Week 1 -- Part 3

I figured that not everybody would be interested in reading only about LATIN and the exciting work I am doing for them. So today’s update will mostly be about what has been going on outside of work.

For the most part I’ve been house-hunting and sleeping with a little bit of eating thrown in. The heat really seems to take my appetite away so I haven’t been eating any big meals. Lunch is provided every day at LATIN so I haven’t had to worry about that meal at least. For breakfast and dinner the options vary. While at the hotel I was getting breakfast every morning there, but now that I am crashing at Melanie’s house I will have to find my own breakfast. This has been surprisingly easy. Melanie lives in a housing development and throughout the day there are food carts wandering through the community selling meals. They even have bells and little tunes playing to announce their coming, like the ice cream truck back home. But since most Indonesians are Muslim and their daily schedule is dictated by prayer times, breakfast is an early affair. The early morning prayer is supposed to happen after dawn and before sunrise. I’m not sure exactly what time that is, but I do know that the first breakfast cart came by the house at 6:30 this morning ringing his bell.

Dinner hasn’t been quite as easy. A few nights ago I went to an outdoor restaurant which was little more than some tables under a tarp. I had no idea what I was ordering, but Ayam Goreng Spesial sounded like it would be good. I assumed that Spesial meant special and that therefore it must be there specialty. It turned out to be fried chicken and when dipped in sambal, the chili sauce that Indonesians put on just about everything, it was pretty good. Unfortunately my stomach did not agree with my taste buds which lead me to believe that some of these outdoor restaurants may not be up to Health Code standards. Luckily my doctor gave me plenty of antibiotics just in case this happened. Since my stomach is still a little unstable I just grabbed what I thought was a bag of chips at a kiosk last night. They were called “Fries” so I assumed they were a potato product. Pretty soon I’m going to learn to stop making assumptions because they turned out to be some sort of styrofoamy, crisp-like thing that was in the shape of a hollow french fry complete with dipping sauce. Of course the dipping sauce was not ketchup like you would think, but more sambal.

Like I said at the beginning of this post I’m not doing much else these days. The house hunting will probably be put on hold for the weekend, but I’m cool with that since Melanie is letting me stay at her place while I look for my own. Even today there is hardly anyone at the office so it seems that Indonesians enjoy there leisure time to the fullest. I guess I’ll just have to learn to do the same.