Day 3 (7/1/12)

So today our plan was supposed to go biking to the north of Senggigi, but as we all know, plans change! And so they did!

Instead, we slept a bit longer, walked around the beaches of Sengggigi, sat in many beach cafes with a philosophical glint in our eyes, watching the sunset over the ocean and wrote mails to friends and family. We also planned our coming few days, looked for another room with a better flush, better ambience and better internet and gathered a few maps so we could get lost properly the next day on our bikes! It was a laid back day, mostly people-watching and cooking up strange and funny stories about them! It was one of those “busy-doing-nothing” kinda days that you read about in novels set in the 1920s european cafes where Hemingway or Fitzgerald would hang out!

Our Slovenian friends left for Gili Trawangan today and they wrote to us saying that they were safe and having fun.

We’ve noticed that Senggigi seems to be much more touristy than Bali. Especially in Senggigi, people seem to have no jobs other than the ones connected with tourism.

Little things that we learnt in the last couple of days.

- The dish Ayam Taliwang sucks! (The sauce is a bit sweet and spicy which is a blasphemy according to our culinary standards!)

- The dish Nasi Goreng rocks! (It’s basically Fried rice so …. you know)

- The dish Gado Gado is never served the same, even if one orders it in the same restaurant twice! We suspect that the dish could be made of left overs and that maybe the reason why it’s never served the same twice!

- “Y” is supposed to be pronounced as “J”. For example, “Yogyakarta” is pronounced as “Jogjakarta”.

- C is pronounced as “Ch” as in “Chocolate”. For instance,“Candidasa” is pronounced “Chandidasa”.

- It’s good to lie about how long you’ve been in the country. The longer the better.

- Om Sawsti Asthu is the word to welcome someone formally.

- Shuksuma is to say Thank you.

According to the Lonely Planet the words for ‘thank you’ and 'welcome’ are completely different from what we learnt,. Thank god we haven’t used them yet.

Another thing we’ve seen with most Indonesians is their infinite knowledge of Bollywood movie names and actors’ names. Everyone, and I mean “everyone” says, “Oh, from India! Say hello to Sharukh Khan! Kal Ho Na Ho! Kuch Kuch Hota Hai!” and so on. Surprisingly, they do not know a single word of Hindi except the names of some random movies.

Indonesia is similar to India in many respects. People aren’t very punctual and don’t make a fuss about it when you are not punctual either. They too are laid back, ritualistic, religious, have bad roads, and bad drivers riding on such roads, selectively dirty or clean depending on the place and need, bribable policemen, have strong hair, have loads of languages and dialects, and are exceptionally friendly to people who look like foreigners! :)