I am still sick. My computer is broken, I found a seven-inch-long gecko in the toilet at my hotel, and lately I've begun to question why on earth I ever wanted to come here at all. That sounds really bad, but I have my moments, that's for sure. It's been awhile since I've updated, and that has been mostly about my computer being incapacitated and less about no internet access. Since I moved out of the house in Bentang and into the hotel on Jalan Soekarno Hatta, I haven't ventured out anywhere. I had begun to feel comfortable in China Town, knew where the internet cafe (that would charge me more than double for being a foreigner) was and had just found the grocery store. I have only eaten when someone came and got me to eat, and have spent basically the rest of this week trying to sleep. Yes, it's been like that. As the cherry on the kue, I can't seem to load any of my emails at this cafe. ::sigh::

Okay, enough wallowing. Time to look on the bright side. Tomorrow I move into my new house (which is like a pavilion, I think, a guest house on someone else's land), and the teachers at my school have been exceptionally kind. I have seen some beautiful sights here in Bukittinggi, and am reminded daily of why I came here (but sometimes the reminders just pale in the face of other inconveniences). Today, for instance, I got to talk to some really cool people (in English! Yay!), and someone told me about my name. He thought I was an Indonesian based just on my name: Amelia, a common Indonesian name, and Din, the Arabic word for religion. Who'd have thunk it?

Anyway, I think it is time to wrap it up. I'm currently in love with the fictional relationship between Leah Price, a Georgia preacher's daughter, and Anatole Ngemba, the Congolese schoolteacher in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I hope I finish the novel tonight (and more than that, I hope that my books arrive here sometime soon, the loneliness is only assuaged by the comfort of a fiction novel.

Will write again soon and upload all my previous entries, too, as soon as the compy's fixed.