Starving Quietly

I suppose there are as few examples of the close connection between body and soul as the hunger pangs of an expat who can’t get the food he/she is used to. I cannot forget the way a former classmate of mine from California, USA would talk so earnestly about how grateful he was to have discovered a source for applesauce. “Apple sauce?” I was thinking at the time.

Now it’s my turn. I’m dying for bulalo, sinigang, petchay, kare-kare, pork chops, chunky beef stew, stuffed and roasted milkfish, bagoong, dinuguan (blood pudding), menudo, giniling, oh a slew of other unacquirables here. It’s particularly bad when the meal hours come and the only things edible are the foods that the people here have. Indomie, mie instan, mihun, mie basa, mie kuning, sohum mie, bakmi, cwiemie, mie goreng, mie bakso, mie ayam bakso, ayam bakso mie, bakso mie ayam, mie bakso ayam, mie rubus, rebus mie, mie dan kuah, mie tampah kuah, mie thrown at the wall, mie on the plate, mie on the side of the plate, mie under the table, mie and you, you and mie. That. Works for them, but it's killing mie. I mean, me.

I come away from the table stuffed to the gills but positively starving in my mind. I recall the parakeet squabs I had when I used to keep parakeets. The barely fledged baby birds would find themselves kicked out of the nest and sitting at the bottom of the cage, right on the birdseed dish. While the mature birds had enough sense not to sit on the seed, not so the bugleys (I called them bugleys from bird + ugly). The other thing that bugleys hadn’t yet figured was how to eat the bird seed. Hungry but no longer fed by their parents, they’d have the general idea of eating the birdseed like all the other birds were doing. What they didn’t quite know yet was that they were supposed to hull the seeds first. Often, the result was a sorry-assed looking bugley with a drum-tight crop, bursting with un-hulled birdseed. Starving, of course! Yep, that’s what I feel like these days.

I am losing weight. This is a good thing, yes? But I’m starving. That’s mie. (Whimper)

City Bites

7 Aug 11 (Sunday)

That’s what big cities do to foolhardy newbies and I played the part yesterday. Three things I managed. 1) I moved apartment. I moved from a hi-rise apartment complex to a ‘kost” or a homestay sort of lodging. I thought it would bring me closer to the school and I could stay later and produce more work. Well, no, not exactly. Seems I made the choice without really understanding the layout of this area and I find, so far anyway, that I’m not much closer to the school than I would be had I just stayed at the apartment. The room is great. Unfortunately, I had not taken into account the stench of the open sewer canals that surround the place.

The last straw is the water. I saw the bath water in the pail this morning. Noticed big bubbles on the surface. Damn that’s dirty water. Then I recall hearing in the conversation with the other residents last night – no, I don’t speak the local language very well, but I do understand enough to catch phrases and the thrust of the conversation – something about how there was a water pump. Shoot! That didn’t register in my head until this morning: ground water! If you’ve never been to Jakarta I’ll tell you something about it. There are lots and lots of open sewers here. Breeds lots of mosquitoes, creates unspeakable views, generates a miasma that perhaps only the longtime residents don’t notice. City newbies, well, we notice. And that black water, it seeps down to the ground!

Perhaps those apartment dwellers are there not just because they’re seeking a stylish lifestyle but because they’re refugees. This city is beginning to reveal itself as one of the more environmentally degraded places I’ve been to. Oh sure, Manila has its corresponding areas. Still it’s not very nice to discover that this dismal state of the environment is endemic here. It’s all around. Yeech!

The second stupid thing I did was I went shopping for too many things. More than I could comfortably handle in one go. Consequently I lost a couple of items. A pail and a trash bin. Not too expensive items, but still that cost me money.

Finally, I got fleeced by a cabbie. I still don’t know my bearings in this city. I stayed at the supermarket without realizing it was nearly midnight and so had to ride through the dark streets of this city. Dumb. Ha ha.

Wisdom isn’t a stage you achieve, I think. Instead it’s a dynamic state brought on by having to deal with circumstances that keep you sharp and alert. Take away those conditions and you revert back to the not-no-smart you. Then change the situation again, make the situation difficult and then you start hurting, and consequently getting smart again.

Incidentally it’s Sunday morning. Normally I would be at church today. But I don’t know where that is and it’ll take some time to find it. So I’m spending this morning walking around and getting my bearings. Maybe I’ll find a place where they sell cheap secondhand bicycles because I sure could use one.