Day 1 - Chicken Collection

Today was the first day (Tuesday) in Indonesia after arriving late last night to our room in Bogor at CIVAS. Probably the hottest night of my life but being so exhausted from 2 days of travel and 3 flights made things significantly easier to sleep. Though we were told to get up and be ready for 9am, we soon found out that we were not leaving to head to Jakarta's chicken collection facility until 2pm. We were obviously curious and so wandered quickly around the city of Bogor, which is basically a suburb of Jakarta but someone calmer than a city of 22 million people with comparatively better air. Wandering around took about 20 minutes as the extreme heat and lack of Rupiah (money) made doing anything difficult (as did the lack of sidewalk and overall omission of any goal for our walk). Heading back, we decided to play a board game (Amanda won...surprise surprise) and then we had a really cool lunch of things cooked in peanut butter. They called it peanut sauce but it actually tasted a lot light peanut butter to me and it was not just flavouring, almost like a peanut butter curry and served with shrimpy chips (without the shrimp flavour). Heading out at 3pm we discovered that everything here is really far. Either they have no idea how fast we are actually traveling or my watch is broken, but 60km on a highway similar to ours should not take 1.5hrs. That being said, their highways are quite impressive. Not very busy and with conditions similar to ours road quality wise. People love to pass on the shoulder but that is really the only difference, even the road signs are similar to TO's. Of course with no drinking in the entire country (being mostly Muslim and all) drunk driving also does not exist. I shouldn't say alcohol is not existant as apparently you can find it if you know where to look and there are even two beer breweries in the country. However outside of hotels and the most touristy spots there is almost no drinking, or pork eating (but apparently you can find pork too if you are in the know). I better get on to the chicken collection facilities, which actually consisted of an entire neighbourhood. 325 individual families in the neighbourhood collected chickens, keeping them on the bottom floor and living upstairs. Try to picture Eastern European type alleyways and houses with chickens on every bottom floor and people living in quite good accommodations upstairs (as the chicken business is quite profitable...$1.65US for a 1kg bird.....they make a very decent living here). It was not where chickens were really grown, rather it was like middle men (or families) buying from farmers and then filling orders for people who want to buy large amounts of chickens for the market (or restuarants I guess). They sell slaughtered or not, and the slaughtering is all halal which means they have to bleed out (it has to technically be a natural death). Anyways, it was really interesting and everyone was so excited to see us (so many kids followed us around the town and old women brought out their digital cameras to ask for pictures with us). We then went out for dinner and were treated to a special form of Indonesian food found mainly on the island of Sumatra. We were supposed to go to an even more popular Sudanese place, but we were closer to this restaurant. They put out all of their food on the table and you simply eat the plates you want. It would be like ordering everything on the menu (about 15 things) as well as rice for a base, and then choosing the things you think look good. The food was quite good, lots of different curries and coconut milk, beef and especially chicken, and then many vegetables. Some more interesting things were the beef skin and tendon (basically the outside part of a cow leg) and stinky beans (a bean that smells!). However common things like eggplant, cuts of fish and chicken, or fried red peppers were also there. It cost roughly $2.50 each and apparently we ate way more than the average Indonesian would (they usually take 1 plate each with rice while we split about 10 dishes between 5 people for variety....nobody told us we were eating too much!). That is all for now, I will try to add more later this week.