Makanan (Food... I know you've all been waiting to find out!)

Rice. And fried everything, including rice. And of course, more rice (AKA “nasi”). I used to think I ate a lot of rice when I went back home to Irving with my parents, but in comparison to this, that was nothing! Here, rice is eaten 3 times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The Indonesians keep telling me that they don’t feel full unless they eat rice. Luckily, I don’t get rice for breakfast very often anymore (after mentioning several times that I was going to have a nasi belly before I left), but everything is still deep-fried so I’m pretty sure it’s not any better for me. If I don’t gain 50 pounds within the next 2 years it will be a miracle.

In the south we love our sweet tea, but it turns out that I have not actually had real sweet tea until I got to Indonesia. Here the tea consists of equal parts sugar and water—it’s ridiculous—so if I come out of Indonesia without diabetes as well, it will seriously be a miracle!

OK, now that I’ve gotten my principal complaints about Indonesian food out of the way, I must admit that the food is actually really good! First, they eat a lot of fish in their diets, which I love, so it’s nice to have that as a regular part of my meals. Also, there are so many fresh vegetables and fruits available to us. We live in really rural farming communities, so they grow all their vegetables here and have them fresh every day. The fruits, especially, are so good! I can get guava, mango, honeydew melon, papaya, bananas, apples, tangerines, watermelon, and so much more any time. I’ve also found some fruits that aren’t common to the US. First, there is rambutan, a leci-type fruit that is covered by a thick, red, spiky skin that you peel off in order to get to the fruit within. It’s sweet and I really like it. Another is duku, another leci-type fruit that has a brown, fuzzy skin and is very similar to the rambutan in taste. Also, there is a fruit that draws very extreme reactions—you either love it or hate it—the dorian. I have not actually tasted the fruit yet, but I have smelled it many times as we drove past carts that sold them, and that alone drove me away. The dorian has a disgusting, pungent smell that is really unappetizing, but maybe I’ll try it one of these days. Finally, a surprising fruit in Indonesia is the avocado! In the US, we eat the avocado as a vegetable—on salads, with salt and lime juice, in guacamole—but here they eat it as a fruit with sugar…and it’s really good! I have only ever had Haas avocados, but here they grow HUGE avocados the size of footballs!

Fruit juices are widely available here and are, without a doubt, my favorite things here. They are made right when you order them and are extremely cheap—you can get a cold, tall glass of fresh fruit juice for about 60 cents! Whether we’re coming back from a long, difficult day, a good lesson at school, or it’s really hot outside, one of our favorite things to do is go and get a refreshing glass of juice and hang out. My favorite fruit juice is definitely the avocado juice—avocado, brown sugar, and chocolate syrup blended together—it’s absolutely delicious!!

I have eaten many strange things, I think, but Indonesia has definitely broadened my consumptive horizons. I always say that you should try something twice (once just to try something new, and twice because if you didn’t like it the first time it might have just been a fluke and you should give it one more shot before writing it off forever) but there are some things I’ve tried here that I don’t think I will pursue again. The other day my friends and I had a free afternoon, so we went into Batu (a city nearby) to take care of some errands. Every day we have breakfast and dinner at our own homes, and then we make rounds and have lunch together at a different person’s house, so with our free day we decided to go out and get lunch on our own for the first time. Excitedly, we decided to pick items from the menu that we had never tried before. Luckily, all of the items we chose turned out to be delicious! Unluckily, they brought us an extra dish, which consisted of a plate holding, what we guessed was, different body parts of a baby cow. Being from Texas, I have eaten many parts of many cows, but never before have I been presented with a brain, a liver, fried skin, and some unidentified crispy meat. Well, I had never tried brain before, and I rationalized that it’s got to be good otherwise they wouldn’t make it, right? Wrong. It was pretty disgusting, actually. Exactly how you expect a fried brain to taste… a little crispy on the outside and mushy on the inside. I almost threw it up. Then, a couple days later, when we were having lunch at my house, my host mom made a dish with some strange clear-ish “meat” that we couldn’t quite place. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t really good either, they texture was off and not really appealing. After eating and cleaning up, my language teacher pointed it out and told me that it was cow tongue. Fabulous, more cow parts.

No matter how good or bad the food is, the biggest problem that all of us face concerning the food is probably the quantity that we are expected to eat. People are constantly trying to shovel food into us. No matter how much we’ve eaten, they never think it’s enough! Even if we have just eaten, and they watched us eat an entire meal, they will come and find us and make us eat more. It’s very impolite to refuse food, but sometimes it is just ridiculous.