taliwang

Indonesian lessons have been going rather well; almost every day it seems as if my language skills improve. Being able to affect basic strains of communication has helped me feel more confident going about my daily routine as I see fit. Inevitably, however, this overconfidence sometimes results in me getting in a bit over my head.

For instance, returning from my holiday on Tuesday night I was in Lombok waiting to catch a ferry to Bali where I would then fly back to my present home base of Yogyakarta. I had heard that Lombok is famous for the Taliwang style of cooking, involving a dipping sauce made from limes, chilies, and shrimp paste. I went out and found a place and ordered, to looks of incredulity, grilled chicken taliwang. Walking into the warung, I should have noticed the stacks of chickens—twisted and folded such that they would fit rightly in a cigar box—on paint stirrers, but I was too preoccupied with the Indonesian soap opera playing on the TV. My first realization came when a bowl of rice and a bowl (about the volume of a cigar box) of fowl were place in front of me. Having never eaten a whole chicken, I fretted over both my options and the mechanics of the task literally before me.

Thankfully in Indonesia is it completely appropriate to eat with your hands (in fact, at breakfast earlier that day I had delighted the assembled crowd by eating my breakfast of rice and lamb marrow ‘Lombok-style’—ie with my hands) and, taking liberal use of the finger bowl, I managed to claw and tear my way through the meal.

As I was paring through the last of this chaotic web of twisted claws and wings (I didn’t go anywhere near the head) an advertisement came on the TV for a spray on deodorant. The mis en scene is a teenage girl’s bedroom where three girls in boy shorts and tank tops set up a web-cam (the camera’s perspective is that of the web-came, slightly grainy) in front of which they cavort to the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”. Predictably the fun (and voyeurism) can not last forever; one of the lasses raises her arms above her head (I seem to recall this concept done before, except with Michael Strahan in lieu of pubescent girls—tomato, tomatoe; potato, potatoe) and the other two capitulate under the odor (represented by shocks of green).

Of course, when the Spice Girls came on everyone in the warung turns to look at me, elbow deep (later, before I left, the proprietors suggested I use their sink) in my chicken on a paint stirrer, and laugh uproariously. That this advertisement was a commercial during a soap opera in which all of the female characters wore full head scarves brings me to what I originally wanted to write—that this country is a muddle. It is too bad such great literature has already exploited the term.