Yang and I are at a gate in the Jakarta airport waiting for our connecting flight to Bali. It is 5:30am in the morning a and we have been waiting for over three hours. It would have been six hours except our flight from Xiamen to Jakarta was delayed by two hours because of some visa problems some fellow passengers had. I am looking for my cell phone. I’ve been looking on and off for 30 minutes. I have looked everywhere on my person and in my carryon when I finally tell Yang. She checks her purse and asks some random airport staff if there is a lost and found. Apparently there is only a lost. We board the plane with my mind already thinking about the next model of phone I will get. I am torn between iPhone, an Android moto, or going with a cheap Nokia. The latter being the best choice for a phone phone, as opposed to a phone/chat/play/vanity object.

We land in Bali, get our checked luggage, and score a taxi. I am relived to find my cell phone in my checked luggage. It seems that as I was struggling for sleep in the Jakarta airport I put the phone is a small pocket of my check-in. I tell Yang and also comment slightly too proudly that I never lose anything. Never a cell phone, never my wallet, never my keys. That I haven’t lost anything like that since I was a kid when I lost a jacket or two in arcades.

The taxi renting experience was no where near my anxiety fueled fantasy. All you do to rent a taxi at the Bali airport follow the clear “Taxi” signs to a cashier, tell the cashier what hotel you are staying in, pay a fixed price in a currency you have no idea what the conversion rate is, and give the voucher to a taxi driver who escorts you to the car. The taxi is clean and the driver is nice; he only tried to up sell us on a tour package once during the trip.

We get to the hotel and since it is only 9am we have to wait to check in. We sit in the lobby for a bit and Yang and I both check our email. I am quite tired and want to take a nap. We walk around the hotel – which is amazing – and rent a cabana. We rest in the cabana until 1pm when our room is ready. We shower and have lunch. Then I notice I can’t find my cell phone. I repeat my searching process again. No luck. Not in the pants I wore earlier, nor the shorts I have on now, nor my luggage, nor in Yang’s purse, nor in any of the drawers in the hotel room. I check everything a second time. Still no luck. Then I check Yang’s purse again and find it. (to be fair, things have been know to get lost in that purse for months).

Yang comes into the room and notices the cell phone in my hand. She smiles – a gentle reminder of how proud I was to never lose anything – and says I left the phone behind this morning in the hotel lobby.