Solo, Part 2: The Discovery of the Cream Bath

When Ethan arrived in Indonesia, I decided to meet him in Solo and help him out with the settling in process, so that way he didn’t have to handle all that bureaucratic nonsense alone. Unfortunately for both of us, the drive was all-night long, and miserable. Cigarette smoke in an enclosed space for 8 hours is never fun. A little after dawn, I arrived at the hotel; I was “langsung sakit” (immediately sick!) and headed straight to the little girl’s room to get rid of all the badness.

Ethan was staying in this ultra-posh hotel that was just a little too pricy for us, so after I slept a couple of hours, we ate our breakfast and prepared ourselves for the walk of shame. That is, we physically dragged all of our luggage—no small feat considering he had three big suitcases alone—down the street to the neighboring hotel that was just a wee bit cheaper! Arriving at this hotel was a bit of a walk down memory lane, because it was the exact same hotel we had stayed at over three years ago with USINDO. At that time, there were 25 of us, and we practiced our dangdut (a kind of Indian influenced Indonesian rock music) karaoke over dinner, and stayed up all night singing Indonesian pop songs in the hotel lobby. This time, was slightly different. Our days were filled with going to immigration offices, police offices, and universities, and our evenings were spent with me shivering under four blankets, and Ethan expending his precious drugs brought from America to make me better. One interesting development came out of this though. Figuring that we needed to treat ourselves after all our hard work, Ethan helped me to discover the cream bath.

A cream bath is when someone puts mashed up avocado in your hair and massages it all around for about half an hour. And then they put it under one of those hot steamer things, before they wash it out. Sounds gross, right? Believe me, it feels awesome. I was skeptical at first, but Ethan made it sound so great. And heck, I’ll try anything once. While I was at it, I also decided to try my first manicure, because they said they could do them at the same time. The whole process took about an hour and a half, and what a relaxing time that was! You see, they didn’t just stop with the cream bath and manicure. Both were combined with a neck, back, and arm massage that was just heavenly. I almost forgot I wasn’t feeling well, it was so lovely. For two people, it only cost seven dollars. So, it’s not even too expensive. I’m not so sure about repeating the manicure, but the cream bath I plan on doing as often as possible from now on!