Dear All,
Things in the kitchen are very interesting.
Before I even get to the food, it's important to know that the staff has tried to marry me off to every unwed woman in the place. They are half joking and half serious. The typical scene, repeated two dozen times over the last two days, goes something like this:
"Ooooh, Alek handSOME. Married???"
"No, Tidak berkeluarga. Singgal."
"You want Bali girl??!!"
At this point one of the unmarried girls, either on hand or walking by, is grabbed roughly by both arms and thrust towards me. She looks mortified but smiles nonetheless.
"This Jupun!!! No married! She pretty girl!! Nice mountains!!! You want??"
Out of curiosity I asked one of the guys who speaks English a little, what dating is like for Balinese. I asked, not because I'm prospecting, but because they, the women at least, never go out. They just go to work and then go home to their families. He told me that if you are interested in someone, your family will meet their family and once that is going well, they start planning the wedding and you get to find out if you actually like each other.
The other interesting twist is that Balinese women do not, to the uninitiated, look their age. They seem to experience a prolonged period of looking really young, followed by instant onset old age. A woman that looks thirty is probably approaching ninety and is a day away from shriveling into a Bali raisin. Just about all other women look like they are between twelve and eighteen. Fortunately for me, there is zero chance that I'm going to get involved with a local, so I don't have to try and figure it all out. The guys, on the other hand, all smoke like chimneys and I think this causes them to show their age a bit more. They still look young, but they are more craggy and have the occasional identifiers like receding hairlines and bad teeth.
Inside the kitchen, my knife skills are coming in handy. I am shadowing a woman in the cold kitchen and basically prepping salads, fruit drinks and desserts. It is not rocket science but there is a lot of memorization so that the food looks the same every time there is an order. Also, I haven't done a morning shift yet so I have yet to learn how all the dressings and cold sauces are made. That will be useful information. The staff are universally friendly and, in between efforts to pimp me out, have really been showing me a lot and correcting the little mistakes I inevitably make.
I guess that food-wise, things are just a little bit anticlimactic. I know that will change in time so it's no big deal. In the meantime I am starting to learn the nuts and bolts or restaurant work. It is fascinating how things are portioned and priced. So much of the food is made ahead of time that there is actually very little cooking done during the service. It is more of a carefully orchestrated heating and compiling of ingredients that were prepared, whenever possible, ahead of time. It is also really tricky to get all the orders out at the same time but I've improved a lot already.
I'm also learning the language really fast...and forgetting it almost as rapidly. The people in the kitchen here speak Balinese, Indonesian and kitchen English all at the same time, which is playing evil games with my mind. Yesterday, I tried to say I was very full, but it turns out that the word for "full" in Indonesian is the same as "penis" in Balinese. They laughed and laughed. Later, one of the guys was telling me more about cockfighting. He kept saying things like, "I used to grow my cock very big but not any more." "I feed my cock chop beef so it strong." "Very expensive to buy good cock!" I couldn't help but giggle my ass off. In your face Balinese people!!!
In more relevant news, there is an upcoming, expat organized, voting party for Obama that I plan to attend. Stay tuned.
Hugs,
Alex
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