakes, beef meatballs and tripe. It tasted excellent. Being a texture person, I probably would leave the tripe out if I was cooking it, but overall it was a good soup!

Anyway, we are overflowing with thankfulness to the God who goes before us and yet never leaves us. Thanks for your prayers as we learn, learn, learn!!