That seems...suggestive.

Mostly, the food here isn't radically different from things I have had before. It's rice or noodle based dishes, basically. I find that I am most surprised by the snack foods. For example, beef floss. No, I'm not kidding. I wish I was. Beef floss is a sweet or salty minced and shredded beef that gets put on the top of a dinner roll type bread. But you can also buy bags of it.

It's floss, but probably still a bad option for your teeth

I'm not sure whether this is an Asian thing, or just an Indonesian thing, but I've actually tried this. On a roll, not just straight from the bag. It's actually not bad. It's been shredded and seasoned and processed to the point where it doesn't really taste like beef at all. The texture is like the dust at the bottom of a container of bacon bits. Not that you can easily get real bacon bits in this country. Pork in a Muslim country is a bit of a struggle.

These days, I'm mostly amused by the names of what I would consider more "conventional" snack foods.
Contender #1:

The beng-beng. Now! Understand, I am not down on these at all. They are delicious. They are like a combination of Kit-Kats and Crunch Bars with just a little caramel. I love them. I just do not get the name at all. And they are nearly always sold at the school canteen with:

Contender #2:

The Chacha. These are also fine. They are M&M's basically, but the chocolate is a little waxier. It's just the names, guys. The beng-beng, the Chacha, and, well:

Contender #3:

These. I will freely admit that due to package design, the first time I saw them I thought they were just called balls. They are not. They are in fact called Chiki balls. I don't think it helps much. I don't know. These, by the way, are essentially Cheetos.

I will let you know if I find anything else in the snack food world worth mentioning.

Babes in Moiland

The sheer number of shops and malls in Jakarta is amazing. Indonesian people love to shop. I have been to three different malls since I came here, all of them with multiple floors packed with stores. I've spent a little money, but mostly I've just wandered around. I'm not used to the level of consumerism that I'm seeing here.

At a restaurant in one of the malls 

The first weekend I was here, Hannah and I went to the Mall of Indonesia, or Moi (rhymes with toy), as it is usually called here. It has a very confusing layout and is actually not as big as some of the others in Jakarta, but it does have an indoor playground for the kids, called Moiland.

I bought a batik dress there. Batik is the national design of Indonesia and every Friday the teachers here wear batik as a sign of nationalism. We also went to Mal Kelapa Gading, which has 5 buildings. I was too jet lagged to do that much walking, but I did get to see quite a bit of one building.

So pretty!

Later in the week we went to Mal Artha Gading, where we wandered around at the Ace Hardware. It's amazing what you can find at an Indonesian Ace Hardware.

Fishies!

Australian! Eh, Eh, Eh! Australian!

In order to be considered for a one month tourist visa on arrival to Indonesia, you have to pay $25 USD to a customs agent. This is non-refundable, and they can still deny you the visa. I paid my $25, walked over to the visa line and had my passport stamped by an exceedingly lackluster government employee who did not look at the customs forms I filled out or anything in my passport other than my photo. So, it was fine, but I was annoyed that I had taken the time to be sure that all of my answers were right on a document that clearly nobody cared about.

I followed an airline employee down to customs for my bags and after I walked through without anybody looking at my bags either, he left me out front to wait. I had plenty of time to take a photo of the place where I was waiting, since we landed an hour early and my ride was an hour late.

A view of International Arrival Gate D

In comparison to the Narita airport that had very modern looking check-in areas, and then faded and stained grey carpet everywhere else, Soekarno-Hatta airport was done in tile and varnished red brick. There were traditional-patterned carvings on the wall, which I did not get a photo of, since I was still trying to keep up with the airline employee at that point.

The only issue with the two hour wait was that I had to fend off taxi drivers the entire time. They really, really wanted to take me home. I kept saying no, someone was coming to pick me up. I had to tell the same drivers multiple times that I did not want a ride. One particularly enterprising taxi driver assumed that since I was white and I was on this side of the world, I must be from Australia. So he started shouting, "Eh, eh, eh! Australian! Eh, eh, eh! Australian!" This, of course, did not get my attention, so he then stood right in front of me and said, "Australian. I take hotel." Thanks, no.

Success at last! 

Luckily, I won't need to go back there until my work visa is finalized. I'll need to fly to Singapore and back again in order to get that taken care of.

An evening in Narita Airport's backyard

The flight from Chicago's O'Hare airport to Tokyo's Narita airport was fairly uneventful. Due to a fluke in seating, I had an entire row of three seats to myself.  Naturally, I put all the armrests up and took all the blankets and pillows.

I slept nearly the entire way, but watched a portion of the following:
Men In Black 3, in which Emma Thompson had very strange hair for no apparent reason
Mirror, Mirror, in which Julia Roberts had very strange dresses for no apparent reason
Monk, in which I wondered why United had purchased rights to show cable TV

Upon arrival to Narita, I discovered I had been given the wrong customs form to fill out and been told to stand in the wrong line.  Once that was sorted out, I collected my bags from an airline employee and then basically handed them right back to her when I discovered she worked for ANA. Having checked my bags through to Jakarta, I was informed that I should go and book a hotel. Now, the airline employees I had spoken to before I left told me I could either check my bags, or leave the airport, but not both. After checking twice to make sure that she was right, I left the baggage claim to book a room for the night.

I was told that the closest hotel was a 3 minute free shuttle ride from the airport. I soon discovered that the closest hotel was not so much a 3 minute drive from the airport, as a 3 minute drive behind the airport.

This was the view from my window:

Everybody say hi to the planes!

The next morning I took the shuttle back to Terminal 1, and got there at about 6:45 a.m.  Public Service Announcement: The Narita Airport does not really open until 7 a.m. You can get into the building, but you cannot check in or go through security until then. So I stood around in the international terminal by a Lufthansa desk watching a bunch of German women talk amongst themselves.

The terminal at a slightly different angle

The flight to Jakarta was also uneventful. The only thing that concerned me was the sheer amount of Japanese that was being spoken in comparison to the amount that was being translated. There would be 3-5 minutes in Japanese, and then in English, "Ladies gentleman. Please to wear seatbelt." Which, yeah, thanks. But how long? And why? Luckily it was only a 6 hour flight, and then I landed in Jakarta at the Soekarno-Hatta airport.

As an aside, I found the Japanese to be as whimsical as the stereotypes would lead you to believe.

Exhibit A:

An official weather panda

Exhibit B:

These gifts were not musical at all, unfortunately.

Project 7767 revisited

Of the books listed below, I have either given up on them or still intend to read them. I have (obviously) decided that this project is not of tantamount importance and as such, will just move on. In a few subsequent posts I will give a short review of what I did read. And from here on out, I'll talk about what I'm reading. Or whatever suits me.

And onward to the things that I chose to give up on:
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx  (The sentence structure made me seriously annoyed. And the main character seemed flat and childlike.)
Dry by Augusten Burroughs  (I just couldn't. I don't know why I thought a memoir based around alcoholism would be interesting to me.)
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan  (This is not my thing. It is difficult to explain, but I just knew. And I will not read 13 books hoping to like them at some point. No.)

Things I still intend to read:
The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno  (414)
The Complete Novels of Jane Austen by Jane Austen  (1103)
Stories: All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio  (423)
A box set of twelve plays by Shakespeare (1072)
The Gathering by Ann Enright  (261)

Faithfully Funny

I love Ann Lamott.  You learn about faith and grace just by listening to her life.  She has not had an easy time of things, with drug addiction and poor relationship choices. But she found a way to come out of that, and to believe in God, surprisingly enough.  I appreciated the tendency to make things into a comedy, rather than a tragedy. She has good ideas, and is just liberal enough that I don't feel as though she is preaching at me to be holy like her. To be honest, it feels as though she doesn't see herself as holy at all.

I wonder whether the intention of being in the presence of holiness is enough to get a little to rub off on you. If so, it seems to work for her. 

Only Face Value.

The Curious Case of a Dog in the Nighttime was a book about a child who had no sense of social cues, due to autism.

And then he is LIED to. I hated that. The child had no concept of when folks were happy, sad, or otherwise, and he was lied to.  Because that's easy to do to a child who didn't even have a chance to pick up on it.  Or ask the right questions.

It was interesting to me that it was hard to tell about the socioeconomics or relationships of this child because neither of these things were important to him. Having an autistic narrator meant that the book had a lot of facts, but only the ones that he felt were relevant. And this child loved numbers, and other such things. He took his social environment entirely for granted. This made the setting hard to pin down.

I liked this book. I hadn't read anything from the perspective of a person with autism before,  and it was interesting to see how differently that they might view the world.  It's hard to know whether the book is entirely accurate to the mindset of autism, since it was written by a neurotypical person, but I think it was a very compelling read.