• On Sunday morning before our first guest arrives, my cousins and I were taken to the Arte-Polis office. We were introduced to Maya and Andini, two senior students of my uncle who were in charge of the conference. Beforehand, he told me a lot about them: I imagined two sophisticated young women, who works in such high efforts and taking everything very seriously –to the extent of being extremely boring. How mistaken was I?

    I saw them stood before me: Maya was a lively, extremely amiable super-girl who was in charge of everything –I wasn’t wrong about that part. Andin was a chatty, although equally busy girl with a certain character in front of the camera. Quickly, I rub out my former alleged thoughts about them. I knew we would become great friends.

    The office was located in the basement of the Architecture campus, we’re not moving to the venue just yet. It was packed with black-and-orange Artepolis posters –some folded some still left untouched. On the side, it was piling with boxes containing DVD covers, containers and labels. Maya and Andini’s messy desks were visible behind the small room divider.

    There were so many things to do. Alma, Dania, and I offered our hands. With her messy hair and frustrated looks, Maya instantly took that chance.

    The next thing I knew was walking out to the parking lot, and went back hauling two heavy boxes, to contribute to the ever-growing pile of boxes in the office.

    Then, we spent what it seemed like years to manually label CDs with orange stickers that said “Arte-Polis Proceedings”.

    “There are six hundred of them...” announced Maya as she revealed a fresh stack of unlabeled CDs.

    We groaned. The last thing we cared about was getting the edges perfectly neat.

    As the day grew longer, we received some help from other girls from the committee: Susan and Raras. Alma taught them how to fit the stickers to the CD as neatly as possible, and they were both a big help to the team. Although the job was logically finished faster, it still took us hours of work.

    “Our IQ is sinking lower and lower…” blurted Alma as she unfolded another sticker

    “Yeah” I agreed “I guess this is how a factory laborer feels everyday…”

    To save my sanity, I figured that I could do something else. I folded posters and sort them. Then I typed addresses, and bought our fuel food from the cafeteria. Before I knew it, it was time for me and my cousins to pick up our first international speaker, Ms Nancy Marshall from Australia.

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    Together with our trusty driver, Pak Atang, Dania, Alma and I made our way to Jakarta. The capital city’s famous heavy traffic succeeded in getting us in distress. It took us four long hours to get from Bandung to the international airport, which was located in the northern part of Jakarta. We were terrified that we are going to be late for our first guest.

    We were too close. The plane landed on 18.40. We stepped out of the car at 18.39

    After rewarding Pak Atang with a round of applause, we dashed to the international arrival gate. Quickly, we unfolded our orange signage and force our petite bodies through the crowd. We managed to gett a little space in front. The plane landed five minutes ago, Nancy should be here any second now.

    We stared upon the arrival gate for fifteen elongated minutes. An Indonesian family passed by, then two round men, then a family holding two cute boys. Our eyes strained for a lean, blonde woman with a pixie hair cut. There wasn’t any.

    “Are you sure she has blonde hair, Alma?”

    “She does when I met her six years ago. I don’t know how she looks now”

    We strained our eyes again.

    “What if she morphed into dark-haired, squint eyed person, and grew a large belly” I blurted

    “And grew some facial hair as well –like that man up there!”

    “‘I was Nancy Marshall’ she would say” Alma imagined “But now I am Noah Marshall”

    Our random pretense could only thinly swathe our worries. It’s been thirty minutes already since the screen announced her arrival. Thankfully, she texted Alma a few minutes later. She was stuck in the long line of VISA checkout.

    Alas, that doesn’t mean that we will meet her soon. To kill time, the girls and I continued imagining how Nancy would look like after six years, figured out different ways to hold our paper signage, and designed imaginary signs in case another participant of Artepolis emerged.

    At eight o’clock: one and a half hours of waiting, Nancy Marshall showed up in her washed out sweater, waving and smiling to Alma who was holding the orange sign.

    “I noticed your face, Alma!” exclaimed Nancy when we were back in the car, “I didn’t notice you were holding any sign!”

    Alma blushed as she reluctantly confessed that she didn’t recognize Nancy at first.

    We instantly fell into the conversation of ‘what did you do in the last six years’. Dania went first, explaining how she graduated college last fortnight. Alma explained her study trips around rural areas in Java. While I explained how I live far away from my family for high school, and my dream of being a microbiologist. From that instant, Nancy called me “Miss MB”.

    Even though the journey back was much quicker, we grew tired of the long night. Alma went rambling random things, which luckily flattered Nancy. Dania’s energy was just enough to make ample responses. I was too tired to even to make any. I was asleep in the backseat and woke up just before dropping Nancy to the Sheraton Hotel.