The Things I Forgot To Tell You

This will be the final blog. I hope you have enjoyed my stories from Indonesia for the past seven weeks and I thank you for following my adventures. Here are a few more stories: Ocha and I were driving down the road on the afternoon of a cloudless day, when I saw something you just don't, and shouldn't, see in the US. A stark naked man was walking parallel with the heavy traffic. I turned to Ocha and exclaimed, "Ocha, there is a naked man! Is that normal?!?" She looked at me and laughed, surprised that I was so surprised: "um, yeah." I would later see this again. Ocha was right, it was no big deal. I was sitting on the floor in one of the kindergarten classrooms, quietly eating my lunch. Suddenly, a mouse popped out of the wall next to me! He may have been a rat, because he was a lot bigger than the typical mouse, but it was hard to tell before he so quickly ran back into the wall. I think I scared him. The teachers went on mouse alert after that minor incident. If you ever find yourself in Indonesia, be mindful of how you eat your rice. The food is obviously very important to them. We ate rice with vegetables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. The food was prepared no differently at breakfast than it was at dinner. I had my very first meal in Indonesia with a woman that works at Mr. Naim's office. After devouring my pile of fried rice with my fork, she said, "we eat our rice with a spoon." Oops. So, a lesson in rice-eating: hold the fork with your left hand, and the spoon in your right. If you need to cut something, use your spoon and hold the food with your fork. Push the food onto your spoon with the fork. When you are done eating, set the silverware on your plate in a cross-like formation. The spoon belongs over the fork. This symbolizes you will not eat any more. If you don't cross your fork and spoon, they will keep trying to get you to eat more and more. If, however, you do cross your fork and spoon, STOP eating. These things, my friends, were learned the hard way. Chili peppers are in almost everything you put with your rice. VERY spicy. In the beginning, I could hardly get through a meal without my nose running like mad and my eyes swelling with tears. To top it off, tissues are almost non-existent in Indonesia whenever you need them. This means no blowing your nose or wiping your eyes dry. Oh, and it also means no toilet paper. One day at school one of the teachers handed me a storybook to read to the kids. It was originally written in Indonesian and translated into English. Well as I was reading out loud about how a monkey was mad at a duck, the monkey started spewing out a whole bunch of swear words! I don't think the blanks I was leaving in the translation were even noticed. The woman who told me about eating rice with a spoon I saw again the week before I left. I said, "it seems like not that long ago when we first ate lunch together." Her reply took me a little off guard: "yeah, you look more fat now." I just stood there, wondering how in the world my diet of rice and vegetables for 7 weeks could have possibly made me fatter. As if to remedy the situation, she kindly says, "...but more cute." I half expected her to pinch my "chubby" cheeks. I passed my notebook around to get all of the teachers' names for Facebook. It came back with a bunch of email addresses. They all had Facebook. I had to decipher their names and search them out the hard way. Indonesians never have their real names for their facebook, which certainly makes things difficult. Once when I was eating Tempe (mashed and fried soybeans, eaten with every meal), I noticed dark splotches all over. Hmm, must have just gotten burnt, I mistakenly thought. The next day I helped prepare the meal, cutting up a huge block of Tempe. It was covered...in fuzzy black and white mold. We put the pieces in the fry pan. Not burnt, I realized: black mold. Yum yum. I didn't eat the Tempe again for awhile. This is the last of my travel stories. Sampai jumpa dan terima kasih - goodbye and thank you. It has been a great experience. :) :) :)