In Indonesia!

So I’m now blogging from Jakarta! I arrived on Saturday and have been getting adjusted and so on. I somehow managed to almost avoid jetlag entirely! I just go to bed a bit earlier than the usual 2 A.M. Indonesia and Idaho are almost as different as two places could ever be. Venn-Diagram wise, pretty much all they’d share is being on Earth and being inhabited by humans.

Idaho has: cows, potatoes, English, sidewalks, dogs, and pine trees. Indonesia has: cats, Bahasa Indonesian (…impenetrable. The only cognate I’ve seen is ‘taksi’ for taxi.), hotness (which I like!), delicious fruit that if you saw you would not know it was fruit (….snakefruit. Quite the oddity. But kinda good.), the narrowest roads and the craziest drivers, traffic, lovely palm-ish trees, pools, maids, call to prayer, sunshine, a store called GrandLucky, coconut gelatin desserts that are insanely good, Tim-Tams, and a bunch of other indescribably awesome/crazy/interesting/foreign things. I had to stop the list somewhere, I had a lot more to say about Indonesia than Idaho.

So now for the food bit. Well. I documented EVA Air’s plane food a bit. Plane food-ish. Everything on planes tastes like either chicken, peanuts, or paper towels to me. No good. But they did have cute bento-box-ish carrots. When I got to Taipei it was about 6 A.M. and I was starving but figured i’d be best to stick with what I know, so I had dim sum for breakfast!

Yummy steamed shrimp dumplings. The girl at the dim sum place put chopsticks on my tray then looked at me and gave me a fork. But don’t worry, I used chop sticks like a real kid. Also at the Taipei airport I had a Russian ice cream bar (it had those little stacking doll things on it. cute.) and a drink called Pocari Sweat. Ok then. Apparently quite popular. I had to get one, curiosity got the best of me. Basically tasted like lemon-lime Gatorade. Tasted like something your mom would make you drink when you had the flu. I took my first sip with MUCH trepidation.

I mentioned GrandLucky before, it’s this cool warehouse-ish grocery store. It’s nearing the end of Ramadan, and it’s tradition to give the staff at your house a big basket of gifts at the end. So I went with Kate (the mother of the lovely family I’m staying with) on a gift expedition. Before shopping we had dim sum (clearly something I like a lot) which was quite yummy. But anyways.

GrandLucky had a ton of cool stuff. A lot of imported euro grocery stuff. And a ton of fresh and interesting produce. (Mangoes!!) And….live fish and crabs!! Too cool.

And then today I worked at this Habitat for Humanity booth at this fancy fancy mall, Plaza Senayan passing out flyers and… smiling a lot. The booth was in front of Gucci store. Nice contrast, I think. Anyway, for lunch I went up to the food court, in which there was a very wide variety of choices. Everything from doner kebabs to more dim sum to tacos to McDonalds. And KFC, which seems to be big here. And even a Coldstone! I went to this yummy bento lunch place, where I ordered…. I have no idea. A number one. I pointed at the sign and held up one finger. I ended up with shrimp dumpling thingies, some shrimp tempura, rice, veggies, and stir-fry chicken. Plus a coke, which I’ve kind of taken to here, because they come in cool little cans. Kinda like Red Bull cans but skinnier. Yummy.

(not the cutest bento. but hey, good for mall food court food.)