My Moment Of Solitude

finally!! alhamdulillah, my dreams of setting foot on the holy grounds of mecca came true..

April 14th 2008, me, Acu, Mas Eja and 26 other people in our tour group departed from Polonia Airport, Medan to King Abdul Aziz, Jeddah, via KLIA, Kuala Lumpur. After 6 hours of watching movies, 1 hour playing games, 1 hour (trying to) sleep, 1 cummulative hour of eating, we finally arrived at King Abdul Aziz, Jeddah, around 7 pm.

Our tour then departed to Medinah via bus and arrived at 4 am Medinah time. We immediately checked in, washed up a lil' bit, and then hurriedly went to the Nabawi Mosque to say our subuh prayers..

The mosque was right in front of our hotel, so we just had to walk about 100 m. Dear god, i cant describe my feeling of every footstep i took when we were entering the mosque.. heart pounding & beating rapidly, seeing the great Nabawi Mosque with my own bare eyes and all these people rushing to say their prayers at 4 o'clock in the morning! Most people here would still be sound asleep, tucked in a warm bed, and resisting to wake up..(well, i must admit, i was like that..) . It's a scrambeled feeling of proudness, moved, touched, heartwarming, ugh, just too many words..

The next day our tour guide took us to the date farm where we could eat dates as much as we like and drink tea with the surroundings of date trees & merchants..

The date trees were very similiar with palm trees, but the trunk is just a little thinner. To bad, when we came there it wasn't the harvesting seasons, so there wasn't any dates hanging on the trees. We spent our time there for about an hour, and continued our tour to the Kuba Mosque, then back to hotel and say prayers at Nabawi.

Our umroh began the next day when we took our 'niat umroh' at Bir Ali. The men already wore their robes and the women covered up except for their hands and face. The journey to Mecca took approximately 8 hours, so we arrived at about 12 pm Mecca time. After checking in the hotel, we continued to complete our umroh.

Masjidil Haram was only 50 m from our hotel, so we could just walk there. The only thing was, the construction of the masjidil haram expansion was still taking place, so there was so much dust, nails in the road, wires sticking from the ground, and all sorts of construction things, it was pretty hard and exhausting just to reach the entrance of masjidil haram. But u know what? It was worth it.. i didn't think that there could be a more exhilirating feeling than when i entered Nabawi, but this, this was different. No words can even describe the feeling of seeing the holy Ka'bah. I had to try my best not to burst in tears, and concentrate to with my umroh.

We finally completed our umroh at about 2.30 am after 7 times rotating ka'bah, praying in the back of Ibrahim's burial, drinking zam-zam water, sa'i (running from safa to marwah 7 times) and finally tahallul. It was exhausting, but the satisfaction of completing umroh was worth it.

Finally, we ended our tour to Jeddah, which is a quite modern city in Saudi Arabia. We visited the Red Sea, took pictures and even eated bakso..yes, bakso! apparently, the indonesian workers there found another oppurtunity, which is selling bakso to the indonesian tourist! with 1 bowl of bakso for 5 riyals (about Rp.12.500,-), containing 3 meatballs, some noodles and hotsauce, it seems like a pretty promising business..=).