Tuesday, February 26, 2013

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.

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