The Embassy of Indonesia held a Bazaar yesterday, at which Yiwen, Carol and I bought some freshly cooked Indonesian specialities, as we mingled with the crowds. Most of the people were from the local Indonesian community, happy to be browsing among their own kinds of foods, toiletries and clothes—batik shawls, sarongs, jewelry, fans, cloth handbags and kebayas on sale in the main hall—and singing along to the Karaoke played continuously on the outdoor TV screen. Indoors, another TV screen played Indonesian tourism videos, from one of which came the title of this blog post.
We arrived too late to catch the gamelan performance, but I enjoyed watching the children play with their balloons in the formal reception room. Indonesians seem very family-oriented. I like that.
When we'd finally exhausted the possibilities of the bazaar, Yiwen drove us to another place where Carol and I never been before, an authentic Chinese supermarket, where she (Yiwen, not Carol!) put three wriggling crabs in a paper bag to cook for her supper. The items on the shelves included fish heads, bread rolls to be cooked in steam, bags of aniseed powder, ginseng candy, fresh rice noodles, bok choy, whole water chestnuts, chicken's feet, dried mangoes and a whole dried octopus, vacuum packed (you flavour soups with it). Chinese lanterns and dragons hung from the ceiling and the cashier spoke to Yiwen in Chinese.
Letting the flavour be our surrounding today, as well, we flew to Iroquois on the St. Lawrence seaway and found that we had landed in a field of wild strawberries ripe enough to nibble as soon as we climbed out of the 'plane.
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