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.

The Nature of the Divine

I am struggling to figure out what to say about Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. It was a re-read for me, but somehow this book never gets less shocking and enchanting; able to make me gasp, cry, and laugh. There is so much in it. So much horror, so much sorrow, so much joy, so much of the human life and experience.  I love this book so much. So, so much.

It seeks to answer some of the most complex questions of Christianity: What happens when your faith is shaken by adversity?  Can you rebuild? Where was God when it happened?

And it does it with a sweeping beauty and grace that I haven't seen equaled in any book that also includes aliens, discussions of linguistics, and a crash course in Jesuit hierarchy.  I cannot think of a better, more nuanced book that feeds me spiritually like The Sparrow does. Thank goodness a lady from church recommended it to me.

Ferns? Ferns.

Oliver Sacks' Oaxaca Journal is a 100+ page book about a trip he took to look at ferns. I have nothing to say on this except that I did not finish it, for I could not.

Ferns. Let us speak of this no more.

Everybody has motives.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible! was a quick read. Only 200ish pages, with large type and the typical blank space glut that happens when you have a series of short stories in a collection.  So, it only took me a day and a half. But it was good. The stories were funny and did a great job of giving the Biblical characters a fully rounded background. The author worked to show why Cain might have killed Abel, what might have compelled Delilah to trick Samson, and how Joseph might have really felt about Mary's sudden pregnancy.

But it was all light hearted, which I appreciated. I loved that the stories were written to show how the characters were not only relatable, but that there was a funny side to them. This is not necessarily a go-to book as far as any kind of accuracy, but it was a great comedy. Adam and Eve were quite amusing, with the typical "new look" of Adam being an idiot and Eve a theologian. I saw that particular re-writing often in my Images of Eve and Mary class in college. Though, I don't know that it is really any better than the medieval view of it being all Eve's fault. Does one gender absolutely need to be the scapegoat?

In general, I think that the Biblical stories as they are printed in the Bible are somewhat dry to me because I've heard them over and over and over again. But then also, the stories have never held great comedy for me because I don't get the jokes. I am not an Ancient Hebrew who is aware of Babylonian or Roman culture, depending on the Testament. By virtue of cultural ignorance, I am missing a lot of nuance, and it stands to reason that some of that nuance is humor.  Thanks to Goldstein for suggesting where it might be reinserted.

Seattle of the Undead

Cherie Priest's Boneshaker is the only zombie book that I have ever read. As such, I can't comment on the genre subset.  But let me say this. I love, love, loved this book.  It was creepy, but not scary, and was driven by a plot, with all setting descriptions working towards enhancing and carrying the plot. I was so enthralled with it. I read it as I went to and from work and completed it within a few days. It was just so amazing. I never felt confused by the storyline, but at the same time, it was not as though the plot went exactly where I expected it to.

In general, I am fascinated by books that can be characterized as answering a question. In this case, "What if all Seattle became infected with disease and had to be walled off?" I found the answer to be not only entertaining, but to mostly meet with recognizable logic. It dealt with not only those who are walled in, but those who were walled out. What did both the inside and the outside societies have to do in order to survive? How were they affected by the illness (zombiefication)? So compelling. Plus! The names and clothes, etc. were so steampunk awesome.  The world it's set in is referred to as "The Clockwork Century" and at this point Cherie Priest is in the midst of writing a 4th novel in this alternate-history world. I have finished Boneshaker, Clementine is currently out in hardback, Dreadnought will be out at the end of September, and Ganymede is in progress. These are standalone novels, so I don't have to worry about series fatigue on the part of the author being a problem. I believe most of the fantasy world is looking at you, George RR Martin.

Anyway, fabulous, awesome, lovely, and totally compelling book. Cherie Priest is now definitely on my must-read list.  

That's very pretty. Does it do anything?

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves (556) was okay. But I had expectations that the plot would be more of a driving force rather than the wordbuilding. And it wasn't.  So I really, really struggled to get through it.  It was the second book in the series, but the worldbuilding done in book one didn't really apply to book two. Which meant that it was like starting all over. This was a good bit more irritating as time went on, since I thought maybe there could have been some sort of use of the things we already knew.  Instead, it was all new! different! look over here! bet you didn't hear about this town before! It's impossible to get involved with the characters when the setting takes over so much. I don't know.  I'll probably hesitate to buy another of these books.  I'm not bowled over by 500+ pages of scenery.  The people need to be more compelling than just fitting the hero/villain tropes, and having an overarching quest to fulfill.

Plus! All of the main characters are orphans, or have no "family" built into their societies.  Meaning that all characters build family with one another over the course of the book.  Awww, it's like a Disney cartoon.  Lion King for steampunkers! Sigh.  I love steampunk.  This just was all window dressing with a bunch of mannequins.  I wanted real folks, with dimension, and a mix of good and bad.

Who's the adult here?

The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt, (which is 582 pages, by the way, but I am not renaming it Project 8345. Too intimidating.) is a fairly good book. I picked it up based on the cover, as I am wont to do, which is a light yellowy-beige with a black air balloon and red writing. It looked....sweet. The description on the back was not quite as pristine and adorable, but c'mon friends! Balloons!

Except, yeah. It's kinda gritty in places and as an adult (more or less) I objected not to the amount of grittiness, but that the majority is being perpetrated towards these KIDS.  There were murders, manipulation and general disaster. Time was when I might have been able to read it and think, yeah, adventure! Somehow, this book just made me think (over and over) "This is wrong. Somebody should be protecting these teens. Why is no one doing anything?" Particularly at the parts where a character, decades older, said something along the lines of 'only you can fix this.'  That's not empowering the next generation, that's...just not okay.

This is not to say that I hated the book. No sir. I loved the worldbuilding and I was fascinated by the twists and turns. The dialogue was incredibly well-done, and rarely served as a 'let me tell you about the world' device.  Unlike the novel I finished just before this, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, whose use of dialogue was probably 80% designed for 'Mah research. Let me show you it.'  The Court of the Air was, mercifully, much better at letting people talk without giving them a library to talk from.

So, The Court of the Air had readability and creativity going for it. Age appropriate action? No.
I'll let you know how the sequel (2 of a planned 7) goes.

Project 7767

The following is a confession regarding my "to-read" pile. These books are all members of my personal library. As you will soon see, I absolutely CANNOT buy or borrow anything new until I finish this stack. Chaos has already begun to ensue. I have decided to make this my new credo. 'Finish the stack first.' Or some such. Might need a shorter, more forceful mantra for when I pass a Borders. This way I might actually pass by and not, you know, go in and buy a book.

Anyway. Here is a list of what is in the pile, with number of pages. As an aside, it bears saying that some of these books I am SO stoked to read, and then some of them were foisted upon me during someone else's library purge and as such I am somewhat uncertain as to quality and/or personal interest. That sounded defensive. Basically, I'm aware there are a lot of books here; of topics wildly disparate. Pray, judge me not.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon  (221)
The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno  (414)
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest  (414)
The Complete Novels of Jane Austen by Jane Austen  (1103)
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell  (405)
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt  (556)
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! by Jonathan Goldstein  (239)
The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Thing Under the Bed by Patrick Rothfuss (72)
Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks  (159)
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx  (337)
Dry by Augusten Burroughs  (309)
The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs  (369)
Stories: All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio  (423)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi  (359)
A box set of twelve plays by Shakespeare (1072)
The Gathering by Ann Enright  (261)
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan  (782)
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott  (272)

Thus, a total of 7,767 pages.  Hold me. I can't start on that daunting number until I finish The Court of the Air, which is the "to-read" that I'm halfway through.  And, and! I want to be done in time to get myself a book or so for Christmas. I'd also like to orchestrate world peace by January. I'll let you know how things go on both fronts.