PRAHA -> DUBAI -> ARRIVAL TO JAKARTA

Before our intense trip to Indonesia there was a little stop in Prague from where we took off. Because our cool friend is living there at the moment he offered us that we can stay in his place, so we decided to go few days before our flight. These few days full of alcohol and Prague parties were, well let’s say pretty good start of our yearlong adventure.

The night before our flight it was raining heavily so we decided to stay home and have a calm evening with some beers and chat in our friends’ apartment. In the morning it was still raining pretty bad so we didn’t go anywhere around Prague as well, too lazy to walk around in the rain and the excitement of the trip was getting bigger. We bought some bagels and veggies and prepared something little for the 24 hour flight. After we finished we said goodbye to our friend, thanked him for everything and were on our way to Prague’s airport.

On the airport check-in without any problems, Alan’s last cigarette before the flight to Dubai and we were on our way to find our boarding gate. While waiting we met up with our next friend from Slovakia who was taking part in the same scholarship program and was on her way to Jakarta. Classic flight - movies, series, bored looking at the screens in front of us.

In Dubai we met with another guy from Slovakia who was taking the same flight from Dubai to Jakarta. So we walked around the airport, found a place to eat for free if you wait for connecting flight more than 3 hours (where we spent almost two hours), found a smoking room where you couldn’t see your feet through the smoke and looked a bit around the duty free shops for the alcohol we knew we’re not going to see for a long time. After these 4 hours of waiting we moved to our gate and the change of people’s appearance was drastic. Women in gilbabs and men in long white robes and awesome beards were a big sign of how Indonesia is going to look like. Our narrow minded thinking was stuck to just one thought of getting to Jakarta safely and hoping none of these guys take Islam too seriously. Flight was exactly the same just a bit longer with more food and more free beer. The flight attendant was pretty surprised when we asked for a nice cold beer at 5 a.m. when everybody was waking up asking for tea and coffee. What the fuck woman you’ve never seen Slovakians or what.

We arrived in Jakarta at around 15:30 local time and intense stuffiness and heat welcomed us. Well inside of the terminal it was pretty all right so we tried a lot not to go outside. Fortunately we had to wait in queue of around 80 people to check our visas in that beautifully air conditioned place. The whole visa checking was hugely weird because someone had to take picture someone hadn’t, someone was there for literally 15 minutes and we were done in around 20 seconds. After this we went to see if this awesome Indonesian system actually works and tried to find our luggage. Damn it felt good when we found it. At last we had to go out so we could meet up with some people to tell us what the next plan is.

The problemo was that when we actually went out there was nobody from the programe. So we stood in fucking 40 degrees heat for like half an hour not knowing what to do, smoking cigarettes like crazy what wasn’t very pleasant in the heat and humidity, and listening to annoying “Taxi mister??” for fucking everywhere. Yeah, around half and hour later we found the guy who took us to another room full of other students were we waited for another couple of hours. Gladly they gave us 500 000 rupiah (around 40 euros/50 US dollars) for these three days we are going to spend in Jakarta. Yeah our great east European nature told us to go buy beers with our new money and so we did. We drank some beers in the room where everybody was waiting and then some mini bus picked us up and took us to the hotel. But that’s for another time.