Liz in Indonesia: Where I live...

Hello!

I am very exhausted right now.. I only have 3 days left here including today, so I've been pretty busy wrapping everything up. I'll post later and talk more about the end of my time here and thoughts - right now I want to talk about where I've been living. I noticed my blog makes it look like I've been traveling a lot, which is pretty inaccurate. Yes, I've gone on 3 trips total, but together they were 12 days total.. so the vast majority of this 4.5 month period of time has been spent in one city. After I had been here a while I actually decided not to travel in order to get to better know this one place and people here. The thing is is that I haven't written much about my daily life here and this place... mainly because it seems so normal/boring to me now that I feel like it is not worth writing about. People always say it's best to take pictures and write down observations that strike you the first few days you go somewhere. They're right -- very quickly things that seemed crazy/different become normal.

A market street.

Daily Life
FOOD
Man - I don't know what to say. I mainly eat rice with fried meat/tofu/dough on top of it. I try to only have that once a day, instead of 3 times like most people here, but it's pretty tricky finding other things to eat. It feels so unhealthy to me to be eating so much fried food. It's crazy that, according to nutrition statistics, the food here is still healthier than American processed food. I think I've eaten most of the different types of animal organs now. When I was in that village in Sept I didn't look up the words they were telling me in the dictionary because I didn't want to find out what organs we were eating since we had to eat that dish for 3 days straight. Typically families will cook one dish of food and then put it under a sort of mesh cage thing so bugs can't get in (they still do), and then the family eats that dish for every meal until its gone... it usually lasts for about 2 days. They do not reheat the food, so its almost always cold. That's the case at most "warungs" too.. the food is all cold. It's all made in the morning and then sits there until it is eaten. Even meat and fish and eggs. I'm not sure if it's sanitary or not- I always thought you couldn't do that - but I haven't gotten sick from it! My favorite two dishes here are Soto - a brothy soup with thin, clear noodles and fried onions.. not much substance but you eat it with rice and it's not fried! - and Mie Ayam - thin spaghetti-like noodles with small pieces of chicken (well.. half meat and half fat and skin) and cucumber and green leafy vegetables with broth poured over it.

Ok, I don't really have time to write more, so maybe I'll continue this later. I'll let some photos speak for themselves.

This seems to be one of the main hubs of activity in Bandar Lampung. Ramayana market is to the right. This is where you switch angkots... you can see the light blue angkot in the foreground.. the light blue one goes north, so its the one I take home.