Baroquem

7 Quick Takes, Take 14

All-About-Indonesia Edition!

Before reading, go visit the “7 Quick Takes Friday” originator.

Ready? Okay — seven easily-described things that I found interesting or surprising about Indonesia:

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Everybody has compact fluorescent bulbs (often left bare and unadorned). Everybody. From a good hotel and resort house to the meanest roadside market stalls, I can’t recall seeing a single incandescent bulb anywhere. (This may say as much about my memory and observational skills as anything else, but the point still stands.)

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There are still parts of the country where being Caucasian will make small children cry and adults rush up to you asking if you’ll pose for pictures with them.

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I was prepared for a hostile climate, muggy heat and harsh sun with a liberal distribution of mosquitoes. I was well-provisioned with sunblock, insect repellent, and anti-malaria pills. I was resigned to the fact that I would probably get sick from the food to some degree — at least with minor discomfort from the shift in diet, if not from major gastrointestinal distress after eating the wrong thing.

As it turns out, apart from a minor 24-hour cold, I was completely fine. The food was great, I had to resort to sunblock maybe two days out of the entire three weeks I was there, and I never touched the repellent at all. The mosquitoes largely left me unmolested. It was my native Indonesian friend who suffered from allergies, stomach problems, effects of the heat, and a devoted following of insects!

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Eating stewed bat is aptly described by my friend as being like dining on a combination of beef and fish. Beef for the taste, fish for the experience of picking countless tiny bones out of your food.

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It was raining one evening, and we were trying to rent an umbrella. After asking about the logistics of how this worked, I learned that you actually hire someone with an umbrella to follow you as you walk around the city.

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There are cricket-like insects in Sulawesi that produce sounds with the same volume, pitch, and duration as a commercial fire alarm. Or else there are fire alarms in Sulawesi that the locals mistake for crickets, I’m not sure which. One or the other woke me up two nights in a row without disturbing anyone around me.

:::: 7 ::::

Bananas topped with chili sauce and anchovies make a tasty treat. Even for someone who passionately loathes the smell, taste, and very texture of banana.

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