Indonesia: Ubud (Day 6 Super-cont'd, Saturday, 080109)

After the Monkey Forest, we return to the hotel, taking a circuitous and tortuous route that forces us to take yet another nap. I'm roused by Eric's stage whisper: "there's a monkey on our balcony," and I leap up for a careful look through the (very large) crack in our door (held shut with what looks like an absurdly insecure...sliding block of wood).

There's a decent-sized adult male (how do I know he's a male? Balls. Huge monkeyballs. And, no recognizable penis. Though I suppose I wasn't really looking that hard--really. Bestiality = booooo!). He's rummaging through our trash can, where I'd thrown a bottle of green tea. What does he do but deftly unscrew the cap, shake the bottle over his open mouth, and then toss it aside with a little flick of disgruntlement when he finds it empty.

Exhibit A:



We head back out for dinner--picking a tiny restaurant that has as its primary attraction a view of a very authentic rice paddy in the middle of downtown, tourist Ubud. Eric has the roast duck, which turns out dry, and I have the garlic potato wedges and ginger ale. Evidently, the celestial suckling pig was just a prelapsarian interlude before my Satanic/Indonesian Fall from Gastronomic Grace.

Because I am feeling sick. Every smell that hits my olfactory organs makes me feel sick, so much so that I attempt to puke (earlier? later? I can't remember.) in our hotel room. No luck.

I think it'd be safe to say that a large percentage of why I'm so interested in travel is because I like food. Not just eating it, but looking at it, taking pictures of it for posterity, thinking about eating it, planning to eat it, remembering it...you get the drift.

Now far be it for me to dismiss an entire, multi-faceted nation's food, but...that's what I'mma do.

The main problem with food in Indonesia, I think, is that it's not good.

Too salty and over-spiced in that muddy way that turns into blandness.

And it's indicative, it seems, of a lack of attentiveness to food, when it's customary to cook the entire day's meals early in the morning, and then eat them, room-temperature, throughout the day. This is, I know, a function of climate and class. You want the food to keep, and you presumably have better things to do, like, make a living, than to be rustlin' up three hots.

What this means, then, is that my bratty, little, middle-class, used-to-variety-Ethiopian-Japanese-Mexican-Korean-soul-pizza-burgers-Indian-Thai-Vietnamese, American palate eventually has a meltdown on day six of this trip, and is unable to consume anything approaching "authentic" Indonesian. Not the omnipresent nasi goreng and mie goreng (fried rice and chow mein, respectively), not even another meal of babi guling, the suckling pig I'd fantasized about months before the trip, had enjoyed while on this trip, and had manically chattered about having for every meal in our remaining time in Ubud after having a single taste of it...

The only other food I'm able to worry down that evening is a bowl of...potato and leek soup, and a Sprite. Eric attempts to reassure me, telling me that travel sometimes does this to you: your stomach just isn't used to local bacteria--it feels upset; it's okay to be craving familiar, comfort foods. And he gets me started on some probiotics.

I try to regain my composure, but I've always been the type to pile high my plate, and order the weirdest thing on the menu, let the dice fall where they may, and eat shit other folks won't, and I've always talked a big game about eating anything (eyeballs, tongue, ear, dick, balls, whatever) but that horrible Filipino balut monstrosity.

And it's like that bad shroom trip where you feel like you're never going to be sane again, and that you should just run out onto the street and let a car hit you because you are fo'rills insane and ain't nothin' ever gonna change that. Except now you're afraid that food will never taste delicious to you again, and while that's a most excellent diet plan, you already aren't getting laid, and so the list of achievable earthly pleasures is quickly diminishing, and oh my fuck, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT*?

(*Reference to stupid ads for stupid movie that I never saw because it so clearly was going to be stupid, stupid. See: The Reaping.)