So, I started my August this year literally with salt air and rust on my door… in Anyer.
If you asked me whether it was planned, the answer would be no. Celebrating the start of August at the beach was merely a coincidence I hadn’t exactly looked forward to.
Why?
As far as I know, a beach day would never go wrong… for people who love nature. But see, I’ve never really been much of a nature person myself. As far as I’m concerned, things could actually go wrong.
For starters, this wasn’t a trip I initiated. It was a small gathering organized by a company related to mine, consisting of around fifty people, only ten of whom I knew. You know how I feel about traveling with strangers. I got mildly overwhelmed. So the bus ride became an exclusive “gathering” between me and my seatmate. We talked for three hours straight, just the two of us. What an introvert thing to do.
At around eleven, we arrived at a restaurant called Bukit Sawah Resto. It was a spacious restaurant overlooking lush green rice fields.
A gentle breeze brushed against my skin, toying with my hair. Nature in its purest form is always… peaceful. (Even if I’m not a nature geek, I can totally see the charm it offers.)
I mostly ate in silence. I was famished, and what was on the plate in front of me looked like the most appetizing lunch in the world.
It was good. I finished almost everything on my plate.
Since the schedule gave us free time until 1:30 p.m., most of us continued relaxing in the small gazebos. It was nice. Calling it simply a sunny, beautiful day might sound cliché, but that straightforward description actually captured it perfectly: a lazy afternoon sun, a soft breeze, and greenery all around.
But my stomach was too full by then, and sleepiness started to take over. It was good to know I wasn’t alone. Most of my coworkers felt the same way. So, upon arriving at the cottage we were assigned to, some of the girls and I went straight to the bedroom to rest.
But, uh, the bed wasn’t exactly clean, much to my chagrin. And there were tons of mosquitoes in the bathroom.
As someone who’s naturally a very clean person, the sight of it bothered me quite a bit. But the day wasn’t over yet, so after spraying some mosquito repellent, we powered through…
It was officially beach time! I wasn’t nearly as ready as everybody else for this whole games-on-the-sand situation, but I told myself to just get it over with.
My intuition, as it turned out, wasn’t exactly wrong. I thought the games were quite fun, but during one of them, I accidentally swallowed some ocean water…
Some very salty ocean water, might I add…
I was truly embodying August’s spirit, I guess.
I was relieved when the last game was finally over. After eating a chocolate muffin and a fried pastel during a quick coffee break, I made a beeline back to our cottage and took a shower.
Showering had never felt so good. I finally felt clean.
After that, my cottage-mates took turns showering, and we spent our free time mostly on our phones before deciding to take some cute photos. At 7:30 p.m., just as my stomach started to protest, we headed back to the beach for a buffet dinner.
Dinner was nice… though a bit loud. There was a small stage set up for a few hours of live dangdut music, with the blazing speakers right next to my table.
In the end, the day wound down as the music gradually softened. We headed back to our cottage, fully determined to go straight to the land of nod.
As I lay in bed—and as I did almost nothing the next day because the entire agenda was free time—I realized that not every trip has to hold a meaningful story. My trip to Anyer this year was a fitting reminder that sometimes a trip is simply a trip, no matter how much I try to romanticize it.
I’m not much of a beach person, as I’ve mentioned before. But even if there wasn’t any magic in the little getaway I had last week, it was still one I cherished for what it was.
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