Post-mortem report

1. The weird paradox of Christian retreats is usually you sleep less in a “retreat.” I guess that’s why sometimes they call it “camp” and sometimes “retreat.” Interestingly, both have military connotations.

2. Nightmares: I forgot to bring my earplug.

3. I’ve got a feel of what I call as “East Java Reformed-Evangelical” subculture. They are usually very blunt in describing their achievements. A case in point would be the fondness to put all education degrees (including the honorary ones, which is unprecedented elsewhere!) that have been obtained by the person, although actually you only need to put the highest degree obtained.

4. Speaking about subculture, IFES/Perkantas/FES also has one. You will notice that we have a distinctive set of vocabularies. Even a word as simple as “growth” has acquired its Perkantasian connotation when I heard one. Not to mention that I have a bias for speakers from Perkantas/FES background.

5. Kak Alex confirmed my suspicion that one of the tests to become a Perkantas staff is to make jokes. Kak Pet, Bang DBS, Bang Jul, Kak Alex — crazy people. I really appreciate the highly incarnational ministry of many Perkantas staffs, who become like students in order to reach them, and sometimes at the cost of their own personal growth as they don’t grow “old”.

6. The menu is amazingly very similar to what I used to eat during my high school mathematical olympiad training days. I guess caterings in Bandung offer similar sets of food and they have changed very little after all these years.

7. OK, this is why we were lost last Friday. From Wisma Shalom’s website:

Rumah Retreat di Lembang / Bandung

Kompleks Trinity Kav. C1-C3A
Jl. Sersan Bajuri No. 88 Km 4.7
Bandung

Site Office
Jl. Kolonel Masturi 583
Cisarua – Bandung 40551
Jawa Barat

We should go to Kolonel Masturi, but we went to Sersan Bajuri instead — a literal and symbolical error. Completely understandable, though, since nobody would think that we should go to the “site office” instead of “rumah retreat.”