Our Two-Year

Almost a month before the end of 2022, I asked Fani, who has been my best friend since college, when she would return to Medan. Like most people, I'd love to meet her if she took a break in December. At first, Fani couldn't tell me when her flight from Manado would be, which made me wonder if God would let us meet this year since this kind of chance wouldn't come up very often. When my request for annual leave was accepted, the Ministry of Religion surprised me by putting out exam schedules for all civil servants who work for it. So, I asked to change my leave date, which was approved.

When I told Fani I would leave for Perbaungan the night after my exam, she asked when I would arrive since she had already arrived in Pancur Batu two days before. We decided to hang out on the second day after I got there. We met at an animal museum a year before she moved to Manado. This year, we visited Tjong A Fie Mansion, a historical building in Medan.

Only one small Malaysian family was there when we arrived at Tjong A Fie Mansion. We like to get together occasionally but avoid meeting in busy public places like shopping malls, so this mansion is perfect for us. Our only goal is to have a conversation that covers all the bases that WhatsApp can't. My work keeps me busy, but it could be more exciting than Fani's. In addition, Manado is two hours ahead of western Indonesia due to the time zone difference. So there you have it.

When we stepped inside the mansion, we thought, "Oh, this is how it is on the inside." While we and I, in particular, have taken note of the structure's continued existence over the years, only now have I taken the time to truly value it as a genuine relic of Medan's long and illustrious history. Even though the red lantern by the entrance caught my eye on occasion, I never once requested that the minibus pull over so that I could get out and explore. I have yet to look into the interior's conditions solely based on the exterior because I want to save time.

From my experience here yesterday, I can attest to the warm hospitality of this mansion. While we could have hired a tour guide to show us around, we decided to discover the mansion independently. Tjong A Fie's decor makes me think of a scene from Romance in the Rain, a Chinese drama I remember watching with my mum when I was a kid. After going all the way around the mansion, except for the parts we were not allowed to see, we finally left the mansion. Afterward, we went across the street to Tip Top for a scoop of vintage ice cream.

Even though our ice cream and cake orders were meant to be on the diminutive side, we accidentally overordered. Without pictures, we quickly realized everything on the menu, save for the ice cream, was filling. That made us feel even worse about almost not having Korean food for lunch, which was what we really wanted to eat.

We still left Tip Top and headed to Daebak, one of Medan's halal Korean restaurants. Our drinks of choice are strawberry for me and mango for Pani. One of the meals was a light meal, and the other was a main course, but I needed help remembering the specifics of what we ordered. I can pronounce two names for popular street foods: teokbokki (rice cake) and odeng (fish cake). I don't know how Koreans pronounce it, but there's fried sweet potato and vermicelli wrapped in seaweed. The four ingredients are combined with red, sweet, and spicy sauces.

The main course was soup with soft tofu, prawns, eggs, mussels, squid, zucchini, and enoki mushrooms. Red sprang back into action, stirring the soup with an iron spoon and chopsticks in a clay bowl. The meal comes with a selection of side dishes, one of which is kimchi. This soup is either extremely sour or spicy, or it's a combination of the two, and I've never had anything like it before. The dishes we ordered today resembled those we've seen in Korean films and dramas, but I can't vouch whether they tasted the same.

Our conversations cover a wide range of topics. Things have changed drastically from when we used to discuss films and books in our college days. We frequently talk about each other's professional endeavors. "I've just got a promotion," I told her. After learning this, Fani said, "It's not certain that my ranking will rise to that level in the next 8 or 10 years." I retorted, "I don't know when I'll be able to get as much monthly performance allowance as you are now, even though you've only been on duty for two years." 

"We were celebrating our second year," Fani said. When she said "two years," she meant that we had been that long since we had started working at our dream jobs, though I started one year earlier.

I don't remember how we became friends, but I remember meeting her for the first time at freshman orientation in 2008. And ever since then, she's been one of my best friends. She is one of the few people outside my family whose name I pray to God sincerely, asking for the best for them. A week after we met, Fani sent a message saying she was at the airport waiting for her flight back to Manado. She said that, in our next meeting, we would hopefully have the dream status we both desire.