New Year's Eve

It is New Year's Eve. I was awakened this morning by a pig squealing. Lots of pigs are meeting their demise today to be spitted and roasted for the holiday.

My house helper and her friend are spending the holiday here keeping me company - and borrowing our kitchen. Last night they went shopping and came home and packed a box of goodies to send to their families in the countryside. They included things like small cans of meat and fish, a big bag of candy, packages of instant coffee, milk, and Milo, sugar, laundry detergent, soap, shampoo sachets, etc. They also included the makings for a favorite holiday specialty - macaroni salad. It's made of cooked macaroni, fruit cocktail, sweetened condensed milk, processed cheese, and a bit of mayonnaise. They also planned to send about 2 kilos of roast pork left over from the friend's Christmas party at work. They left early this morning bringing the box to the bus terminal to send home with a family member they met there.

Now they are busy in the kitchen making cupcakes and fried noodles. They have two loaves of sliced white bread and apparently plan to make fried noodle sandwiches with it. They will also make spaghetti for a relative who will be stopping by later for some cupcakes.

This evening they will watch movies on an old laptop, eating fried noodle sandwiches and cupcakes, until midnight when the whole city will be outside making racket to welcome in the new year.

As for me, I am writing emails, updating my blog, and pondering life around me. I, however, do NOT plan to eat noodle sandwiches! :-)

Wishing you a happy New Year!

The most expensive rice I ever ate

Reading glasses are a bit of a pain and since I wear them all day long for computer work, who wants to drag them out at the store? Well, last Sunday I stopped by the grocery store at the mall. I saw some really nice looking unpolished brown rice that I had not seen there before. It was less than half a kilo so I threw it in the cart to try. I didn’t check the price. After all regular rice is about 80 cents a kilo and although brown rice would be more, I figured at most it would be $1 a kilo. It was in a simple plastic bag that the store uses for breaking down wholesale sacks of rice and repackaging into smaller retail amounts of 1, 5, or 10 kilos. The price is on little stickers but it’s hard to read without digging out reading glasses. I had several items at the checkout and tho the total seemed high, well, everything is higher now.

But the next day at home, we noticed the price – amounting to $10 per kilo! Good thing it was less than half a kilo. Was it mismarked????? It’s hard to believe that that could really be the price! We are cooking it now and it does smell wonderful. But it will be the most expensive rice we have ever eaten.
If I ever see it again I will definitely want to recheck the price. I will also plan to dig out the reading glasses when in doubt. (And I will probably be in doubt more often now!)

PS Turns out the rice was some special kind imported from Hawaii!! I saw it again the following week and this time looked at the labels. It WAS very nice rice , but I don't think I'll get it again!

Happy New Year!

We had an astonishingly QUIET New Year’s day in sharp contrast to Christmas. Though we are surrounded by electronic noise generators they were all on vacation for New Year’s! The schools are closed, as is the appliance chain office. Many of my neighbors in the apartment complex are also gone for the holidays so we were actually in a quiet cul-de-sac in the midst of all the other racket going on at midnight. Firecrackers have been banned since 2001 and though people try to make noise in other ways, it is just not the same intensity. There was one lone kid with a paper horn out back and in the distance we could hear a low roar of noise: cars honking, people banging on things, loud music and TVs.

New Year’s day is very quiet. People believe that whatever you do on this day you will do all year so they generally prefer to stay home and eat and sleep, maybe visit with relatives. It is also the local custom to assemble 12 different kinds of round fruits and then proceed to eat one fruit a day on each of the first 12 days of the new year. So fruits such as papayas, pineapples, bananas and mangoes aren’t in big demand. Jicamas (called sinkamas locally) , though a root crop, are considered to be round fruits. All sorts of exotic fruits not normally seen in the market suddenly appeared last week. Watermelons cost 5 times what they normally do. They were even selling unripe rambutans! Apples, oranges, durian, pomelos, grapes, guavas were in big demand. Even imported kiwi fruit! (You can also use lemons but the downside is you have to eat it!) Judging by the lines, other hot selling items at the super market on New Year’s Eve were sliced bread, hams, mayonnaise, macaroni, sweetened condensed milk, and the makings for spaghetti. So I presume everybody today is eating spaghetti, macaroni fruit salad, and ham sandwiches in addition to one round fruit.

As for me I'm enjoying a fruit shake made of all the unwanted fruits - papaya, mango, banana, and pineapple!

Never eat fish in the dark

The brownouts continue. During last night’s brownout it rained really hard with lightening and visceral-jarring thunder. There are a couple of kerosene lamps but the light is only enough to show you the big things. I decided to eat early since there’s not much else I could do in the dark. Dinner was what was left over from the group meal at lunch. The rice had the faintest whiff of starting to go off so it was best to eat it early anyway as it obviously wasn’t going to get any better later on. And with the constant brownouts refrigeration isn’t much of a help. As I was munching on a piece of a fish, I couldn’t really see it well. I thought I was avoiding the spine but somehow got a piece of it stuck in my throat. So here I am in the dark in a torrential downpour in a guesthouse by myself with a fishbone caught in my throat facing a two day weekend. I remembered being told that bread was good for fishbones caught in the throat and remembered seeing part of a loaf in the freezer compartment of the useless refrigerator. It wasn't frozen and although it was definitely on the old side, in the dim light I didn’t see any major discolorations or anything. So I quickly ate a piece. Like magic it cleared the obstruction. Whew!

Conclusion? Never eat fish in the dark!!

Banana flowers, ferns, and kerosene lamps

Here I am in the deep dark center of southeast Asia! Well, it really IS dark. This town, along with many others, is experiencing rotating brownouts. It seems that nation wide the government owned power company is having trouble keeping its act together. The brownouts are daily and anywhere from 6-20 hours long at all kinds of different times but most likely during peak hours.

So what do you do when you are stuck all evening in a guesthouse in a town you don’t know with only a candle and a kerosene lamp for light - and your computer battery is already dead? Why you sit and talk with the night watchman/janitor, what else?!

Since he couldn’t do his job either being as how he couldn’t see to sweep the floors or clean he shared a bit of how he copes with life here. The rise in oil prices has prompted changes even in this remote area. The government has been trying to wean the people off of kerosene because kerosene is cheap while some other kind of fuel (aviation?) fuel, which is made from kerosene is expensive. If kerosene use can be decreased, there will be more available to make the other kind of fuel. So people are being encourage to use gas (LPG). Anyway, July was telling me that his wife still uses kerosene for cooking, since LPG is exensive and often difficult to find here. But now they are limited to 10 liters of kerosene a month. They have to show their family ID card to get a coupon and can only get it in the district in which they reside. So he gathers firewood to supplement the family’s kerosene ration. They boil their drinking water on a wood fire as well as anything else that takes a long time.

We talked about food. He said he raises his own chickens and a couple of pigs. He said a lot of people are now feeding special growth formula to chickens so that they mature fast and can be sold at an early age. He didn’t think that was a good thing so he avoids buying chicken at the market unless it’s live and he knows it was free range. He was suprised to hear that in the third of my worlds people buy special growth feed for their piglets. He didn’t know of anybody around here using that stuff though he had once heard that it existed. He said some people buy chicken guts in bulk at the market for their pigs because apparently the leftover chemicals in the chicken tissue stimulates growth in the pigs too.

He talked about how a lot of people spray pesticides on the “sweet” vegetables (I guess things like green beans, carrots, etc. that you have to plant) just before picking them to sell even though the instructions plainly say you must wait several days before it is safe to pick, much less eat. He said he won’t buy or eat it. They grow stuff in their yard and he described many of the traditional edible leaves and plants that grow by themselves or can be had for free. One of his favorites is banana flowers, another is ferns that grow wild near his house. He said the river used to be full of fish but some people nowdays use fish-stunning chemicals so they can make bigger catches and so the fish population isn’t like it used to be. He said that 20 years ago you could easily have ½-1 kilo of fish with only about 10 minutes of fishing. But now it can take hours. He doesn’t like spending that kind of time so he prefers to “fish” at the market.

We talked about formalin and how it is being used with wild abandon as an all-purpose food preserver. In addition to fresh noodles, soybean curd, and ocean fish, he said even people selling wild pig meat they hunt in the forest are starting to use it.

From there we discussed the recent fuel crisis and on and on. By ten I decided to go wear out a flashlight and try to get at least a little paper work done. The lights came on after 11pm just as I was nodding off over the papers, but by then I was too sleepy to finish...

Out of stock specials

Today I went out for lunch with two friends. We went to a place that is reputed to have good and interesting food – when it’s in stock. The restaurant has lots of windows and you can choose tables, booths or even a few bar stools along a counter. Outside were plastered signs about the current specials: Seared Tuna and Citrus Sauce, Thai Chicken, etc. One friend was especially interested in the Seared Tuna special. However once inside and seated we found out that the cook doesn’t come in until later in the day so those specials weren’t available. Oh, okay. So we looked through the menu and two of us ordered Chicken Fajitas and the other some Cajun Shrimp Chowder. Those apparently were in stock and there was someone present who was able to cook it.

One of my friends ordered a watermelon shake. The waitress came back and said they were out of stock so my friend ordered a green mango shake. Soon the waitress was back and said that was out of stock too but they had ripe mangoes. OK, so ripe mango shake it was.

The food was pretty good once it got sorted out what was and wasn’t in stock. The fajitas came with 2 extremely thin “tortillas” in nice plastic tortilla dishes with a cover. Only they weren’t really tortillas, they were spring roll wrappers. Oh, well, never mind. There aren’t too many Mexicans in this part of the world so maybe no one else will notice. The salsa was fresh and not too salty and even had a mild hint of chili to it.

One friend insisted on separate bills. That isn’t really the norm here so sometimes people have incredible difficulty figuring out separate bills. When our bills came I couldn’t help giggling at the little descriptions typed on the top of each of the bills: brown hair, white hair, and pink blouse. I guess I was Brown Hair. Soon White Hair and Pink Blouse were giggling too and I thought we were really going to lose it. Actually two of us had pink blouses on and two had brown hair. But it still worked out. And after all, it could have SO much worse!! (Like Small, Medium, and Large. Or Glasses, No glasses, Needs Glasses. Etc.)

PS These photos are glamor shots off the internet, NOT the real thing.

Civilization comes at last to the ends of the earth

The world is flatter than you think. A friend sent this picture....

Egg salad pizza anyone?

Back in the third of my worlds. After all the smoke and gloom in the second of my worlds, it was great to see the blue sky and fluffy clouds and green, green vegetation of this place. My cough cleared up quickly.

My head and heart have had a chance to calm down too.

A trip to the local mall was a bit disorienting as Christmas stuff is out already with a few nominal chains of paper pumpkins thrown in for Halloween. The problem with the Christmas season starting so soon is that by the time Christmas really arrives you are heartily tired of it.

The reason for the trip to the mall was that a friend was visiting from the second of my worlds so I took her out for pizza. I wanted to show her what real pizza is like - I don't think what they call pizza in her world really qualifies. I mean, should pizza taste like egg salad sandwiches? Or tuna and mayo sandwiches? Now I like egg salad sandwiches okay and I don't mind tuna sandwiches, but I see no reason to call it pizza! I am talking about a well-known pizza chain. No wonder all those poor folk down there pour hot sauce all over it! They would probably love real pepperoni if they could get it but instead the best they can get is pizza with canned hotdog slices. Yeeech!