Monday, March 21, 2016

7:30 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

The search for a cell phone continues. After doing a lot of research, I had nearly made up my mind to take a chance and buy a Xiaomi Redmi Note 3. This is in spite of the fact that I don’t trust Chinese brands as a rule. I feel like even if they look amazing on paper in terms of their specs, they haven’t been engineered very well. So even if they have a powerful processor and lots of RAM, they don’t take advantage of all that power. Plus, I suspect the build quality is low and that the phone could be defective. I also have a feeling that there will be weird things about the operating system that I won’t understand and that it will be designed with a Chinese market in mind, not a Western one. But even with all those doubts, the Redmi Note 3 seemed worth taking a chance on. It all came down to the camera. If the camera was good, I’d buy it. If not, I’d look elsewhere. Most reviewers gave the camera praise. It didn’t blow them away, but it was pretty good. And that was good enough for me. But just at the last minute, I stumbled across a YouTube review comparing the Redmi Note 3 to the Sony Xperia M5. And this review told a different story. This reviewer provided many sample pictures. He’d take the same picture with the two cameras and put them side by side. He also enlarged a small part of each picture to show the fine detail. And there was absolutely no comparison. The Sony was FAR, FAR better than the Xiaomi. Far better. Not only that, the Sony was tightly integrated with Google services and had many other software advantages. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 had lots of bells and whistles – like a fingerprint scanner – but the Sony was far more solid and had the features you need perfectly realized.

Finding this review nullified all of my research and put me back to square one. It also confirmed my deep suspicion that Chinese brands are not that good despite the specs. I changed my mind once more. I still didn’t know which phone to buy, but I decided that if I buy a good phone, I should wait and buy it in Kuala Lumpur. It would be a much more pleasant experience, and it would be safer. I’d be certain to get a genuine phone and not a fake. I’d also get one that was in good condition and not sitting around in a dirty warehouse or in the hot sun for months. It’d have been kept in air conditioned and dry conditions. I could ask questions in English and get answers. Here in Siantar, no one speaks English and they don’t seem to know anything about the phones other than the price. Finally, I could have confidence in the warranty. Here, if the phone is defective, I doubt I could return it. And I imagine it would be impossible to find out if the warranty was valid in other countries. All of these questions and issues could be dealt with in Kuala Lumpur. And I have to stay in Kuala Lumpur for a while as I get a new passport. So I have the time to go shopping.

The new plan (which was my original plan) was to buy a cheap phone here—one that I would use for just the next month or two. With that new old plan, I did more research and was left floundering. The problem is that really cheap phones don’t attract reviewers. There isn’t much to say about them. Reviewers like to review the flagship phones, not the cheapest ones. No one expects to get very much from a cheap phone, so they don’t generally seek out reviews. Therefore, I couldn’t find out very much about these phones. I eventually gave up, and I decided to go downtown one more time to look at phones.

I think I was successful on that trip to downtown. I wasn’t nearly as angry as I was on my previous trips. So I’m starting to recover from the theft of my phone. I was still very suspicious, however, and I kept a careful eye on everyone around me. I also toned down my friendliness by a lot. I avoided contact with the crazy people. And I still found Siantar to be a very ugly and unpleasant place. I don’t see any charm in this city at all. In the end, there is one cell phone store that appeals to me more than any of the others. The clerks there are all women and none of them speak English. However, they have an intelligent display. They have a long glass case that goes down the entire length of the store. This case has five or six shelves inside it, and every single phone they sell is on display (inside the box) with a card that gives its price and its basic specs. This is perfect for me. The other stores offer no displays and no information. So I’m stuck having to ask the clerks about every single phone. And when they don’t speak English, it’s a nightmare. Plus, the phones are all kept far away and I can’t get close to them. At this store, I can examine all the phones at my leisure and write down all the information in my notebook. There was also one clerk that wasn’t afraid of me and who seemed to know a little bit about the phones. She used her phone and Google Translate to communicate with me, and she knew the answer to one or two of my questions. In particular, I wanted to know if the Samsung Galaxy V Plus had USB OTG support. I’d asked this question in a few other stores, and no one even knew what that meant. This woman piped up instantly and said no. That model did not offer USB OTG support. If I wanted USB OTG support, I’d have to buy the J1 Ace. I was astonished and pleased that she knew what she was talking about.

It was clear that the cheapest phone that could still do the job would cost around one million rupiah, which is about one hundred dollars Canadian. I made a list of all the potential candidates, and this morning, I am going to return to the Anda Hotel and go online and find out about these phones. I should be able to make up my mind and buy a phone today. Beyond that, I have no plans. I might drop by the BCA bank and see if the young manager would like to meet for lunch. He speaks English well, and he is friendly. It would be nice to get to know someone from here. I could also lay the groundwork for having him as a sponsor. With all this time going by, I’m already thinking about my next visa extension. I had plans to do this in some distant city, but it makes more sense to do it here. I’ve already done it once, and they know me. Who knows what could happen in some other small immigration office? I sent out a feeler to Al to see if his wife would be willing to sponsor me a second time and how we might handle the logistics, but Al didn’t say anything about it. I’m sure she would be willing, but it might be too complicated. Al is going to go to Singapore around the time that I need this extension. Plus, they are in Kisaran, and we would somehow have to arrange to have physical papers sent from there to here with her signature. It could be done, I guess, but it would be easier to have a local sponsor—especially a respectable banker.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

7:45 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

My quest for the best $100 phone didn’t get very far. The problem, as I suspected it would be, was a lack of reviews. I couldn’t get decent information about them. If you are interested in a $100 phone, you are just going to buy it. Reviews don’t really matter that much. You’re looking for a cheap phone thta gets the job done. The other problem is that the majority of the reviews come from North America and Europe. And for some reason, USB OTG is not important there. No one ever mentions it in their reviews or tests for it. In Asia, it is extremely important. I really want USB OTG support. But I could not get a definite answer about whether these phones had it or not.

Another problem is that I suffer from budget creep. I might say that I want to spend only $100, but then I’ll see a phone that costs just $30 more and it is FAR better. For $30, you get a big improvement. So I start looking at those phones. Then in that process, I see a phone that is FAR better and IT is only $30 more than the second one. What’s $30? So I’m suddenly looking at phones for $160. And if I’m willing to spend that much, then why not spend $200 or $250 and get a phone that you really like? I go from $100 to $200 in a blink of an eye, and each time you go up in price, there are lots more phones to look into.

I went downtown again. I mainly wanted to answer the question about USB OTG and the budget phones. Which ones supported it and which ones didn’t? I ran into a lot of confusion with that question. Everyone kept telling me that the phones did not have USB OTG. Even when I knew a phone had USB OTG support, they told me it didn’t. It was confusing. Then I realized that they were telling me that the phone did not come with a USB OTG cable in the box. Well, I knew that. NO phone comes with a USB OTG cable. That would make no sense. Even after that, I couldn’t get a clear answer. The only way I’ll know is to take a chance. Buy the phone and test it.

At another store, I had a fairly typical experience. This was the store that had all the phones out on display with nice signs giving their specifications. One phone seemed like a bargain, and it confused me. It was listed as having an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 2 megapixel front camera. That is not a great set of cameras, but it is very good for the price of this phone. The price seemed too low. And I remembered from my research that this phone actually had a 5 megapixel rear camera and a .3 megapixel front camera. I asked the clerks to confirm the sign’s information. Did this phone REALLY have an 8 mepapixel rear camera? They insisted it did. I asked them to open the display case and hand me the box. They clearly didn’t want to do that, but I insisted. Then I looked on the box and I saw that I was right. It had a 5 megapixel camera. Their sign was wrong.

It’s not a big deal that the sign was wrong, but the clerks had no reaction at all. The clerk just put the phone back and locked the display case. There was no attempt to correct the sign, and I don’t think they ever will. It just didn’t occur to them to correct the mistake. And that is a fairly typical attitude for Indonesia. I see it all the time. There’s a certain carelessness and lack of focus. At the Anda Hotel yesterday, I was told that the new passwords for the WiFi weren’t available yet. I would have to wait. I was speaking to a clerk/waiter that spoke excellent English. He said that the WiFi passwords would be ready in about a half an hour. I asked him to tell me when they were ready. I didn’t want to have to keep checking over and over. I asked him twice, and he said yes twice. He knew it was important to me to get online, and as soon as the day’s passwords were ready, he would tell me and bring me one. Then, of course, I never heard from him again. After an hour, I went up to the front desk and asked about the WiFi passwords. They looked at me like this had never been talked about before. I had to insist again, and one of the women went off to investigate. She came back with a WiFi password for me. If I hadn’t insisted, they’d have let me sit there for ten hours. This lack of focus on the part of people adds a subtle layer of stress to all my days in Asia. You just can’t count on anything actually happening. You just can’t. I think people still manage to get things done, but they go about it in a different way. I’ve talked about this many times in the past. People with money have access to lots of services that I don’t use. For example, they would never do all the little things themselves. They would just pay someone else to do it. I saw this in action in Africa a lot where there were armies of little boys willing to go run errands for a small amount of money. You could just sit in your chair and ask for anything you wanted and a little boy would run off and get it for you. I, of course, tried to do everything myself. Even in this hotel, there are probably many layers of service that I don’t know how to access. And I probably wouldn’t want to anyway. I notice that there are empty coffee cups and plates outside a lot of the doors. So they get coffee and food brought to their rooms. I don’t do that. I have my own kettle and I make my own coffee. I prefer it that way, but at the same time it would be nice to have things done for me. To a certain extent, I don’t think I have a nose for pleasure. I’m not really interested in pleasure. It doesn’t occur to me to seek it out. So I don’t get room service, massages, swim in pools, or anything else. I never think about that stuff though I would probably enjoy it all very much.

While looking at cell phones once more, I stopped by the BCA bank to chat with Bima. This is the young man who helped me with my ATM troubles. I wanted to ask him if he wanted to get together for lunch or coffee or something. I have the regular motive of just wanting to get to know him better. It’s nice to have local friends. But I also have the ulterior motive of laying the groundwork so that I could ask him one day to be sponsor for a visa extension. I am meeting him at 1 p.m. today. We’ll see how that goes.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

6:30 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

My encounters with Indonesian people did not go very well yesterday. That is to say, they went normally. The first was when I went to the Anda Hotel for breakfast and to use their Wi-Fi. I was standing at the elevator (Yes, it’s fancy enough to have an elevator) when I caught the eye of the manager who I’d spoken with when my phone was stolen. She is the only English speaker in the place, and the front desk clerks had gotten her to come speak with me about my problem. The manager was sitting at desk in a room near the elevator. She looked at me and smiled and I smiled back. Then, since I was feeling chatty, I went to speak to her. I walked up to the door of that room and said hello. I figured she would say things like “How are you? And what happened with your phone? Did you go to the police? Did they catch the thief?” Instead, she waved her arms at me to go away and said I wasn’t allowed inside the office. I had an instant flareup of anger and annoyance. I saw that there was a big sign on the door to that room saying “Employees Only” or “Hotel Staff Only” or something like that. I also saw that my feet were outside the room. I had not gone inside. I instantly went into passive aggressive mode. I dislike that about myself (I’ve read that only weak people become passive aggressive so quickly), but it happens instinctively. I held my hands up in a mock arrest stance and said something like, “Okay, okay, okay. Look, I’m not in the office. And I’ll go away and never come back. Sorry.” Then I shook my head in disgust and turned and left. I hate it when things like that happen. And it happens a lot in Asia. It’s a kind of rejection, and I don’t deal well with rejection. I end up being very reluctant to approach people or ask them anything. I’m nervous they’ll say no. It’s the abrupt way that people do that that bothers me. And this woman just jumped all over me as if I had done something terribly wrong. When I came down from the restaurant a couple of hours later, I noticed that all the doors in the area were firmly closed. They don’t want any dangerous foreigners wandering around and saying terrible things like “Good morning” and “Hello.”

The other disappointing encounter was my lunch appointment with young Bima from the BCA bank. It didn’t go well. For one thing, when I showed up, Bima told me that we had to wait. He had invited a friend to join us, and the friend wasn’t there yet. I hate it when people do that. I’d wanted to have lunch with Bima. We’d already established a rapport of sorts. We’d had two relatively long conversations and we’d gotten all the “Where are you from? How old are you? Why aren’t you married?” questions out of the way. The lunch was supposed to take us beyond that point and allow us to have a real conversation. It was also supposed to be informal and relaxing. But now it wouldn’t be. I’d have to sit through all the questions from his friend all over again.

Worse, instead of going to a regular local restaurant, they took me to a fancy and expensive place. These places are always worse than regular restaurants. Everything gets so complicated. You end up focused on the food and have little time left over for the conversation. Things ended up being far worse than even I expected. I ordered a chicken dish from the menu. The waitress went away with all our orders and was gone for a long time. Then she came back and said they couldn’t prepare that dish. So I chose something else. This too turned out to be unavailable. The third time, I ordered a fried rice omelet—the exact same thing I’d had for breakfast. But at least it was simple. I ordered a mango juice. The waitress went away. She came back later and said they had no mango juice. I had to pick another fruit.

Bima’s food came very quickly, and was placed in front of him. But my food wasn’t there. And neither was his friend’s. So Bima’s food sat there getting cold. He refused to touch it until my food came. All of this took a very long time, and now Bima announced that they only had an hour for lunch so we had to hurry up. I HATED that. It makes sense that they only had an hour. That’s normal. But then why go to a fancy restaurant? You know it will take a long time. And it will be expensive, but you can’t linger over your food and enjoy it.

And, as expected, I was just grilled for the entire time. Question after question after question. I was on trial and defending all my life choices all during lunch. Why are you alone? Aren’t you lonely? Why aren’t you married? Don’t you want to have a wife? Why why why why why why why why why? I wanted to strangle both of them. Normally, it is a bit of a transaction. I answer all the annoying why questions, and then I get some information about local life. In this case, it didn’t happen. I got almost nothing. All I learned was that Bima’s friend was actually from Tanjungbalai. The two of them had only recently graduated from university. Then they’d gone to Jakarta for training by BCA bank, and the bank had placed them here in Siantar. They live in a boarding house of sorts—probably exactly like Rea’s place in Tanjungbalai. I’d like to see one of these places for myself. They appear to be a common part of life in Indonesia.

I had to answer so many why questions (right down to why I use a fork instead of a spoon—isn’t a spoon easier?) that I had little time to eat. Then because time was running out, I had to eat like a maniac and just shove food down my throat as fast as possible. If it were possible, I’d like to have sent them away. They can go back to work. I’ll stay at the restaurant and finish my meal at leisure and read a book. But that was impossible to manage without all kinds of hurt feelings.

I was so sick of all the complications that I didn’t want to deal with money problems, too, so I just insisted on paying for all three of us. It was just easier that way. I don’t know if that was a good thing to do or not. I think it was okay. These guys were extremely young. I was two and a half times their age, so it was okay that I paid for lunch I think. We had a lot of dishes and we each had a fancy drink. The bill came to 160,000 rupiah. It seems like a healthy amount in Indonesia, but it’s relatively cheap. Three fancy meals and three fancy drinks for $16 Canadian. Of course, you have to compare it to my regular good and very filling meal at my local restaurant. I get rice, a nice piece of chicken, a boiled egg, five vegetable dishes, and all the pure water I can drink for 13,000 rupiah. So this horrible lunch cost me 12 times what one normal meal would cost if I were on my own. It would have been worth it if I’d managed to extend my friendship with Bima, but because he had invited his friend along, that didn’t happen. When we walked back to the bank and said goodbye, I felt like we were less comfortable with each other, not more. And that doesn’t bode well for my ulterior motive of one day asking Bima to be sponsor for a tourist visa extension.

That’s about all that happened during the day. I spent the night reading a John Grisham novel in my room. I had a good dinner at my local restaurant. At one point, I realized that I still had access to the Anda Hotel Wi-Fi signal from here, and I still had the day’s password. Unfortunately, the signal was so weak that I had to sit outside on the balcony. Mosquitoes attacked me with a vengeance and an Indonesian man sat down right beside me and thrust his head practically in front of my computer screen and intently watched everything I did. It was quite annoying. But I couldn’t do anything anyway. The Wi-Fi signal was not strong enough. It took ten minutes for a single web page to load, and even then it sometimes just quit. So I gave up and went back to my book.

I didn’t make any more progress in purchasing a cell phone. I did more research, but I was left more confused afterward. I was trying to nail down the purchase of a cheap temporary phone. But there were more problems doing that. I had almost made up my mind to buy the Asus Zenfone C for $110, which is the cheapest option around, but at the last minute, I came across the unwelcome information that this model doesn’t have a GPS sensor. And GPS is the number one reason I need a phone to begin with. This was the fifth or sixth time that I stumbled across the absence of some key feature on a budget phone. So buying a budget phone began to appear like a landmine. There were dangers, and being unable to communicate with anyone, I could not avoid those dangers. It’s great to buy a phone for $100, but it’s not so great when you buy it and then find out it can’t do the one or two things you want it to do.

So I switched gears and came at the problem from a different angle. I started looking for the budget phone with the best camera. The camera is the most important feature to me after the GPS. This kind of narrowed the field. One phone stood out—the Huawei Honor 4C. Every review said it had the best camera by far compared to other phones in its class. So this morning, I will do some more research into that phone. I believe it will cost around $200. That’s double my cheap phone budget, but it appears that buying a cheap phone is a risky move. So I pretty much have to spend around $200 at a minimum to get a phone that will do the job.

Friday, March 25, 2016

4:40 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

It’s early in the morning, so I don’t know how clear I will be. I thought I was awake, so I turned on the light and I’m making coffee, but now I feel quite tired. I guess I didn’t get enough sleep after all.

It’s been a strange couple of days. And it’s been mainly about technology. I did one last round of research, and I decided to take a chance and buy a Xiaomi Note 3 smart phone. I walked back to the cell phone store fully intending to just buy one. But then things got weird, as they always do. For one thing, the people at the store could not really confirm whether the phone had an SD card slot or not. Some versions of this phone have a hybrid slot that can accept either a second SIM or an SD card. I knew, however, that the Note 2 did have an SD card slot. It was also quite a bit cheaper. So on the spur of the moment, I decided to buy a Note 2. But when the guy at the store cut open the seal on the box and opened it, the first thing I noticed was that the included documentation was for a different phone. It wasn’t for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2. It was for a much cheaper phone. Chances were that this was an honest mistake, and the company just included the wrong papers in the box. But it was also possible that this meant the phone was a fake or that it was off the grid—some sort of factory reject. And if the documentation was wrong, perhaps other things were wrong or the guarantee would not be honored. Whatever the truth, it was bad, and I told them the deal was off and I left. They were going to open another Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 and see if the paperwork inside that one was correct, but I told them not to bother. I didn’t trust the phones and I didn’t trust their store anymore. I left.

As I left, I was pretty depressed. It had taken a lot of effort to get to the point where I could buy the fancy Note 3 or Note 2. Now I was back at square one. I quickly came to the conclusion that enough was enough. I decided that my initial instincts were right. It was too risky to buy a fancy phone in Sumatra. It was just begging to be ripped off. It was better to buy a good device back in Kuala Lumpur. I decided to go back to the other cell phone store—the one that had a nice display—and buy either the Zenfone C or the Zenfone Go.

I still had questions about this phone, and I got some confusing answers back at the first cell phone store. I asked about the Zenfone C while I was there. In particular, I wanted to know if it had a GPS sensor. That, after all, is the entire point of buying a replacement phone. At this store, they said no. They said it did not have a GPS sensor. But then I found that one of the clerks owned this exact brand and model phone. I asked if I could see it, and I turned on Google Maps. Sure enough, a little blue dot showed up giving the physical location of the phone. As far as I know, the only way that could happen is if the phone had a GPS sensor. How else could the phone be reporting its physical location? I tried to get the clerks in the store to acknowledge this contradiction. They said the phone had no GPS. And yet there was the GPS in operation. How could that be? But they insisted it had no GPS despite the evidence. They really don’t seem to know much about their own products or even about phones in general. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me.

When I got to the store with the nice display, I tried to confirm the existence of GPS on the Zenfone C. One clerk there, a very beautiful young woman, assured me with confidence that it did have GPS. I asked her several times, and she seemed sure. So I decided to buy it. It cost 1.1 million rupiah, which is about $110 Canadian, so it wasn’t a big, big deal. I picked out the blue model, and I’m very pleased about that, though from a usage point of view, it makes no difference. I used the phone for something like 12 hours straight yesterday, and I totally forgot that it was blue. The blue is only on the back cover. The front is black. And when you use the phone, you never see the back. But it is a very nice blue. And the box is blue. So it makes it seem happy and upbeat.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Wasn’t able to finish my story from the other day, so I’ll continue here:

My actual purchase of the Asus Zenfone C went relatively smoothly. Everything looked good when they opened the box. The paperwork was in order. The serial number and IMEI numbers were included and everything looked genuine. The clerks at the store needed to perform some kind of technological voodoo to get the phone up and running and connected to the systems in Indonesia. I don’t know what they did, but I just let them go ahead. My one concern was the GPS. I tried to tell them that I would buy the phone ONLY if it had GPS. So I needed them to demonstrate the GPS before I handed them the money. The wrinkle with that was that to use Google Maps, you had to sign in to a Google Account. They handed me the phone and asked me to add my Google Account to the phone (or add the phone to my Google Account—I’m not sure which way it goes). I didn’t want to do that right in the store. I wanted to take my time and do it at leisure later and think through all the security concerns, etc. Plus, I had just created a new password, and it was back in my hotel room. I couldn’t remember it.

So without them asking for or my giving permission, the clerk created a new Google Account on my phone. And with this account, she turned on Google Maps and we saw that the GPS worked. That was good, but now I was freaked out that I had some strange Google Account on my phone. Could I delete it? It was confusing, and I wasn’t happy about that. But they appeared to be able to delete that account, and later on, I added my own Google Account.

I won’t go over everything that happened after that, but it took me about two days to set up the phone with all my apps. Some apps were simple to reinstall. Some were complex. Some were impossible. I had to do a lot of research and try a lot of things. It was also very slow at times since I was using my network connection to do all the downloading. And I kept running into problems for which I could find no solution. For example, my old WhatsApp account was based on the phone number I was using when I set it up. But that phone number is long in the past. I don’t have it or use it anymore. So I can’t log in to that app. I have to create a new account, which means that I lose all of my contacts and history. It’s puzzling that it works that way.

It’s been awesome to have a phone again, particularly because I use it to connect my computer to the Internet when I have no Wi-Fi access. And it’s nice that the phone was relatively cheap at $110. However, the experience of using this phone is FAR inferior to using my original Galaxy J7. It’s far slower. The screen is dark and not very sharp. The screen is also smaller, so the keyboard is difficult to use with my fat fingers. Worst of all, it is glitchy. I had zero problems setting up the Galaxy J7. Everything I did just worked. But on this Asus Zenfone C, I run into problems constantly. Weird things happen all the time. Apps just shut down. Apps will suddenly turn on. I’ll be trying to enter a password, and instead of doing that, the phone will launch YouTube and play a video. All kinds of weird things happens. And every time I try to install a new app, I get a window asking me to allow Zen UI to access my Twitter account. This makes no sense. I try to say no, and I go around and around in circles as apps turn on and off and weird things happen. Finally, the battery life is terrible. Granted, I’m using the phone non-stop and using it as a Wi-Fi hotspot, which requires a lot of power. Even, so the battery just drains so fast. And it takes a very long time to recharge. If I’m using the phone while it is plugged in, it barely charges at all. Basically, it is a horribly phone in almost every respect. It was cheap, but you clearly get what you pay for when it comes to smart phones.

I’m back at the Anda Hotel now to use their Wi-Fi connection because I still had a ton of things to do on the phone, and I’d used up all 10 gigabytes of my SIM card’s data plan. Things are slowly coming together, but I still can’t do some things. My main problem right now is that I can’t download any maps from Here Maps. They just won’t download. No matter what I do. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but it won’t work. This is a big problem. I can download maps from Maps.Me no problem. But those maps are very simplistic. They don’t have nearly as much detail as Here Maps or Google Maps.

I’ll keep trying.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

9:40 a.m., Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

Not much to say today. I spent yesterday morning continuing to work on my phone. Then in the afternoon, I walked downtown to look for a case for my phone. Since I had my new phone, I was able to take an unusual route. Ever since my first phone was stolen, I was restricted to the main streets that I could remember. I don’t have a map of the city, and I had to stay on the streets that I knew well. Otherwise I’d get lost. But with my Zenfone 2, I fired up Google Maps and set off down some small streets to go exploring. That was great. However, I can’t say that it was pleasant. Siantar is a very ugly city. It’s also not very interesting.

My first destination was a place where I remembered seeing two camera stores. They were very cheap stores, but I thought they might carry some belt cases for cameras that would fit my smart phone. The ones I’ve seen for smart phones have been cheaply made. One camera store had a small case that possibly could be adapted to fit my phone. That was it.

I then went to a series of smart phone stores. The first few didn’t have any cases that fit my phone. This seemed fitting. Nothing I buy ever fits anything. When I tried to buy a case for the Samsung, it was impossible. I figured it was because the phone was relatively large and unusual. But now I had a very normal and regular-sized phone. And even now, I couldn’t find a case that fit it. It was annoying.

I eventually found myself back at the store where I bought the phone. I went there to buy a new SIM card. I had already used up the ten gigabytes of data on my first card. While they were setting up my new SIM, I asked about a case for this phone, and to my astonishment, they produced the perfect case. It was the exact size of my phone. It also had stitched belt loops, not just a clip. And, best of fall, it was vertical. Most cases are horizontal, and that is awkward. The phone is so long that it gets in the way when it stretches horizontally across your waist. But this case was vertical—up and down—so the phone does not get in the way of movement.

The case cost only about five dollars. I couldn’t help but reflect that had I found such a case for my Samsung, that five dollars would have saved me about four hundred dollars and untold trouble and trauma.

That was a good part of the day. The bad part continues to be my stomach problems. I was really sick for a long time when I got to Siantar. I eventually started a course of antibiotics, and I appeared to get better. I had a few days of health. And then, boom, out of nowhere I was sick again. And it was almost a completely new type of sickness. It’s hard to describe. Normally when I have diarrhea, I experience bloating and discomfort and then severe stomach cramps as the diarrhea moves through the lower part of the intestine. If it’s really, really bad, I also have stomach pain and a sense that I’m going to vomit. But this time, I experienced regular but intermittent pain in my upper abdomen. The pain was severe and all life came to a halt during those episodes. It felt like my stomach and intestines were clenching and tightening savagely. And the pain was really bad. I’d be held motionless with my mouth open from the pain. Then it would slowly subside. A minute or two later, another episode would strike. This went on for hours. I barely got any sleep. I had no sense of diarrhea moving through my system. It was just this pain.

But when I got back to the hotel at one point, I was hit with a severe series of cramps. I was doubled over on the stairs, and helpless to prevent it, I shit my pants. It was so horrible. The smell was unbearable. I had to shuffle my way back to my room and take off my clothes and then wash it all. It got through my underwear and all over my pants. It was pretty bad. So life is no fun.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

8:20 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

A few adventures over the last couple of days. I don’t have much energy this morning, so a quick summary will have to do. The big story was applying for my final visa extension. Before I could do that, I had to nail down a sponsor. That worked out well. I asked Al if his wife would mind sponsoring me a second time. He said that was no problem.

I had to find a place in the neighborhood that could print the documents and then make copies. One problem there was that my flash drive had been corrupted by a virus when I used it in Kisaran to print these exact same documents. I had the documents on a flash drive, and I went to a stationery type store. The guy there plugged my flash drive into his computer to print out the documents, but in so doing, my flash drive was infected with a virus and all the contents of the drive were lost—including the documents. Luckily, I had photocopies of them, and I just had to retype them. Then I had the idea of using a memory card with a USB adapter instead of a flash drive. A memory card always has a “lock” switch on it. For some reason, USB drives don’t have this switch, which is really strange. So I copied the documents to the memory card. Then I locked it with the switch. After that, it’s impossible to write anything to the card or modify its contents. Therefore, it would be impossible for a virus to transfer itself to the card. Perfect.

Once I had the documents, I got everything organized and rode off to immigration. One glitch in this process was that I was applying for my extension fairly early. Perhaps too early. Al was going to Singapore, and he thought it was a good idea for me to apply right away in case the office wanted to call him and his wife again. If I waited until later, he wouldn’t be home. To my delight, the immigration office accepted my application without question. To my disappointment they said that it would take 8 days to process it. No idea why they are so slow.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01