Medan

On the island of Sumatra there’s a city called Medan. There is absolutely, completely, incredibly fuck all to do here. Nevertheless, tourists often come to the city. Medan is a transit point on the way to the national park, home to orangutans and other tropical critters.

As many as 2 million people live in Medan. What they all do is impossible to imagine, because there’s simply nothing in the city.

The city center is just endless rows of identical buildings with a highway between them.

Everything is plastered with some kind of public service ads or political posters.

I found a cool lamppost.

And an awesome water tower.

Right in the very center there’s a decent shopping mall, which has the only currency exchange in the whole city and some tasty food.

Luxury housing was attached to the mall. In the Asian sense, luxury housing is any building over 25 floors with access to shopping straight from the elevator.

Medan has exactly two sights. The first is the city mosque in the Moorish style.

An object of colossal importance for the people of Medan. Even the pedestrian overpass next to it was decorated in the mosque’s style.

The second is the Maimun Palace, where the Sultan of Deli once sat. It’s cool to be the Sultan of Deli. You get your own huge vacant lot right in front of your house.

I love the description of the palace on tourist dumps: “Both Indonesians themselves and travelers from other countries are eager to see it.” Seriously? I barely made myself walk there, even though my hotel was five minutes away.

The palace, of course, is terribly primitive by our royal standards.

Faded portraits of the local nobility hang inside.

Street trade has set up shop in the former living room.

I ended up on a school tour.

People in Medan haven’t been scared off by tourists yet. There are very few of them here, so a white person gets mobbed by crowds asking for a photo. The only English they know is “Senk yu” and “Salam alaikum.”

Out of inexperience, I booked a hotel in Medan for a whole 7 days. I figured that after the jungle trip to the orangutans my legs would ache for a few days. The trip turned out much easier than I expected, and Medan much more pointless. So I spent the rest of the days in the hotel working.

Fortunately, the city had a very interesting hotel in a historic building. The rooms smelled damp, but it was the smell of luxury damp.

The lobby had antique vases, paintings, and statues. The wallpaper was peeling, and the leather on the armchairs had cracked long ago, but that only added to the charm.

My room had an absolutely fantastic temperature control from the 1970s. You set the temperature with a lever like a car’s gearshift. If you don’t lock the lever at the right cooling level, it slowly creeps back up to “off.”

Too bad the control hadn’t worked for a long time and was there just for looks. The cooling is now done by an ordinary air conditioner.