Cowbright: Ace Hardware or Bust!

I spent a few hours today with Marcia and Julie, a friend of hers who is here along with her husband and 3 young sons for language training in preparation for their work in Banda Ache. Marcia, myself, Julie and her 6 month old headed off to Estana Plaza for lunch and a bit of shopping. The big draw at this particular shopping center is Ace Hardware which seems to be the favorite place for expats to shop. That’s because they have a little bit of everything with products you won’t find anywhere else. For instance, I bought a small bottle of "real" Downy for $12 (still having problems with stinky laundry - more on that in next post).

Although things are generally cheap here, if it's a product that is recognizable to me (imported from the US), I can expect to pay several times what I would pay at home. The other day I was excited to find Ken’s mayonnaise but didn’t realize until I was in the process of checking out that it was over $8! It’s too much trouble to try to return something here, especially trying to explain why you need to return when you can’t speak bahasa Indonesian and the clerk can’t speak English. It's much easier to just enjoy the mayo!

Below are a few random photos from yesterday and today.

fresh apple pie!

biscuits - yum yum!

Believe it or not, the new oven works great! The first time we used it, however, it put off a terrible odor that stunk up the apartment and burned our eyes really bad. Ronnie had the idea of using it outside on the "dirty kitchen" (burners right outside the door, typically used for outdoor frying). Despite having no idea what temperature we were baking at, they turned out really good!!

Tonight we tried our first apple pie in the new oven. The unusual color is due to the palm sugar (dark brown) - a common type of sugar used here that is not as sweet as regular table sugar. It looks different, but it tasted deeelicious! I think we've already gotten our $15 worth out of our new oven.

Bandung school children performing with angklungs

At the mall we found a group of young school children performing on angklungs. This is what they looked like, front and back. They were really cute and played their instruments well. (Yes, all the school children in Indonesia wear uniforms.)