Bali - Day 3
Apologies if the following is tough to follow. I'm having hard time accessing the internet, so literally sending stuff as I can.
OK, so I hit the market today. It was good fun, although I'm not sure how sanitary it was after I wandered by the live chickens, etc. I guess its not worse than the Chatuchat market in Bangkok where I saw baby squirrels for sale! So today I think I am going to wander down by the beach and hopefully find someplace that sells cheap lunch eats! I'm sure that in Ubud now I'm going to try to hit the non-gourmet spots as they will be a bit more authentic perhaps. Don't get me wrong, the restaurant here in my little mini-resort is AWESOME, but in some ways it’s a little too western, to "modern balinese".
Tangent: I like how in Australia all the good food is "modern australian" and the only non-modern Australian food that has been able to survive seems to include vegemite and pie floaters. Apparently "Ancient Australian" food is the worms and grubs that the aboriginals ate, and the "pre-modern" food is british food, which we all agree sucks.
So anyway, hopefully today I can fetch some old-school balinese eats.
Fruit Update #1 - Today at the market I picked up some iwan, which is kinda like a cross between a pear and a mango. It looks like a pear, but the soft white flesh has the texture of a mango. The taste is tough to explain, but I was really diggin it! Apparently it is also seasonal, so I got lucky this time.
Fruit Update #2 - Rambutan is in season! I LOVE RAMBUTAN! Yay!!!!!
OK, yesterday was pretty boring, although I did SWIM for the first time in like 5 years. I realized that I reall don't remember how to swim very well! I sort of floundered around and got tried really quickly…so sad. So I think that once I'm settled down I will fork out for some swimming lessons, or make friends with people who know how to swim for real. I'm pretty sure that if I were in a giant oceanliner that hit an iceberg and sank, I would be fooked, as I can probably only tread water for about 2 minutes and then I would keel over and die. Its odd to see one's own mortality so vividly! And drowning would suck, FYI.
The straw I'm using to drink my mixed fruit beverage is a literal straw, like a reed. How cool is that! I'm so sick of plastic straws anyway!
Coffee - So I went to a coffee factory today and saw them roasting the coffee and grinding it and putting it into little bags. I couldn't tell if the coffee excursion was a sales pitch, but they didn't seem too focused on getting me to buy coffee (unlike all the jewelry scams in Bangkok and Amsterdam).
Also here in Lovina I haven't seen any tourists at all (outside of my little hotel). I think I was the only white-ish person in the whole market today, although admittedly the market trip is probably not everyone's favorite thing to see. Its fun being a total minority. Whee!
I'm also amazed that given basically the same set of ingredients indonesian and thai food are so very very different. My friend Jan explained it once that Thai people love every dish to have two flavors (ie. Sweet and spicy or sweet and sour or sour and spicy, etc.) where Malay and Indonesian cooking goes with either one flavor or every flavor. Not sure if I agree or not, but an interesting theory. Maybe I will take a cooking class in Ubud, but I kinda doubt it at this point.
Soon I will start to complain about this grad school decision that I have to make. Also plan to post my application essays at some point…..
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