When it rains...

They say it's the dry season here in Medan, but we have had torrential downpours the past couple of days. Yesterday, both the house that we live in and the office where K works got flooded. Outdoor drains at both places were clogged with leaves, so the water found its own level indoors. Of course this all happened the day after A scrubbed and mopped all of the floors. The flood at K's work started on the second floor, so you can imagine the mess.

Apparently someone had time during the cleanup to take a photo ;)



Other than mopping up water, we kept busy by attending the grand opening luncheon of the J.W. Marriott Medan. It's Medan's first five-star hotel, and they pulled out all of the stops. We were treated to two live bands, a six-course meal, boring speeches, a video montage set to the Star War's theme song, and a dramatic entrance by the governor of Sumatra and the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. We don't really know why we were invited, but we were VIP guests. It was all quite surreal.

The ambassador plays the drums.



That has pretty much been the excitement of the week. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to get to Singapore this weekend. We don't have the right kind of visas to leave the country yet. Instead, we're going to celebrate Muhammad's birthday (that's why we have a long weekend) by trekking around Danau Toba. Home to the Batak people, Danau Toba is one of the largest crater lakes in the world, and it's the site of the largest volcanic eruption in the last 25 million years. It should be a blast!