I began the description of our open market visit in the last blog post. The market was small. It seemed big and due to its labyrinth nature was kind of easy to get lost in. All the aisles were at right angles so it was easy to mentally keep track of where you were. Some of the market was open air, some was inside. The smaller pedestrian only aisles had tarps strung across to provide shade. The bigger streets were crowded with cars, scooters, and horse drawn carts. The horses were small a stocky. I didn't see them carry anything. I think they were there mostly to carry people. My camera stopped working in the market, so now I am carrying my phone for taking pictures.
When ever we walk any where we can almost always hear people yelling "boolay" which means "whitey." We are the only white people I've seen.
Before we left the place we were staying, Dr. Snyder handed everyone a small plastic person toy. We had to give it to someone while we were at the market. The market place dealings were very different from Africa. In Africa the vendors were obnoxious, trying to sell to everyone. If you even acknowledged them they would harass you further. It was not impolite to ignore anyone you didn't want to do business with. Here in Indonesia people would say hi, and then point to their wares. You could smile and say hi, wave, and walk on. It was nicer than Africa, but it took me awhile to get used to. In the pastry and sweet foods section of the market I met a man who said his name was 'Kristyan', at least that is what it sounded like. I think it may have been 'Christian.' We talked about how his product was made. It was a dark brown, rice pudding mixed with thin slices of roasted almond. A spoonful was then placed in a palm heart leaf, and wrapped up. The ends of the palm leaf were used to tie it together on both ends. It was fun to work through the language barrier. He would often call on someone near by for the English word for something. In our 5 minutes of conversation we maybe used 5 English words. Only 2 or 3 of which came from him. I haven't picked up much of the language yet. I keep forgetting the words. Before we left I gave him my plastic toy.
After the market we went back to the University where we are staying and waited to go to the mall. We got a little bit of local currency, 300 thousand Rupiah, which is about 23 dollars. The hour drive to the mall was filled with watching the crazy Indonesian driving scooters shooting in and out of traffic and horns blowing. First thing we did when we got to the mall was to get lunch. The food court was on the fifth level of the mall. I ordered fried noodles. They came with a deep fried egg on top and Krupuk, which is puffed cassava chips. After lunch a couple of us guys helped carry cases of water to our vans, and then we walked to the ocean while everyone shopped. We could see trumpet fish, angle fish, and sheep's head, there were colorful crabs and some weird critter I couldn't see very well. After looking at the ocean we checked out the mall.
After the mall we went to a small shopping area that sold traditional clothing. When we left there we accidentally left the leader, Dr. Snyder, and didn't realize until a ways down the road. We went back to pick him up and then visited a Chinese temple.
We arrived back on campus right at dark. Supper was really good again. We had worship, a debriefing discussion and then headed to bed. Although I had to walk across campus to get enough wifi to upload this post.
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