Family, friends and a lot of food
The flight from Singapore to Medan took us only around 1 hour, it was a relaxed trip. After we landed we took the train for the first time from the relatively new Kuala Namu airport to the city centre of Medan. I was positively very impressed about the new airport, much better than the old Polonia airport and the train was also very good, it´s clean, punctual and faster than with the car. Medan is the main capital of the island Sumatra but actually not really a nice place for tourists. The traffic and road conditions are worse than what I knew before. Sadly the crime here has increased, you really have to cake care of your belongings which can be stolen very quickly by motorbike drivers. Mery sadly saw how the handbag of a woman was stolen in front of her during daytime. It also happens that when a thief get caught, the surrounded people just hit him until he die, the people here have no problem to take the law into their own hand…
Medan is the residence of Mery’s family, her mom, sister and brother all live here. When Mery was around 16 years old her family moved from Pematang Siantar to Medan. The family gathering was very lovely, even her younger brother came all the way long from Borneo to Medan to join us. We later made a family portrait which is quite common here…
Actually we don´t really have that much to talk about our activities, cause we are mainly here to meet our family members and friends. The daily routine for us is almost the same every day, we make appointments with our families and friends and go out for breakfast, lunch and dinner or we meet in a café or visit them at home. In Medan and Pematang Siantar we never get hungry at all, always eating…really bad ;-) Only in Bukit Lawang we made a short jungle trip.
From Medan we took the train to travel to Pematang Siantar which is around 140 km away. We both grew up here in Siantar, we went to the same school and class. We met here so many old school friends and I still have an aunty and a cousin living here. Mery has also some relatives here. We also went to the local Buddhist temple where the urn of my dad, my aunty, grandparents and great grandparents are placed. Furthermore we visited the old house of my grandparents where I grew up for 12 years when I was a kid. The house is already sold and is currently under construction for about 2 month. The construction workers said that it will take about 1 year until it is finished. Impressive to see is that they do not use any machines to do the work, everything is done by muscle force. Not much has been changed in Siantar, we met so many people we knew from our childhood and enjoyed to eat all the dishes we knew from the time when we were small. It was a very lovely trip back into our past. You will see from the pictures that we met a lot of old friends there and it was funny to talk about the old school times. Everything seems very familiar to us although I didn´t live there for more than 26 years. Our next destination will be Jakarta, there we are looking forward to meet other family members and friends. We will keep you updated…
