Yesterday was the m*slim holiday of Idul Adha. This is where they celebrate the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Ishmael (they believe) on Mt. Carmel. In Bandung the mosque was going on all night long and it was obvious that it was a special day. Here, it was really quiet and a lot of the stores were closed. The only loud sounds we heard were the three Christmas booths near us going at it. There’s one that likes to play rap-style Christmas music and another one likes to play traditional music. Quite funny…
The MAF national workers chose to take today, Friday, off instead of Thursday. So Hugo’s plan is to finish re-organizing the avionics inventory today. He likes to do it when the national workers aren’t in because they ask him a lot of questions so it is hard to get tasks completed and also, he doesn’t want to offend them too badly by redoing their inventory system – which didn’t make sense to him…
The rest of us are spending a rainy day indoors to the smell of a roast cooking in the crockpot getting tender for croquettes… yummm…
The roast is another story. The new grocery store in town has a meat section. They have a lot of fish and sometimes squid or shrimp. They also have frozen chickens (thankfully without all the stuff we don’t want) but they also have whole ducks – eyeballs, legs and all… The other thing they have is hunks of beef. Everything is done where the customers can see, so… I was watching them cut the beef the other day. There are hunks that are a few inches thick and a couple feet long by a foot or so wide and they use a machine like a jig saw to cut smaller hunks off. This meat is so incredibly frozen it’s like cutting ice. The guy who was cutting it was about 18 and was wearing a big black plastic apron. I’m going to guess he’s never studied how to cut a cow up properly… I also have a feeling that they don’t really clean the blade all that well, if at all, between cutting fish and beef. It’s too bad because you can’t buy beef from them that hasn’t been frozen before so whatever you buy you need to cook in the next couple weeks… At least I think that’s how long beef can last in your fridge… I get my ground beef from this little hole in the wall place along side the road and you have to order the day before and every morning they slaughter a cow and later on you can go pick up your ground beef in a big black plastic shopping bag. If you ask, they’ll double-bag it… thankfully…