Woohoo, I'm back after another 5 day stint in Indonesia for work. Didn't have to endure any dangdut videos, and the guesthouse provided by the client for me and my Indonesian colleagues was lovely and had a huge tv with all the same channels as Astro and more. So while I was internet-deprived the whole time, as least the tv helped keep me sane.
I usually pride myself on being easily adaptable to other countries. Most other countries I've been too, the worse problem I usually have adapting to the new place is coming down with a bout of sneezing... and since most other countries I go to have better air than Malaysia, even that is rare! And this isn't even my first trip to Indon... but for some reason this time round, my body developed an unusual sign of rejecting this place and wanting to be home.
On the second day I was there, something about the food I ate didn't quite agree with me coz' I came down with a bout of food poisoning and woke up in the middle of the night to puke (made it in time to the toilet!). That was not cool. After that, the rest of the time there, I had no appetite for the food, even though the food served at the guesthouse was actually pretty good... rice with Indonesian dishes that are not too different from normal Malay cooking. But then again, back home I don't really fancy Malay cooking either, so that was probably another thing that made me put off. During breakfast time, the food looked really good, but was also really oily (fried rice, fried chicken, fried eggs!) and I'm used to eating only fruits or bread for breakfast... so on the last few days, I ate really little of it and thought the the oily-ness of it all was putting me off. The dishes served during lunch and dinner, however, were oily AND spicy, and the spicyness was putting me off too, even though normally at home I have no problem with spicy food. I ended up eating much less than I usually do at home coz' my tummy just kept feeling weird and didn't want to take in the food.
Very strangely though, on the last day I still had no appetite... until I got in the plane heading for KL... then it was like something triggered in me. I got SO hungry and was hankering for a bowl of noodles. I was even willing to pay a ridiculous price of RM7 for the Maggi hot bowl they serve on the flight... and when the air stewardesses serving the food were so slow coming to my row, all I could think was "C'moooon....moveitmoveitmoveitmoveit!!!!". By the time they came, the flight was almost about to land (it was only an hour flight) so they didn't want to give me the hot bowl as they were afraid I wouldn't have time to finish it, and since I REALLLY wanted noodles, I opted to wait. Which was even more torturous. I was almost ready to hijack the plane and make the pilot land right in front of a noodle shop. After I landed, I found out my dad would be late to pick me up, which was a relief to me coz' it meant I had time to eat at the airport. I ended up eating Ipor Hor Fun at Old Town White Coffee... which mostly consisted of lots of noodles in soup, a few lousy pieces of chicken, a couple of prawns and that was it. A typical ripoff Malaysian meal... but at that point it was like heaven. Aaaaah....
Since then, even though I've been having a bout of diarrhea and running to the loo once every hour or so (which means I actually did have food poisoning and am purging myself now), I'm happily eating my normal Malaysian oily and spicy food with a healthy appetite. So I figure, it wasn't the oilyness or the spicyness of Indo food. It's just that for some reason, my body decided it didn't want Indo food. In confirmation of my theory, as soon as I got back home after eating my ripoff but heavenly airport meal, I opened up a box given to me by my client, which was a souvenir from them.... and found a big pandan cake and some other Indonesian cakes inside. It looked yummy... but the smell of it immediately made me feel like throwing up again. Hmm... very strange.
Well, not sure why my tummy decided to go on strike in Indonesia. The place does have it's fair share of good food... like the super extremely spicy Mi Acheh we had at an outdoor stall which I twittered about.... it was basically instant noodles made it this super spicy red soup. It was so spicy, it did something along the lines of making smoke come out of my ears, tears well up in my eyes, and snot drool out my nose. Every bite had to be taken slowly, and finishing the bowl was a test in endurance all by itself.... but I did it! Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of that masochistic meal, but I did get a photo of another common Indon food, 'bakso', which means 'meatball' in Indonesian.
That's a bowl of bakso noodles they served which costed only Rp7000, which comes up to less than RM2. And you can count NINE freakin' meatballs in there. Two of them are extra large! Good grief. In Malaysia, if you ask for a bowl of meatball noodles, you'd be lucky to get more than 4 meatballs... and it would come up RM4 or so. *Sigh*
Well, I hope next time I go back to Indon, my tummy will function normally so I can actually enjoy their food. ;)
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