I’m pretty excited to finally have an address! A home base… a place to leave my stuff that’s not a hotel room! My new address is:

Jonathan Brown
Jl. Bunga Mawar 39
Roses Townhouse unit 1
Jakarta 12410

A few hours later, Lydia & I met up with a fellow American in paradise… Brook: a 35 year old Rhode Islander who has been working with disaster relief operations in Indonesia for the past several years. He’ll be here in Jakarta for 3 months & was looking for a place to rent,, finding little success for such a short period. We may be in a position to help him now. In the meantime we met on the roof (between the pool & the bar) and shared stories about who we are & what brings us to Indonesia!

He’s seems a great guy, and we enjoyed going out for dinner with him. He flew to Aceh the day after the tsunami, and was there when the second 8.3 richter scale earthquake hit Nias & the northern Sumatra area several months later. He was in Yogya helping with Merapi evacuations when the earthquake hit there. On the 4th floor of his hotel, with 9 stories of concrete & steel above him,,, he said that was the scariest 55 seconds of his life. The ground moved violently, like your mother shaking you out of bed on a bad day,,, but in rapid lurches 1meter in each direction. Even though this 6.2 earthquake was smaller in magnitude than the wavy one he experienced in Nias over a year ago, he was much closer to the epicenter of this one, and the violent shaking vs. the slow wavy motion made it much worse.

Very interesting listening to his stories.