We are very excited that our friend Lindsey arrived today, in remarkably good shape for having flown 20 hours plus a few more for layovers. We had a fun day walking around Chinatown and eating roti canai for lunch (yum),…
We have a little bit of a problem at MACEE. When trying to convince students that the US really is a great place to go to college, we have to overcome several obstacles. The first is that America is "so…
If you say the word karipap aloud, you might be able to figure out what it means. That’s right, curry puff. This is a classic example of food with Indian and Portuguese influences that has become a staple part of…
From a CNN.com article about Rumsfeld’s condemnation of the Iranian elections as a sham. "So the fact that they had a mock election and elected a hard-liner ought not come to any surprise to anybody because all the other people…
Our gym is being renovated, as we mentioned a week or so ago. Very annoying. This weekend, though, took the cake. They had a gigantic "opening party" that involved a very annoying man on a loudspeaker announcing when the next…
Indonesian and Malaysian are relatively easy, as far as languages go, because the rules are very regular. You can take a root word like an adjective or a verb, slap on some affixes, and turn it into all different sorts…
I (TP) was only scratching the surface of my difficulties with bibliographies. Malay, Indian, and Chinese naming conventions really aren’t that hard to master once you learn the rules. And fortunately, just by looking at the name it is almost…
Why do governments have to be so screwy? TP gets to spend all his time reading about the weird policies of the goverment here, while I (jm) get to talk with actual, hard-working government employees who tend to have some…
Just about every time I (TP) meet someone like a security guard, a librarian, a receptionist, or someone like that, I get asked this question. Now, I’m not sure what most people’s general experience with Westerners is, but JM and…
Here’s another example of Indonesia making a mockery out of us. When we were in Indonesia, one of our favorite dishes was sayur asem, sour Javanese soup. We included a recipe for it awhile back. Sayur asem, though, has some…
