Trying to Relax

Welcome back! It's been a little while since I was able to get on here. I hope that you all had a great holiday season and were able to do something fun and exciting for the New Year. Again, I was unfortunate to not have a great time on New Years. This is starting to sound like how I start every post nowdays. Hopefully that will stop soon.

First off, I ended up working somewhat late on New Years Eve. Granted, I was only at the refinery until ~7:00 pm. That may not sound too late, but when you have to come home, eat, shower and then drive 1 hr to get to the nearest bar to celebrate, it turns into a relatively late day at work. Also, I had to get up and go into work in the morning to do some inspections. So, with both of those thoughts, I decided to stay around my hotel and celebrate here. So, I had dinner with my friend Thang, but was back in my room and already in bed and reading by midnight. Exciting, eh?

But that's where the fun ends (because I can tell you were all wishing that you had the same experience on New Years Eve). I ended up waking up at 4:00 am with a bad case of diarrhea and I've been battling problems since then in that area. But I won't get into that here because none of you really want to hear about it (if I am mistaken in this statement, I apologize and whoever it is that is interested, please e-mail me and I can give you all the details...well, I probably won't even then, so just hold your peace). So, I went into work and did the inspections that I needed to do, but called it quits shortly thereafter and came home to rest it off.

I then went into work on both Friday and Saturday, but things were going pretty slowly, so I decided that we deserved a day off. In talking to one of the refinery engineers, he recommended going to this place called Grage Sangkan in Kuningan. Kuningan is ~1 1/2 - 2 hr drive from where we are. So, Thang and I left work a bit early and we had our driver take us up to this new hotel for the night. We got there a bit late and really only had time to eat before calling it an early evening.

But in the morning, the fun commenced again. After breakfast, I decided it was long time since I got a massage. This is needed here in Indonesia because I'm finding it very difficult to just relax. The bed at my hotel really isn't that great and the air conditioning unit blows air right on my face during the night, so I haven't been sleeping extremely well. Then, when we drive to/from work, I can't relax because the roads are bumpy, we always come too close to hitting other vehicles on the road and the driver is always honking his horn to warn everyone that we are passing them. Of course, it's hard to relax at work because I'm working and all. As you can see, I'm finding it difficult to just relax, hence the need for this little getaway.

So, over to the massage area I went and after trying to communicate with the woman at the desk (who spoke very little english), she called over someone else who was able to help me. I decide to get a wonderful hour long massage (for those of you wondering, don't worry, there was no happy ending). My muscles are very tight and always have been. I think it comes from my utter lack of flexibility, or maybe the tightness is what causes the inflexibility...I don't really know. Needless to say, she had a hard time trying to loosen them up a bit, but she did it in the end. However, I do think she may have left me with a few bruises. Now, this hour long massage cost me only ~$14, so you really can't beat that!

But the fun didn't stop there, oh no. I then decided to head over to the spa area in the hotel...yes, this was different than the massage area. When I first got there, I was trying to ask about what kind of treatments they had to see what I might enjoy doing. As luck would have it, I was talking to the same woman I first tried to talk to at the massage place. So, what does she do? That's right, she calls over my friend that gave me the massage because she is apparently the only one of them that speaks english well enough. So, I opt to go for the Aquamedic treatment.

Now this is something else entirely. Actually, it's quite nice and a really interesting idea. So, I will take you on a step by step walkthrough of the entire Aquamedic treatment.

1. You lay down in a plastic "bed" of sorts that has jets of water that shoot up at your back and legs. This is relatively low pressure, or at least was when I was doing it, but it quite relaxing. So much, in fact, that I nearly fell asleep.


2. You then move over to the foot massager. The foot massager is just a high powered jet of water coming straight up from the pool floor. They are nice enough to place a bar to hang on to so that you can keep your balance as the water tries to lift you out of the pool.


3. Next is the lower back massager. This consists of a seat at the side of the pool where there are ~6 jets of water that shoot out at high pressure into your lower back. When I was at this station, they had turned off a few of the other stations and the water pressure was tremendously high. I had to hold on tight to stay where I was!


4. The next step is what I started calling the "gauntlet." Near the side of the pool, they added a short wall ~3 feet or so from the side. This formed a small path for you to slowly creep down. This consisted of 6 different stations. Each station had water jets on both side of you (1 on the main pool wall and the other on the added wall). The first station started to shoot water just above your ankles. Each station afterwards was slightly higher than the previous one so you were able to get the massage at each part of your legs. After spending ~5 minutes at each station, you move on to step 5.


5. Now we move on to the upper back massager. This is one strong jet of water that it aimed at your upper back. Very similar to the lower back, but there was no seat so you can sink low enough to have your upper back in the path of the water jet.


6. Finally, we reach the end where you get to sit under the waterfall. You can see me getting my shoulders massaged by this in the first picture and there is a woman completely submerged in this on the left side of the second picture. This is actually quite good at massaging your shoulders and neck. Quite relaxing in the end.


7. Okay, so I lied, there was really one more step to the whole process. This is of course going over to the little "bar" area and having a cup of coffee or tea (and pay the bill of ~$8 of course). I opted for tea since I really don't like instant coffee and I haven't had anything that isn't instant here in Indonesia so far.

After I finished my Aquamedic treatment, I ran to get my camera so that I could take the pictures that you see here. Then I just sat around the side of the pool and read my book. It really was a great way to relax. As we got closer to the checkout time, I decided to go back to my room to shower and pack. I went to the restaurant and grabbed a quick bite to eat. Just as I was finishing though, they turned the TV on and what did I see? College Basketball! I changed seats and watched the end of the Kansas-Tennesse game. They had a brief update about other games and I got to see that the Badgers won today too. But since ESPN was on, I thought I would wait a bit and see what might come on next. It happened to be the Utah-Alabama Bowl game. Being the college football fan that I am, I decided to sit around and watch the first quarter. It was wonderful to watch football again! After the first quarter though, I thought it was time that we should leave and begin to meander our way back to Indramayu.

So, we found my driver who had been waiting for some time for us and were on our way down to Cirebon to hang out for a bit. The first thing we did was to try and find an ATM that would accept American Express. This is a bit harder to do than it sounds. Well, this wasn't our day to do that, so we're still on a search for that somewhere...not sure where it'll be. But it was still early, so we decided to try and find some touristy things to do. I had an idea of a couple of things to do since I had my Lonely Planet book with me, but I decided to ask the driver if he had any suggestions. I thought that he might know better.

This was an ordeal in and of itself. To do this, the conversation went something like this:

Me: "Are there any touristy things to do in Cirebon?"

Driver: [blank stare]

Me: "Tourist...me" [I point to myself]

Driver: "Yeah Yeah! You tourist. I know" [Nods head vigorously]

Me: "Where?" [Shrug my shoulders to indicate a question]

Driver: "Jakarta, Bali."

Me: "No, here in Cirebon."

Driver: [blank stare]

Me: "Me...tourist...Cirebon...where?"

Driver: "Oh, in Cirebon...?" [I can nown see the wheels turning]

Me: "Yes. Here. Now."

Driver: "Nowhere"

Me: "What? Nowhere?"

Driver: "Yes, nowhere"

Me: "Nothing for tourist in Cirebon? Really?"

Driver: "Yes, nothing"

Okay, so now that I know that the driver doesn't know of any touristy things to do, I rely on the trusty Lonely Planet and decide that we should go to Kraton Kesepuhan. I decide this because it's the first of 4 sites listed in the Lonely Planet book. Kraton Kesepuhan is a palace where the Sultan of Kesepuhan still lives. Don't ask me what the sultan rules over because my answer will most likely be, "Kesepuhan." But of course I have no idea what or exactly where that is. But we went in anyway. We had a couple of tour guides that took us around, even though we didn't ask (or I don't think we did). The most interesting thing in the place was in this really small museum and is pictured there. This is a chariot that has the pictured front to it. Now, this chariot was built in the 1600's sometime and was made to pay tribute to the Hindu's, Chinese and Muslim's, all of which had an influence on the culture of this region. The Hindu's are honored with the trunk of an elephant, the Chinese with the head of the dragon and the Muslim culture with the wings.

After we finished our tour, we headed back into the city for dinner. Now this was what I was really waiting for all day! How can I be so excited for dinner over here, you ask? Well, I'm glad you did. We got to go to Pizza Hut! Now, if you're anything like I was before I started traveling, you're probably thinking, "How could you be so excited about Pizza Hut when you're in the amazingly exotic location with tons of great foods to try?" Well, after being in asian countries for nearly the past year and a half (except for a combined ~2 months), one does not want to eat rice with every single meal and a good pizza hut pizza does the trick to get you back on track. And let me tell you that it was delicious.

After we finished up the pizza, we decided to head back to Indramayu and the hotel and get ready for tomorrow. Yep, it's back to work tomorrow and hopefully we'll be able to start moving forward towards startup. After we start up, I should be kept on site for ~1 week before getting released and being able to head home shortly thereafter. I'm really looking forward to that! But, until then, I just have to get by with what I have and try to relax whenever possible. This weekend (even if the weekend was only one day) sure helped me out a lot in that respect.