After much drama over me missing my flight and the aggravating altercation with the rude airline staff-- may your Allah punish you well-- I finally managed to rest my feet on this long-forgotten motherland of mine, and sink my teeth into the much-missed gustatory goodness galore.
Really, my family might not have been blessed with the brightest of all minds, the most statuesque of all physiques, or the most bad-ass of all talents, but we know good food and we know how to find it. To actually witness with my own eyes the lengths to which we would go (and had gone), coupled with the timely display of agility of mind, in hunting those obscure havens where they store the country's royal secret to obesity, is really mind-blowing. It is so stupendous, it really borders on predatorial. The only one thing that is greater than these uncanny gustatory instincts is our cumulative waistline. This inane acuity transcends cultural, racial and taxonomical classifications: the only reason good enough--and I am guessing here-- to cage the beasts is the sometimes-unreasonable pricing. Thankfully, having lived in a third world country for almost the entire span of our lifetimes, we are now equipped with the "blink" a la Malcolm Gladwell to sieve through the cornucopia of gustatory teasers, and to winnow out pleasantries from pleasures.
We be going to Bali on Sunday, and oft you hear normal people giving their pedestrian gushing about the Garuda Wisnu Kencana, the sightseeing, the water sports adventures, blah blah blah, but not so much with my folks. All I hear is ribs, pork and seafood treats by the beach-- which is always a reason to smile. Long time ago I was told that "Nothing tastes better than skinny!", but whoever said that obviously never had a foot-long strip of unagi-tempura sushi shoved to his mouth at dinner after having binged on a plate of honey glazed pork ribs for lunch, and of course there were other things too. It's kind of hard to translate this taste-buds titillation into prose, but rest assured the food here is one of those stuff that makes one's mouth water and armpits juicy. Joye sanz fyn.
