5th April 2016, 4 am in early morning i left from my hometown in Bandung, Indonesia, it’s never been so easy to say “goodbye” to some of those close people in your life when you were about to move to other continent (that you never been to) for a couple of months and you never know what life may bring after this trip or even during this trip specially with your family, everything is possible. My flight actually supposed to be started from Bali in the beginning, but then I decided to take the flight from the capital city of Indonesia called Jakarta, which are closer to the my hometown geographically, another reason why I took this flight is also because i could spend a bit of more time with my loved ones at home.
I will always remember those day were hot and dry and sticky, the clouds move in as the sun recedes as usual when I finally reached the Soekarno Hatta Airport in Jakarta at around 10 am, lucky I have a best friend from high school who are now working as a pilot in our national airlines, so he were resident close to the airport and picked me up, so i could spend some time in his apartment rather than waiting for hours in the airport, because my flight was actually will be at around 5 pm in the afternoon, and I came earlier because obviously I don’t want to miss my first intercontinental flight!
After spending some time to get something to eat and killing some time, we finally decided to go to the airport as he also had a schedule to flight and we are in the same direction to reach the airport, after we arrived in the airport I saying good bye to him, then i was looking for another EVS participant from Indonesia, it was Okky, Daniel, and Reni! They were actually already waiting there since the morning as well, and about to go for checking in the luggage, and I didn’t expect if the queue line would be so full of people! After put our luggage, then finally take our flight to reach Dubai in our 6hr and 25 mins flight, then we waited for 4hr and 25 mins during our transit and trying to not to sleep in order to wait for our connecting flight to Rome, and for my friends, Okky and Reni to Venice, we were getting something to eat during our transit time and then saying some good bye because we will be separated on the next flight.
It was at 3.20 am in the morning when we took our flight from Dubai to Rome, and our flight was for around another 5 hours, I was a bit sleepy and just slept almost all the time during this flight and only woke up for eat when the flight attendant gave us some food and breakfast. And we are finally arrived in Rome airport, Fiumicino in the morning, and were on another line to get our passport & visa checked in the custom, and waiting for our 3rd flight to finally get to Cagliari, my new home for another 3 months for the EuroAsi project! I was so excited and feeling not so tired even after this long flight, and really looking forward to it, in this aiport everything is checked again, even I have to take everything on my cabin bag to get checked, and Daniel, was getting the ticket for our flight to Cagliari, here we were feels that Europe’s Air is different, it’s much more less humid and so cold! (even for European it was warm, I remember it was around 12 Celcius during that time) anyway, I’m so excited that I finally step my feet in Italy, a place where one of my bucketlist finally checked. But our journey is not finish yet, another hour to reach Cagliari, a capital city in Sardinia, where our hosting organization TDM 2000 is based is waiting for us.
To understand Cagliari fully, think of a medium-sized city in a relatively medium-sized island apart from the Europe mainland and actually closer to Africa, than Europe, and here in Elmas Aiport, we were warmly welcome by 2 friendly faces, Luisa and Federico! I’m so happy that finally could meet this people in person and will be cooperate in the next 3 months on the project! Thanks to Erasmus + for this great opportunity, I hope that I could maximizing this time to reach the goals of the project and could give more bigger impact in the future! Will continue about our first week experience later on another thread, stay tune 😉
Reza, Indonesian EVS volunteer in Italy