indigestion

The other night, my friend from Jakarta, the lady who essentially appointed herself responsible for shepherding me around during my first week in Indonesia, happened to be down in Yogyakarta. She gathered a sundry group of her friends, family, and me together and took us out to dinner.

I of course, managed to provide a rather bland occasion with some notable dinner entertainment. We went to a fish barbecue place where your plate is a banana leaf and most people forgo utensils. Basically the meal involved a table full of dishes and a big basket of rice (Indonesians believe that what constitutes a meal is rice, everything without is a snack), a family style affair.

With so much food before me and having lived with unusual moderation of late (more out of reality than choice), I had already decided to put down some food. When I started eating with my hands, the other people at the table looked bemused, when I started piling on the sambal (sauce made from stone crushed red chilies), they looked anxious, when I clumped the rice like the Javanese do, they looked admiringly, and when I kept moving for the rice basket after everyone else had pushed back from the table, a young waitress walked up to me and blurted out ‘I like the way that you eat.’