Some common questions I get asked is stuff like: Where do you stay? What was the food like? These
are without a doubt the easiest questions to answer but these are only the
answers to those questions for the first half of the trip.
Food: For supper most nights we had fried rice. Not fried
rice like most people probably think of with egg in it. This was fried rice I
actually like a lot and miss. We got it from a food stall, called a warung,
right around the corner from where we were staying. After it was cooked it was
wrapped up in a piece of brown paper, kind of like a paper bag, and stapled
shut. We would bring it back to our place to eat. One day the husband of the
lady who owned that warung brought us chicken sandwiches. It was wonderful!
Lunch most days came from the warung right next to the fried rice warung. It
was fried noodles. It was similar to ramen noodles but with different
flavorings. There were a few meals that didn’t come from those two warungs. The
other meals always consisted of white rice and a small portion of meat.
Shelter: The guys and girls stayed at two different places
but I believe they were owned by the same man.
The guys place was referred to as the garden. You could either take the
roads a long way to get there or go up the steep road by Pak Lindra’s house and
cut through by the side of someone’s house, cross a ditch and fight through
trees and grass. So the choice was long and easy or short and challenging. I
really don’t know too much about their place. I don’t think they had running water or electricity but I am not
positive. The garden had three beds and was very much open compared to
where the girls stayed.
We stayed in a part of the family’s compound. Technically we
had 2 bedrooms each with two beds, but we all stayed in one. When you walk up the family’s driveway to the
left is a covered area with instruments and the motorcycles and clothes line. Then
you go up some steps and there is a platform thing to your left and the path to
our rooms on the right. Straight ahead is the family’s house. Take the path on
the right to our rooms. First is the room we didn’t sleep in which was very
open. It did have somewhat transparent bamboo shades for walls. There was
another platform sort of thing with a couple of gamelan on it. Above the platform
was our second bedroom where all four of us girls stayed. We did have
electricity and running water. However, the bulb burned out in the room we
stayed in and we never got it switched. We really weren’t in our rooms much
when it was dark anyway except to sleep. We had a western toilet and a sink!
You have no idea how exciting a sink is to me. A sink is even more exciting to
me than a western toilet. Have you tried washing your face when you have to do
it using a bak. It’s just messy. A bak is what you bathe from. It’s basically a
cistern filled with water and you use a scoop to pour the water over you. It is
cold and it is not fun. Luckily our bak was movable and the faucet was high
enough up that we moved the bak and used the faucet like a shower. It was still
cold and not fun.
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