There was certainly a lot to learn while in Indonesia – religion, culture, history, land… and food.  Staying in a house with Wiwit, a petite Balinese woman (you’ll see her photo below), allowed me to ask my 101 questions each day about what this is, what that’s called, how you make this, what that tastes like, and how does one eat that?!  Not to mention my numerous questions on local customs and especially those Rice Guards! One thing that I came home with is a new set of Indonesian vocabulary – words for all of the different fruits we tried.  So here is a small introduction to Balinese fruit.  Keep your eyes open at your local supermarket or specialty food shop – a lot of these tropical fruits are exported. Read the rest of this story >>

We have been staying in a house at the end of a narrow, short road, in the middle of Bali‘s rice fields.  It is almost as if the house was picked up by the same tornado that took Dorothy and Toto in the Wizard of Oz, and dropped us here.   We have been able to see up close just how significant rice is to the Balinese; it is not simply the food staple, eaten at every meal including breakfast, but also an integral part of their culture, the rice terraces also making Bali’s picturesque landscape what it is.  We watched their daily work routines from morning to night.  Not only seeing how it all works, but especially hearing it all too.

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Happy New Year 2009 !  Bonne Année !  Prosit Neujahr !  And for me here in Bali, it’s Selamat Tahun Baru in Indonesian.
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From Zürich, we had taken a 4.5 hour train ride to Paris, and after a stop in the countryside for the holidays, it was a 12 hour flight to Singapore, followed by a 2.5 hour flight to Denpasar, Bali.  This was certainly “getting away.”  It was late evening when we arrived, so our first experience with Indonesia was in its sounds and smells, not yet its sights and beautiful landscapes for which it is known.  Staying in a house in the middle of the rice fields in southern Bali, we could only imagine what it would look like the next morning.  A lightning storm all throughout the night offered us an excellent preview.  We tried to catch each flash, as we listened to the sounds of cow bells, exotic birds, animals we had no idea how to identify, Muslim chants far in the distance (at 4am), roosters crowing and scooters whizzing by.

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