Pyro's on Earth: Adventure in SAAT

Hiya, friends! It’s (guess who?!) Devina!
Just to let you know, my favorite color is orange! So, from now on, let's use orange!

Well, now I want to share my experience in traveling!

But, heck, it’s not a real TRAVELING, after all. It’s just visiting. But I think VISITING is a part of TRAVELING too! So, yeah, here it goes!

Guess where I went to!

Alright, just to the point. At 17 August 2008 (heck, this is supposed to be Indonesian Independence Day) to 18 August 2008, some of my churchmates and me were having a… what’s that… let’s just say that we were having a small and short-period bible camp. It was on Malang.

In our way back to Surabaya, we visited this place called ‘SAAT’. Oh well, don’t pretend that you don’t know SAAT, okay? It’s the university where you can study Christian theology. In the other word, it’s a place where some Christians who are called by God do be a priest study in. in Indonesian, it’s ‘SEMINARI ALKITAB ASIA TENGGARA’.

First of all, we park our car and get off from the oh-so-bloody-boring-and-crowded car. Well, what do you think? Of course it must be the first thing everybody does when they arrive somewhere, right? Crap, the parking area was so damn big! We can have a football field there.

Then, the next thing we did is… as usual, take a picture of ourselves in front of the enterance. Hey, it’s not like we’re some loony narcists. But we have to at least record this special event, don’t we? Tee-hee, we took 2 pictures. I was the one standing on the very right, wearing green t-shirt and a strange-looking yellow hat (if you don’t know yet, that’s my favorite hat. Hey, I like wearing hat!). Look, behind us was a big globe. It’s not looking very good in my picture due to the inability of the camera to picture a good photo. But if you see it by yourself, you’ll see how detailed it was.

After taking pictures of ourselves, we entered the building. Sadly, the security didn’t allow us to use the main entrance so we used the left side entrance instead (CURSE THAT SECURITY! ooops.. no cursing...). This is the picture of the left side of the building.

Honestly I didn’t take many photos compared to my other friends. I just take three pictures. The first was my picture with the living room as the back ground. And the second is the most useless and worthless one. It was the lamp. Hey, but you should admit that the lamp’s design was beautiful, wasn’t it? And the last picture is me, standing in front of a statue of Jesus Christ washing one of His disciples’ feet, probably Peter. Under the statue was a writing ‘TO SERVE NOT TO BE SERVED’. Well, I’m not gonna preach on this thing so you’d better read John 13:1-17 if you want to know about it. Oh, and the reason why I using the same pose (yeah, the so famous peace pose) for the 2 pictures and why I took the photo of a lamp, only God knows. To be honest, I also don’t know why.

Then, we exited the building. These two pictures is the view of the building from the back side. Seeing this beautiful view, we can’t fight our will to take another picture. So yeah, the next picture is some of my friends and I, still using my hat. Oh, and if you are curious about was statue behind us was, it was a statue of Jesus Christ when He helped the doubtful Peter out of the stormy sea. If you want to know more, see Matthew 14:22-33.

Before we continued our journey, we took a last glance of the view. This is the view from the opposing side. There was another two buildings and if you saw in the far right was a huge bell.

Our next…ummm…destination was the library. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to enter since the students were studying. Well, nothing much to say other than we SHOULD be very quiet there.

Then, we entered the other building. Yes, the one with the writings ‘SOLUS CHRISTUS’ and ‘SOLI DEO GLORIA’. I forgot to take the picture of the first floor. But I managed to take one on the second floor. This is the canteen. From there we could take a better look of the first building.

Still from the second floor, we looked down and found a small pond there. And, as usual, we ended up taking another picture…

We continued our journey. But, since we all were getting very tired, the tour didn’t went as interesting as before. This is a picture of a really bigass building, which I didn’t know the function. It’s so big that I couldn’t take all of it.

Furthermore, we found the student dormitories. They were all had a minimalist design, but I should admit they were beautiful. The only thing that bothered me was that ALL of the dorms have the same design! Hey, were they out of idea when they designed them?

Oh well, it was time to end our journey. We went back to the car park. We use that way, under the white ceiling but still outdoor. Maybe to prevent the rain from wetting the people.

And, these are another view I saw there. I took the pictures because I think they were simply beautiful. No specific nor detailed information, though. I’ve told you much enough. Oh, crap, why always there was a tree to cover the good view, eh?

Thinking about all of this, I think the university was built in Malang, far away from large town such as Surabaya, to make more peaceful circumstance and situation. Yeah, it was so quiet and peaceful. More like a villa but much quieter. But I enjoyed it though. I don’t know whether it was only my suggestive or it was really true, I really felt God’s presence there. Maybe they arrange the building to be like that so the students can feel that God is everywhere around them, to protect them from doing sin.