Too much discussion about the food

In true bule fashion, just when you think you are getting a handle on various words and phrases you find out that you don't know diddly squat.  It is the nuances that get you in to situations that can be mildly amusing, especially to your staff,  or potential not cool at all.

Today, I was trying to decide what to eat for lunch.  Options were slim so I decided to fry an egg and make a fried egg sandwich.  For some unknown reason, I could not get the gas burner to light on the range top.  It would sputter and go out.  I thought perhaps we were out of propane, as we use bottled propane instead of having a direct line in to the house.

My sweet little housekeeper came in and looked at it.  She touched the piece that covers where the flame comes out and tried it again.  Of course it lit and I felt like, "Wow!  That sure was hard to figure out.  What a ding-dong."  But that is just how it goes sometimes.

She asked me what I was making and I said I was making a fried egg sandwich.  She looked at me kind of weird and so I said in my best Bahasa Indonesia, "Sandwich telur goreng."  Literal translation - sandwich egg fried.  She continued to look at me and I then asked a few questions and then it came out that what I was making is called mata sapi.  Literal translation - eye meat.  Just have to add the word sandwich in there somewhere.

I sent a text message to my squeeze and told him about mata sapi.  He replies, "Eye meat or eye cow or eye bull."  It was an informative reply.  Unfortunately, I then got in to trying to understand why it would be called that.  A fried egg does look like an eye.  And the sun is called mata hari (eye of the day).  Would it be like an eye that you can eat like meat?

By this point the very much looked forward to fried eye, sorry - fried egg sandwich was not looking so appealing.  I was hungry however, so I ate it anyway.

As I was typing this I thought about these translations and perhaps it isn't eye meat or eye cow but a bull's eye!  Yes, by-George it looks like a bull's eye on a target.  This made my stomach, and my brain, feel so much better about consuming a bull's eye sandwich.

Sometimes literal translations take some real thinking about.  Sometimes they are funny.  Sometimes they are rather poetic.  Sometimes you have to scratch your head and really work at it.  I am sure my literal conversions from English to Indonesian is quite strange and the staff go out of the line of sight and roll around on the ground laughing.  After three years we are still amusing.  I guess that is a good thing.

Bon appetit.

Cool cats and learning to "becara seperti a Texan"

I am not sure if I have explored the subject of the cats here in Jakarta.  If not, I will enlighten you.  If so, maaf for repeating myself.

One extremely obvious thing we noticed when we first arrived here is that the vast majority of cats have very odd tails.  Instead of being long and sleek or long and fluffy,  they are shorter and mis-shapened.  Sometimes they look like the number 7 or they look like a tail with a bulbous, knotty end.  It sounds weird I am sure for those of you reading this and I can attest, it looks weird.

We have asked about it and people have speculated that the tails are broken by wayward motorcycles or scooters running over them.  The mother cats are malnourished and it causes a deformity.  There is a chromosome that causes them to be shaped that way.  However, my favorite is when my sweetie pie asked our driver why the cats had tails like that and after a side-long look of the "What are you talking about pak?" persuasion, the answer was "Tidak apa-apa." Tidak apa-apa is one of those great phrases that we use a lot here.  It's kind of like a "whatever" a "just the way it is" or "no worries, don't concern yourself."

We have gotten used to seeing the cats in this condition and adopted the tidak apa-apa stance until recently.  At work one day, honey lamb and one of the young Indonesians he works with got to talking about cats.  After sweetie asked him if he knew why the cats tails looked that way, this young man looked at him like he was out of his mind.  This then spawned the question to sugar lips concerning what our cats look like.  How could they be different?  Aren't all cats' tails shaped like the ones here?

After a quick query on the Internet, our young friend was totally stunned that cats had tails that looked like what we are used to seeing in the US.  He was practically speechless.  He never imagined that the tail on a cat might look different.  And with that said, I guess neither had I.  So maybe the "What are you talking about pak?" look made much more sense.  Never having been off the island of Java, our driver had never seen other cats.  So to ask him why the tails are shaped that way was kind of like asking why the sky is blue.  When that is all you see, that is all you know.

Along the line of expanding ones horizons and knowledge base, my main squeeze has been feeding new phrases to the woman who we use as a fitness trainer at the gym we belong to.  What started it all was the word "calf."  Not in reference to a baby bovine, but as in the large muscle on your lower leg.  Just as we have a difficult time pronouncing certain letter combinations or rolling the letter r as they like to do here, the converse is true for Indonesians.  The word calf would be pronounced totally different if we adhered to their alphabet.  The "c" would have a ch sound.  The "a" would most likely be an ah sound.  The "lf" combo would probably sound like "lif" like lift.  So our trainer tries to make it sound more American but it took a little bit to figure out what the word was she was saying to us.  So sweet thing tried to teach her how to put flatter, harder sounds to it.  She got close.  He then began to teach her words like ya'll.  While ya'll is actually a southern word and not a Texan word per say, it was just the kind of word she could really get a lot of mileage out of.  Of course he had to explain that ya'll can be singular and plural as in "all ya'll.  I am not so sure he has not taught her "yee haw" and "dang-it."  So by the time we leave, our dear trainer will "becara seperti a Texan." (speak like a Texan).  I do have a feeling that since he has started these impromptu lessons that she has up the abuse level on our training sessions.  Maybe he should go back to trying to speak only Indonesian to her and she will not be making me do so many abdominal exercises that I cramp up into a little ball.

3 years on the other side of the world

Sweetums and I passed our 36 month mark as expats at the end of January.   Why is this significant?  Well, you start to understand it is truly the little things in life that make it grand.  That even though you have gray hair and have to wear bifocals to see, there is so much stuff still to see and do.  Perspectives change.  What may look easy, isn't always.  A life that is difficult doesn't mean that it isn't joyful.  Home is where the love is.

So, with all of that said, here is what is running through my brain as I ponder the last 36+ months.

1. Our assignment was for 36 months, but as you might have guessed, we are still here.
2. It feels like home when I return.
3. We have filled out so many arrival/departure documents, visa forms, and purchased enough airline tickets for international travel, etc that we have memorized our passport numbers and all of the important stuff to go with it.
4. I still love hearing "Welcome home." at US immigration.
5. I still miss driving myself places.
6. Conversely, I do love having someone pick me up at the airport after a 30 hour transit and I can't figure out what day it is.
7. You think that a 12 to 14 hour flight is a piece of cake.
8. I still love bajajs.
9. I still get homesick.
10. I love my friends here.
11. I love my friends at home.
12. I love that some of the friends here have become friends at home.
13. I love that our son has had the opportunity to come and share part of this life with us and see so many things that he would never have seen otherwise.
14. I appreciate that folks have really gotten tired of hearing about what it is like to live here.
15. I appreciate the fact that it is very hard to explain what it is like to live here.
16. We are still a very, very long way from home and that is difficult to deal with sometimes.
17. I really do like freshly pressed clothing and sheets.
18. Personal space is a variable, not a constant.
19. What may have frightened you so much to begin with isn't so scary after a while.
20. Some folks are much bigger thrill seekers than sweetie and I are and that is okie dokie.
21. I still don't understand a whole lot of things.
22. People who text and walk wander are a major pain in the behind.
23. There are still scary, horrible, heart-wrenching things that you see too frequently in many places in the world.
24. There are very sweet and kind people everywhere.
25. There are some not so sweet and kind people everywhere.
26. What an experience this has been to a place I quite honestly had to look up on a map to see exactly where it is.
27. I really dislike the distance I have to travel to get home (which ever home that might be).
28. You can only watch so many movies on an airplane before you faint in little snippets without realizing it and then are so befuddled as to why the movies are not making any sense what-so-ever that you have to watch it again.
29. The last 6 hours of the endurance test called flying home are enough to make you want to either scream, cry, or run up and down the aisles.  All of which will cause even more delays when you land.
30. I am blessed.