Food Part 2 The Supermarket

It's been a while coming, but as promised, the supermarket. Much as I do at home, I don't just shop at one store here, but several:
Ranch market -this is my clear favorite. It is a clone of Whole Foods, and much like Whole Foods, the quality is good, but the prices are high. It's not nearby but when I am near it, I always try to stop in. It's one of very few places to sell pork.
There are three places within walking distance:
Giant- this is where I shop most often. It is about a 5 or 6 minute walk on a decent sidewalk and mostly in the shade. It has a good variety of stuff, but the quality of the produce varies a lot. Staff is friendly.
Hypermart -think Walmart. Huge, impersonal, lots of variety. It is in the basement of a new, hi fashion mall. I think the mall uses them as a draw to attract customers to the mall. We often go to the mall to eat and so usually stop by on our way home. It is also about a 5 or 6 minute walk, but the sidewalk is a real hazard. There are supposed to be brick pavers, but most are missing or very uneven. You have to maneuver around rickshaw carts and food vendors and tree roots. It's such an awful walk that we usually take a longer way around which adds several more minutes.
Cosco -this is a small Mom and Pop type Japanese grocery. Owners are very friendly and helpful and they have a small selection of very nice, fresh produce. They sell frozen pork.

Nice, but not practical:
Hokky - this is a wonderful place known for its fruit, but is quite out of the way to get to
Papaya - this caters more to westerners, but is very small, crowded, and also out of the way

Lastly, there are vendors who set up sort of like a farmer's market between 6 and 7 AM near the entrance of the gated community behind our apartments. Tom is out walking then and sometimes buys stuff. ( he is doing tai chi with a group there on Tues. Thurs. and playing tennis some other days. Realize that sunrise is 4:30 so people are up and about early.)

Of course we have no car and our refrig is small so we shop often and buy small amounts at a time. The result is that we eat out quite a bit. I really like to cook, but so many ingredients are not available, that I wander around the stores trying to think of meals I can make with what I see. There is lots of rice (30 pound bag, anyone?) and many, many kinds of noodles, even Italian pasta( its a noodle after all ). I really miss beans like black beans. I have found chickpeas in one place, but nothing else. On the meat side, it's mainly chicken. The beef isn't good. You may have heard it said that the Chinese eat every part of the pig except the squeal. Well there are many things the locals eat like tongues and brains, chicken feet, etc., but we aren't interested in that. Tom was considering a soup once in a restaurant until he heard it was "goat's knuckle soup". The saving grace is that there is so much wonderful fruit.
We also treat ourselves to something like a "Dove Bar"- chocolate ice cream inside and dipped in dark chocolate. Yum.
There is a lot of fish, but we have no idea what most of it is. There are tanks with live fish which I think is farm raised fresh water fish. We do recognize red snapper and have had it a couple of times, but it's almost as expensive as at home. We have noticed that on Saturdays some places make a big show out of have a whole large fresh salmon that they filet and will cut to your order. It's usually reasonably priced and very nice. I notice that they package up the head and bones and sell them.

There are more supermarket pictures here on the web:

https://picasa web.google.com/117712396372323795770/supermarket

Let me know if there are problems with the link.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me comments about the blog. I would love to hear from others who are reading it. I do this as a way to reach a lot of people at once, but I do answer individual emails.
Anne

A perfect storm

The upcoming week may be a perfect storm. There are two major events this week and most of the consulate staff(there are only 12 Americans here) are in Bali for obama's visit. You did know that he was coming to Indonesia, didn't you?
One Is international education Week and I am scheduled to give talks on "Preparing a Statement of Purpose" for a college application and "Finding the right college for YOU" on tuesday and t hursday.Tom is to do a talk on careers in the STEM fields on Wed.
Additionally there is a big high school fair sponsored by the Jakarta Post. The consulate has a booth there that needs to be manned 11 hours a day and they are pressing all available Americans to help out. I will do an evening shift on monday and a day shift Wed. Tom will help out with the day shift after his STEM talk. I was originally double booked, a day shift and a talk at the same time, until I protested. It doesn't help that they are at different venues, about as far from each other as its possible to be. Additionally two of the Fulbright English teaching assistants are manning the booth all day Sat and both live 30 miles out of town, so we invited them to stay overnight here - our first houseguests.
We survived our moves and are now happily ensconced in what we hope will be our home for the next 8 months. I must say that the staff was extremely helpful. Tom had asked for a shaving mirror in our old unit which they had installed. When we walked in here for the first time today, he noticed they had already installed the same mirror ( or moved the other one). I get to keep my same cleaning guy whom I really like. He speaks passable English. Some of my friends are jealous. He come three times a week and changes the linens and empties the trash and cleans the floors and generally makes himself useful.
The unit is a mirror image of our old one so we keep getting confused about which direction to go.
I have my photos back. I just guessed at what google was asking me in Indonesian and presto.
Here are some.
Our unit is the one just under the penthouse on the left- 20th floor.

Numerology and A Working Vacation

Today I want to write about numerology. As you may remember we moved into a complex that has a hotel tower and an apartment tower. There was to be a "nicer" apartment available in a few days that we could move into. But we were also told then - three weeks ago- that we would have to move to a hotel unit on Nov. 11 and 12. We tended to dismiss this latter. Surely someone would cancel, etc. Meanwhile we continued to live in 1881 and occasionally they showed us a different unit to see if we would like to move. Note that they all have the same layout, but are decorated slightly differently. Finally we saw a unit worth the hassle of moving - unit 2082. We noted a few things we wanted fixed before we moved and we planned to move several days hence. But alas, they found a water leak so another week went by. Then we were told that indeed we would have to move to a hotel unit for the weekend, but when we moved back to the apartment tower we would go into 2082.
As you might imagine none of this made us very happy. So yesterday we packed up and moved to the hotel. It took the bellboy two trips with a full cart and this all fell on me as Tom was working. I will say that they gave us a vey nice room in the hotel and, after asking, vouchers for the breakfast buffet. They also moved in a full size refrigerator as I had frozen and perishable foods in my apartment. But until yesterday I didn't understand that the reason we had to move is that the date was 11-11-11 and that is considered a lucky day to get married by both the Chinese and Muslim communities (for different reasons). The hotel is hosting wedding parties for four different weddings so of course it makes sense that they would have booked well in advance.
We are learning a bit about Chinese numerology. Nine for example is a lucky number. One of our favorite restaurants is the "3.6.9 cafe". You will note that 3+ 6=9 and 9+9=18 which also means that 1+8=9. Interesting. Also the towers here don't have a floor 4. 4 is an unlucky number because it sounds like death. A friend says that the floors in her building have 3, 3A, 5, 6, etc.
This move would have been far worse if we had moved to 2082, then had to move here for the weekend, and then back. At least I only had to pack up once and the staff has been very helpful, although we have had to pry the details out of them. We decided to treat ourselves and eat at the very nice rooftop restaurant, City lights. It's outside on the 21st floor. The night was spectacular with clear skies, a full moon, a perfect temperature, and a slight breeze. The rains of the past few days had washed everything clean and the city sparkled all around us. A magical night.

On another topic, we are going on a working vacation. The day after Thanksgiving, for which we have been invited to the consul general's residence, we will travel to yogyakarta for two weeks of language training. Known to everyone as Jogja, it is supposed to be a wonderful city. It's been referred to as the soul of Indonesia. It has decent weather and interesting history and politics and is near Borobudur which is a " must see"sight. Although Indonesia is a democracy, Jogja is ruled by a hereditary sultan. And that is the people's choice. He is much loved. His daughter got married last month and the festivities rivalled will and Kate. Of course the down side is that we will have intensive language training. As best we can figure out, it will be tutorial rather than classroom based. I'm sure, especially at our ages, that it will be exhausting.
One last note. I spent most of last weekend updating my iPad with the new operating system, iOS5. Other than the time it took, it mostly went well. The one problem relates to this blog. I got a message that I would have to re-link my photos and YouTube to the blog site. I do this through google, but google insists on communicating with me in indonesian rather than English (on this issue only) so i can't understand the instructions. All my other interactions with google are in English and my preferences are clear in my settings so I don't know why this is happening. The result is that once again, I don't have access to my photos. It's something I will be working on. You might surmise correctly that we got the broadband issues mainly solved. We bought an external modem and the highest data transmission package available. It works fine but we have to manually reboot it every morning.
Anne

Reading in America

What a day we have just had. The consulate had asked us to give a talk at Tronojoyu university in Madura on the general topic of American literature and drama. We tried to get more specific information, but it was not forthcoming. So I put together a short general PowerPoint called "Reading in America" where I talked about encouraging readers from an early age by bedtime stories and school activities to promote reading, summer reading lists, and on to book clubs, best seller lists (which they don't have) and so on. Then I talked about what genres are popular, and finally trends like ebooks. I showed my kindle.
Tom prepared a part on drama from Broadway to Community theatre and high school musicals, etc. and listed some of the drama critic award winners from the last few years.
Thus our preparation. My supervisor was very surprised that the consulate was not sending anyone along with us in case there were any problems, so she asked a student, Fitri, to go with us. The university would send a car and driver to collect us.
So this morning we set off for Madura, Tom and I, Fitri, the driver, and two students from Tronojoyu univ. for the hour long drive. Madura is an island off the coast of Java, about 70 miles long and 20 miles wide, famous for batik. The landscape changed dramatically once we crossed the bridge from urban congestion to agricultural land and narrow roads. We saw rice paddies, and goats on the road as we made our way to the campus. What can one say about any campus here? It is clear that there is little money for infrastructure or buildings and grounds maintenance. So no beauty awards. Anyway we went to the building and received a warm welcome. We were to speak in a theater type classroom with tables at the front and tiers of seats sloping up. The room was packed with about 100 or more. The first surprise was that everyone took their shoes off when entering the classroom, professors and students alike, so we did also. After introductions and several welcoming remarks, I began my part of the program and when I finished and asked for questions, there were none. I had been warned of this (I donesian students never ask questions in class although they are very inquisitive if you meet them on the street) so I had brought a few bookmarks and pencils from home and offered them to students who would ask questions, so slowly they began to ask. Tom then did his part and by now the questions were coming quickly of both of us. We got some great questions as follows:
How can We develop a reading culture like you have in the US?
does the military ever put on plays? (we had talked about community theater groups)
What is the value of reading?
Are there plays that celebrate folk tales?
Is there street theater? ( No but we talked about flash mobs)
Are mysteries always about ghosts?
A question about feminism.
The question that took the cake for me was:
Did we know of any plays written in the great depression that dealt with LGBT issues? Wow, where to begin with that?
We talked almost two hours and really enjoyed ourselves. I think the students learned quite a bit about the US. The class was american studies which uses american literature to learn american history. The teachers were ecstatic at the interaction.
Afterwards there were many photos and some more questions. I gave out my email address quite a few times so we'll see what that brings.
somehow they had figured out that we were interested in shopping for batik so a large contingent of faculty and staff headed off for lunch with first a stop at a batik store. The shop was not air-conditioned and i was so hot the clothes were sticking to me as I tried things on. I don't much care for shopping in the best of times and it was a bit un- nerving to have 8 or 10 people hanging around and giving advice. I finally bought something just to bring an end to it. Tom got a shirt also. Later it turned out that they gave us presents of batik sarongs.
On to the restaurant. It was open air and supposedly famous for duck. After we sat around for a long time, they indicated it would be much longer, so suggested a different place. Fine, and it was air-conditioned. All the food is served to be shared, so much discussion ensued, very little with our input. When the food arrived it was all very good. We had duck and several types of fish and rice and vegetables. They had ordered a traditional soup. I am not very fond of their soups as they are mostly bones or chicken feet and they spoon the broth and meat(?) over rice. But of course I took some.
After another round of photos we headed home. All in all, a great day. Feeling like we made a difference in someone's life, priceless.
PS. I was very impressed with Fitri. I mentioned the Jodi Picoult book, My Sister's keeper in my talk. She told me later that she had just read it- in English.