Manado, part II

After my blogging on Saturday night, T & I got some martabak again and then back to the hotel room where we watched soccer and slept.  Sunday morning we went to church at the Manado branch.  There were only 48 chairs set up and at that time I thought "what a small branch!"  When all was said and done, there were only 30 people in Sacrament Meeting and 4 of those were missionaries, 2 of them were Tom & I, and 5 were children.  It's so weird to go to such a small branch!  The members must be giving a talk every few weeks!  Sacrament Meeting was only like 45 minutes, Sunday School was about half an hour and then RS/Priesthood was about 40 minutes so church was over in 2 hours.  I guess that since they are such a small branch the mission president has told them to only hold church for 2 hours instead of 3.  It seemed super short!  One hour less makes a huge difference.  After church we were invited to have lunch with the branch president and his family.  We had barbecued fish - delicious!  After lunch the branch president was so nice to drive us to the airport where our flight was late...again.  We flew to Makassar where we had to get off the plane and go through security check again just to get right back on the same plane.  How annoying!  They made us do it since some people were getting off in Makassar while some of us were continuing to Jakarta.  Anyway, it was a total waste of 20 minutes.  Then we flew to Jakarta and had to wait FOREVER for a taxi.  We wanted to take a BlueBird taxi since they are the most dependable in Indonesia but we were #23 in line and they were only on #9.  Gahhh.  So we waited like half an hour until it was our turn to get a taxi (and we had already waited like half an hour for our luggage) and then it was like a 45 minute drive to our hotel where we unloaded then headed out for dinner.  We ate chicken satay at a nearby food stand (so good!) then back to the hotel where we crashed for the night.  Our sunburns are getting better...hoorah!...and haven't been too horribly painful which is a relief.

This morning we went to Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast as this hotel doesn't have complimentary breakfast (lame) and then walked to the Indonesia National Monument where we were going to go to the very top to see over the city but apparently it's closed the last week of every month.  Sooo we walked to the internet cafe where Tom is looking up how to get to our next destination - Taman Mini.  It's a place where they have little areas that each represent an area of Indonesia.  There are like imitation houses, etc so you can see what the culture is like in several areas of Indonesia without having to travel the whole country!  I'm really excited to see it.  Anyway, it's burning hot today and we're sweating bullets but we're trying to enjoy every minute of our last two days here in Indonesia.  Here's to hoping for lots of shade at Taman Mini...