Driving down the busy city roads, worlds of taste and smell and sound open up all around you: customers bargain for prices at a group of fruit stalls; vendors grill chicken kebabs on street-carts in the street bazaar; smoke and savory smells drift from open-air restaurants, as cooks fry rice and tofu in woks. The street seems so busy and loud, but it all crashes together like so many ocean waves, and the noise settles. It used to seem like so much, but now it seems normal, familiar even. This is where I live. This is normal here. This is home now.
While in Indonesia, I have had many different foods, but our diet is usually made up of four categories: fried food (chicken, fish, rice), rice (which is often also fried), fruit and oftentimes also some fried rice-flour chips or sweet biscuits (which are more like cookies than American biscuits). Yes, I mentioned fried and rice twice (and also rice-flour). That is because almost everything is fried in palm oil here and, as I have been told many times, a meal is not a meal unless there is white rice. Yes, I am being serious; white rice is served with every meal, although it is common for it to be fried or replaced with fried noodles, or sometimes cassava root, which is similar to a potato.
