How to Lose, and Recover, All Your Possessions While in a Country Where Few Speak English

As I noted earlier, I recently left Jakarta, leap-frogged through the States (on a whirlwind tour of old friends, microbrews, pretentious coffees, and artisanal cheeses that left little time for blogging–my apologies), and landed squarely in the city of Saigon. M and I got here early Saturday morning, and our first 36 hours have lived up to the expectations set by those who had been here before. Granted, Jakarta didn’t set a very high bar, but I feel like our quality of life here will be a vast improvement over that of our first Asian home. To craft a completely unjustified hypothesis based on one example, and possibly set myself up for unmet expectations, let me state the following:

My journey to Jakarta was easy, seamless, and felt far shorter than the 30 hours it actually took.

Living in Jakarta was a stressful, sometimes depressing, and physically and emotionally taxing experience.

My trip out to Saigon was a stressful, sometimes depressing, and physically and emotionally taxing experience.

Therefore: Living in Saigon will be AWESOME!!!

Q.E.D.

I will spare you the banalities and small hiccups that made my transit to ‘Nam more horrendous than one would imagine it would normally be, but will zero in on one incident, perhaps the most notable debacle of the adventure. Here goes.

Because of various planning snafus, financial limitations, and other circumstances beyond my control, during my layover in Singapore, I needed to collect my bag, go through customs and immigration, and then re-check my bag on a separate reservation on a different airline to fly to Saigon. I anticipated this process to be annoying, given the myriad steps and the fact that it would be happening in the middle of the night after 25-odd hours of travel, but I’m a pro at handling annoying, Ain’t no thang. This, however, was a thang. A very shitty thang.

Approaching baggage claim, I spotted my suitcase from afar. “Sweet!” I thought. “Easy peasy!” I raced over and yanked it off the conveyer belt, then immediately noticed that not only did the suitcase look slightly different, but it also had a tag on it saying, let’s just say, “John Generic Person,” which, I observed, is not my name. I hefted it back up onto the belt and waited for my rightful suitcase to come out. And waited. And waited.

It never came.

I went to the Lost & Found, where a gentleman with very limited English had me fill out a missing luggage form. I tried to explain to him that I was fairly certain that Mr. John Generic Person l had mistakenly taken my bag, and asked if–since not that much time had passed since our flight landed (though it was rapidly slipping through our fingertips, I silently noted), and John GP might still be in the airport–we could perhaps page him and avert the impending disaster. The man rolled his eyes and shook his head and, muttering words I did not understand, pushed the form back to me. I tried not to burst into tears right then and there (I hadn’t slept in several days, mind you), and finished filling out the form as best I could. Of course, I had neither an address nor a phone number to write down, and was imminently leaving Singapore for a city 700 miles away, so I did not harbor much hope for the return of my suitcase. My confidence was deflated slightly more when he handed my receipt, a piece of paper with no words except my (misspelled) name and an 8-digit code on a line that asked for a 10-digit code. As he tried to shoo me out of the office, I asked for his name, so that I would have something concrete to ask for when I inevitably called from Saigon asking if my bag turned up, and had nothing to tell them except for a useless number and useless description of my suitcase. He took the paper back, shaking his head again, and scrawled two illegible words in the corner of the page.

I walked calmly out of the Lost & Found, passed through customs, found a secluded corner, and collapsed on the floor in tears.

That suitcase contained: all of my most beloved clothing; all weather-appropriate clothing for my new home; an edition of the only book that I have ever co-written and edited; Clownie, my stuffed clown that I have had since before I had hair; various prescription medications; a book that my mom made me for Christmas a few years ago that I’ve kept by my bedside everywhere I’ve lived ever since.

I was a disaster.

After crying in the corner for a while, I wandered around aimlessly. Here I will mention that my flight had arrived at just past midnight, and my next flight didn’t leave until 7:20 A.M. The airport was deserted, everything was closed, and most lights were off, although the AC was going full blast. It was boring, dark, empty, and freezing. Eventually, I steered my mind toward an aim: finding a power outlet. I walked with my 50-lb backpack and 40-lb handbag (this situation was shitty enough that I’m allowing myself a little hyperbole) for about 40 minutes before I found the one outlet in the Changi airport, in the corner of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, where a teenage girl was posted up with several stacks of paper and a pile of books, charging her iPhone. I turned around and wandered for perhaps another 40 minutes. Upon return, the girl was still there, still charging her iPhone, and I decided I would test my laptop’s battery and just turn it on unplugged. I sat down and fired off a tragic and perhaps slightly melodramatic e-mail to my mom, a less melodramatic e-mail to M, and a rage-filled e-mail to United, then, glancing with disdain at the iPhone-charging teenager, hauled up my stuff and commenced my aimless wandering. Five hours to go.

I meandered past closed airport restaurants and deserted ticketing counters, pausing to sob on a few benches and to exchange some U.S. dollars for Vietnamese dong (ha!). As it turns out, aimless wandering at 3 in the morning with two heavy bags gets old quick, and so I found myself back at the Coffee Bean about half an hour later. I checked my e-mail again, and saw a new message from my dad, titled “your bag.” I assumed my mom had told him about the e-mail she’d received from me, and that he was offering his condolences, and looked at a few other emails before opening his. When I finally did, my heart briefly stopped. “Kate,” it read. “I know you couldn’t find your bag–another person picked it up by mistake and contacted me about an hour ago from his Singapore hotel. I gave him your information, and he arranged for United to take your bag back to the airport…it should be there about an hour from now.” At this point, I cried again. Then I checked the time stamp on my dad’s e-mail, which showed that I had a mere 20 minutes until my bag would allegedly arrive. I used this time to write a non-tragic but equally melodramatic e-mail to my parents, and to cry some more. Then I strapped up and headed to the Lost & Found.

The rest of the tale is fairly uneventful, so I’ll skip the details and give you a brief rundown. I sweet-talked my way backwards through customs, showed up at the Lost & Found, collected my bag, went back through customs, forwards this time, and then headed to my flight.

What I will elaborate on a bit is this: Check the goddamn tags on the bag you pick up from baggage claim, John Generic Person. And everyone else. JGP, I know that you flew from New York to Singapore, which can mean few things other than that you work at a place like JP Morgan or something else that makes you lots of money and makes you feel super important. But you’re not too important to look at goddamn luggage tags. I know that you’re the type of guy who doesn’t look at his bag at all until he’s about to unpack in your (presumably very swanky) hotel in downtown Singapore, and that is likely because you had paid caddies handling your bag all the way from baggage claim to hotel bedside. But it’s not your caddies responsibility to check the goddamn luggage tags. I know that you’re a big jerk and you made me cry an unhealthy amount in a short period of time, causing the 6 people at the Changi airport between 1 and 4 a.m. that night to have less than favorable impressions of me. So don’t assume that every generic blue roll-on suitcase is yours. Because it’s not. There are probably quite a few of them in the world, and now we have confirmation that there are at least two.

I hope you enjoy your stay in Singapore, with your own possessions now safely restored to you. Because you would have looked pretty dumb wearing my new blue tube dress, and Clownie does not take well to strangers.

How to Handle Getting Caught in a Monsoon, Malaysia Edition

I’m in Kuala Lumpur! I type this from the 22^nd floor of a lovely, air-conditioned hotel, overlooking a city where cars stay in their lanes and motorcycles stay off the sidewalks (yes, there are sidewalks!), where trees and gardens evince conscious attention to the importance of aesthetic and enhancing general human experience, where the air is breathable and the sky clear enough to see mountains in the distance. It’s no Singapore, to be sure, but it’s certainly no Jakarta either. As an editor friend said the other day, on the spectrum of cities, with Jakarta at one end and Singapore at the other, KL is about two-thirds of the way toward the Singapore end. Having above listed many of the elements that differentiate KL from Jakarta, I’ll use the rest of this post to recount a story that illustrates the two cities’ similarities.

Having heard from multiple sources that Malaysian street food is even more epically awesome than its Indonesian equivalent, we set out yesterday afternoon to try it for ourselves. We wandered down Bukit Bintang for a bit, bypassing tourist-y looking restaurants and Western chains, turning our noses up at places with only one or two customers or too-nice furniture—we wanted to find the real thing, not some bule-friendly approximation. Just as the mist in the air turned into rain, we came across a spot filled with native-looking customers, a little street food restaurant with tables under a row of big blue tents. Bingo.

We sat down and, after some quasi-successful menu-deciphering, ordered our food (bee hoon soup for me, lamb martabak and a coconut juice for M). The rain was picking up, and we congratulated ourselves on finding a perfect restaurant, sheltered from the precipitation, at exactly the right moment. By the time M’s coconut juice arrived (awesomely simple—just a coconut with the top cut off and a straw stuck inside), the rain was coming down so hard that it was splashing up from underneath the tarp-wall next to us, and water was spraying in from the open sides, enough that we were both getting pretty heavily misted. When my soup came, peals of thunder were threatening to tear the sky open, and we could see puddles of water rapidly forming on the tent overhead. But the other customers were still eating, smiling, talking, barely remarking upon the sudden deluge, and so we shrugged it off, laughing a little. Laughter of mutually unacknowledged nervousness, in retrospect.

My soup looked and smelled incredible, and it seemed clear that I would need to eat it rather quickly so that it didn’t accumulate too much rainwater—which by now was leaking in big fat droplets through holes in the tarp as well as blowing in more violently from the open sides. In the twenty-six seconds it took me to cut up some of the noodles with my spoon and pour a little chili sauce in the bowl, just as I was about to take my first bite, the storm went from very bad to Biblical. All of the waiters—about eight men—dropped what they were doing and ran to their (seemingly very familiar) stations throughout the tent, gripping the metal supports and pushing them up. They were all yelling to each other, shouting directions and shifting positions. But still they were smiling, and I could see that at least one other customer was still eating his food, so I figured this was all still okay. I told myself that my definitively drenched shirt was just damp, disregarded the fat raindrops splashing into my soup, and resolved not to be the stereotypical panicked white tourist. Just a little rain, not a big deal.

A waiter moved M’s chair inward, presumably so that he would get less of the spray from outside, which was a fallacious strategy given the fact that every seat in the restaurant was getting indiscriminately soaked.  And just then, with the waiters’ shouts crescendoing and blending into the relentless roar of the storm, the tent came crashing down, its thickest metal crossbar landing squarely on M’s right side, bashing his ear and scraping his arm.

Lunchtime battle wound

About half the waiters ran toward the collapsed-and-still-collapsing section of tent, struggling to lift it, while the other half ran to the new emergency they’d suddenly noticed: two white Westerners in a now-potentially-injurious situation.

“Go inside! Go inside” a chorus of voices yelled at us, pointing toward a tiny entrance with cement steps leading to the kitchen. Feeling that pride was no longer the highest priority, we obeyed.

We stood in a narrow hallway watching the rain pummel the world outside and the waiters battle the flailing tent. After several minutes of dumbfounded paralysis, we assessed our situation. It was clear that the rain would not be letting up anytime soon, and that even if it did, the chairs and tables would still be soaked, the ground a small lake; it was also clear that—after watching torrents of water slide down the dirty tarp and into both my soup and M’s coconut—our lunch would not be edible if and when the rain let up; clear, too, was the fact that there was no escape route out the back of the little corridor. We needed to make a run for it. A brief debate about whether or not we owed any money ensued (verdict: no, the deciding factor being M’s bleeding arm), and we steeled ourselves for the escape.

We charged out of the corridor and back into the tent just as the waiters, abandoning the battle, began to disassemble the collapsed shelter, almost trapping us underneath the descending tarp.

“Go inside! Go inside!” they shouted, lowering the metal bars toward our heads even as we crouched to run through, emerging onto the sodden street seconds before they brought the whole structure to the ground.

And go inside we did, heading just across the street to a restaurant whose shelter consisted of material more robust than vinyl. Sitting down, we realized that this new place was actually the same restaurant as the one we’d just left—same name, same menus, same waitstaff uniforms—just in a building instead of on the sidewalk. And so, in a perversely satisfying instance of symmetry, we ordered exactly what we had twenty minutes before, and ate our food from the comfort of a rain-free roof-covered terrace as we watched Lunch Attempt #1 dissolve across the street.

Related articles

• How to Handle Getting Caught in a Monsoon (journalsandjackfruit.wordpress.com)

How (Not) to Eat a Jackfruit

After brunch a few weeks ago, M and I swung by Indonesia’s Whole Foods equivalent, the bougie, bule-filled Ranch Market. We were there primarily to pick up supplies for a barbecue we were hosting later that day, but since one of my missions while in Jakarta is to demystify every alien orb and oblong in the produce department, I wanted to bring home at least a couple exotic fruits. First, I grabbed what can best be described as a mushier, more heavily textured, over-sized avocado labeled “sirsak,” whose English translation, hastily pulled up on our smart phones, was the equally unhelpful “soursop.” Later experimentation with sirsak yielded tasty if messy results, but that’s a story for a different time.

Sirsak securely in basket, I spotted what Google images had previously informed me was a jackfruit, a search I’d undertaken when trying to settle on a name for this very blog.

“This is a jackfruit!” -Google

Figuring it would be a good photo op (see: the right margin of my home page), in addition to exposing me to a new fruit, I added it to our haul.

Grocery shopping completed, we checked out and hailed a cab. On the cab ride, we first encountered the perilous nature of the jackfruit. Sheathed only by a flimsy plastic shopping bag, the heavy, spike-riddled jackfruit was proving to be an unpleasant thing to hold, either in a lap or with hands. The spikes were hostile–far sharper and harder than I’d thought possible for a piece of vegetation–but traffic and boredom and a general lack of good judgment led me to try to pose for a few jackfruit-to-face pics. Despite some close shaves brought about by sudden stops combined with the jackfruit’s heaviness, its proximity to my head, and the difficulty of really gripping something so damn spiky, I finished the photo shoot with both eyeballs still intact and no blood on the seat.

Hey, why don’t I hold this mace-like object several inches from my face while careening down streets at unpredictable speeds??

“Something we bought smells weird,” M said, surveying the collection of grocery bags in the back of the cab.

“Yeah, true,” I said, and we proceeded to sniff the various bags. Determining that the offensive smell seemed to be emanating from the jackfruit, we shrugged it off.

We arrived home and decided to get to work preparing the jackfruit before any guests arrived. I pulled up this handy website, grabbed a knife, and got to work.

The jackfruit was hard and impossible to grip without impaling my palm, our knives far from sharp, and my upper-body strength useful for little more than chaturanga and 2 kg tricep curls, but I persevered.

Yes, I changed outfits between the cab ride and the kitchen.

Scoopin’ out the flesh

Now, despite the fact that the internet told me that the jackfruit flesh should be a sunny orange, not a mashed-potato beige, and despite the fact that the how-to site declared that the flesh should be coming out in solid “bulb” form, not as fibrous mush, and despite the fact that, upon further reflection, our jackfruit was far more spherical and spike-covered than the jackfruit I’d seen on Google, I kept on keepin’ on.

What the internet says jackfruit flesh looks like

What our jackfruit flesh looked like

“I think there are like a hundred different varieties of jackfruit,” M said by way of explanation.

“Yeah,” I said. “Wonder what kind we got.”

The carving complete, we each sampled a little spoonful of the glop. The flavor was subtle, more savory than sweet; not necessarily good-tasting, but by no means bad. And with the flesh now fully unleashed from its aggressive armor, we could confirm beyond a doubt that the jackfruit was what we’d been smelling on the cab ride.

I put the bowl of flesh in the fridge and promptly forgot about it until, hours later, the barbecue in full swing, I was sitting on our front porch sipping some Bintang and chatting about local food with one of M’s coworkers, a native Sinaporean and longtime Jakarta resident.

“Have you tried durian yet?” he asked me.

“Not yet,” I said. “But I’ve seen the pre-cut packaged stuff in the store.”

He went on to explain to me the wonders of durian, a favorite fruit of his, and to tell me all about the uproar the plant has created in Asia. Because of its offensive and persisting odor, lots of elevators and public spaces have No Durian signs; offices often forbid their workers from bringing durian in for lunch; in fact, the fruit is illegal throughout the entirety of Singapore.

I said that I was curious to try it, and remarked that the jackfruit we’d bought that day had smelled a little bit like the pre-packaged durian flesh I’d seen in the grocery store.

“Jackfruit doesn’t smell like durian,” he said.

Confident in my local fruit expertise,  I argued that yes, jackfruit did smell a little like durian.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a jackfruit,” said another coworker, a Norwegian.

Declaring that it was really spiky and cool looking, I jumped up and ran to the kitchen to scrounge up a piece of jackfruit rind from the trash can.

“This,” I said, returning to the porch and holding my jackfruit rind out for all to see, “is a jackfruit.”

The Singaporean burst out laughing.

“No, love,” he said. “That’s a durian.”

So I guess I still don’t know how to eat a jackfruit. But I smelled, cut, and tasted the world’s most controversial fruit without even knowing it, so that’s gotta count for something, right?

How to Appreciate Jakarta

As I mentioned in my previous post, we went to Singapore last week. And, as I alluded to, Singapore welcomed us with cleanliness, efficiency, impeccably functioning infrastructure, competent service, and an attention to aesthetic minutiae (see: beautiful climbing ivy planted on temporary metal fencing around a construction zone) that makes the unpleasant or mundane enriching and joyful. But, you know, I don’t live in Singapore. Both a wide sea and several income brackets separate me from doing so, and so pining for its pleasantness is a purely masochistic exercise. Thus, I now bend to the task of appreciating—which is different than tolerating—Jakarta.

So, what has Jakarta done for me lately? What, in this city, brings my life joy or laughter or insight or education?

Well, for one thing, there are kittens everywhere. I’m allergic to cats and fully understand the health and animal control repercussions of stray kittens on every street corner, but, come on, how can seeing this when you leave the house in the morning not get your day off to a good start:

I can haz kitty?

Arguably even better, there are lizards everywhere. And these lizards are damn cute. The smallest are about the size of a piece of Orbitz gum, and the biggest iPhone-length. They’re all over our porch and our floors, and sometimes at dinner we’ll look up and see one clinging to the dining room ceiling, and, my personal favorite, there’s a big guy who seems to live in our silverware drawer, with whom I have a panicked, almost-daily communion when I go to get a spoon for my yogurt. I doubt lizards are even allowed in Singapore.

The people here are so happy. I know, that’s a generalization and comes from the perspective of an outsider who’s only lived here for a bit over a month, but it’s been corroborated both by other foreigners who have been here some time, and by my daily wanderings down the noisy streets. Bajaj drivers, 7-11 clerks, sweat-glistening stick-thin men hauling enormous wooden carts of trash up traffic-crammed hills during a 90°F noon—if you catch their eyes, chances are they’ll wave back happily and beam at you, as if to say, “Isn’t this all just grand?!”

I’m never cold here. Not that I was cold in Singapore, but this doesn’t need to be a strictly comparative list. All that matters is that where I currently live, I never have to be cold for longer than it takes me to roll down the window of an overly air-conditioned taxi. For anyone who knows me (and for those of you who don’t, let me just fill you in: I’m always cold), this is a big deal.

There are no tourists here. Singapore, a rich, bustling, and Westerner-friendly hub, teems with tourists. With fannypacks and Teva’s, with picture-snapping tour groups, with map-wielding dads who walk into people just trying to make it down the street and mind their own business, thank you very much. This is not a pleasant cohort with which to coexist. On the other hand, nobody really “tours” Jakarta, per se. I may be foreign and out of my element, but I don’t gawk and point and pose with the wandering chickens and overflowing durian stands and rancid open sewers, and, because nobody else really wants to do that either, I don’t have to tolerate the gawking and pointing and posing of others.

But above all, trumping all of the above and constituting the one area in which Jakarta really gives Singapore or San Francisco or Paris a run for their money, awesomeness-wise, is the cost of street food. Nasi goreng, nasi uduk, mie goreng, bubur ayam, sate, siomay—endless joys await you in these little streetside stands. Full dinners—made on the spot with local ingredients and by natives who probably learned these dishes in their family kitchens, served with prawn chips and maybe an avocado or dragonfruit or sirsak smoothie, on a warm night at a cool table—these meals will set you back, depending on what you order, about $1 USD, maybe 2, possibly 3 if you get crazy and add a drink. Seriously. Seriously. Cup o’ Noodles seems like a yuppie splurge by comparison. Last night, for instance, I got two orders of nasi goreng especial (spicy seasoned fried rice with vegetables, a hot fried egg, and crispy prawn crackers), enough to fill both me and M, for 22,000 rupiah. For those of you not fluent in rupiah-dollar conversions, that’s about $2.34. Dinner for two for under $3. And believe me, I appreciated the shit out of that meal.

Nasi uduk (rice cooked in coconut milk) with two kinds of eggs, potatoes, tofu, fried tempeh, fresh vegetables, and spicy mortar-ground chile sauce.

How to Reignite Homesickness

Despite the drastic ways in which my life in Jakarta differs from anything I had in the States, I haven’t spent too much time pining for things back home. It’s only been one month, sure, but I think that’s sufficient time for spells of longing to set in, or at least little nighttime pangs of lonely poignancy. But, no offense to y’all back in the States, that hasn’t really happened.

That is, it hadn’t really happened until this past Tuesday, when a need for catharsis or blind chance or pure masochism led me to a venue specifically designed to elicit my nostalgia.

M and I spent the last 3 days in Singapore on a (semi-successful) visa run. For those of you guys completely unfamiliar with Southeast Asia, as I was up until very recently, let me just give a brief illustration of how Singapore differs from Jakarta: they are opposites. One is a beautiful, brilliant, hygienic, uptight, high-maintenance, and rich girlfriend with expensive tastes and no patience for disorder or disobedience; the other is a back-alley prostitute with a five-inch stiletto on one foot and a four-inch platform on the other, drunk but gleeful, dirty but smiling, who steals money from your back pocket when she hugs you but turns a winking blind eye when you go out behind her back. You guess which is which.

But it wasn’t Singapore that made me homesick, or not Singapore alone. The cleanliness and efficiency, too, felt foreign—convenient and pleasant and easy, unlike Jakarta, but still alien in its slickness, unlike anywhere I’ve known in the U.S. What made me miss the great country of ‘Merika, and specifically my lost love of San Francisco, was a bar.

Gleeful to be in a country where bartenders mix fairly competent drinks, the beer selection goes beyond Bintang and Heineken, and everything isn’t hit by a massive import tax, we happily researched a place to get good cocktails on our third night in Singapore (we’d had our glorious fill of IPA the night before). When M found a place opened by a native San Franciscan, a former bartender at Azul Lounge, we knew we’d found our spot.

We grabbed a cab and gave the driver the address we’d found online–28 Hong Kong Street, also the name of the bar–only to arrive at nothing but a blank stretch of wall with a padlocked door across from a 7-11 on a seedy-looking street. A little flicker of familiarity flared in my head, telling me that I knew what to do, that I’d been here before, but I shook it out. We were on the other side of the world, after all. But after looking around blankly for a few minutes, double-checking the address, and realizing that our options were limited, we did what we’d both been tempted to do from the outset: cracked open the padlocked door (the lock, upon closer inspection, wasn’t actually keeping the door shut, but was just on one of the door handles).

And sure enough, inside was a small reception area with a well-dressed, smiling hostess, standing sentinel to an unseen back area from which happy carousers could be heard. If I’d walked back outside and found myself on the corner of Jones and O’Farrell, I wouldn’t have been surprised. The hostess led us back, past tables of patrons snacking on bar bites that would fit right in on the Alembic’s menu, sipping elixirs from cordial glasses and mason jars. But the real glory came once we saw the back wall. Shelf upon shelf of old, familiar friends, liquors of the brown variety, small-batch and large, barrel-aged and fiery-sweet: there was Bulleit, pallin’ around with Four Roses, which shadowed over the stout little Hudson’s. And past the friendly brigade lining the shelves was the beer chalkboard, which offered us not only Anchor Steam, but also IPA’s, IPA’s of American microbrew caliber (not to dis the Singaporean brew we’d had the night before, but it just wasn’t the same).

I WILL DRINK YOU ALL! MUAHAHAHA!

Perhaps clued in by our drooling and disproportionate enthusiasm at seeing Hop Devil on the beer list, the bartender­—who turned out to be the bar’s owner—asked us if we were from San Francisco.

“Used to be,” I said, uttering that phrase that still feels a little sticky on the tongue.

And thus ensued a good hour of reminiscing, the three of us basically just naming venues and addresses and foods and drinks in a word-association–like barrage of San Francisco adulation (turns out the owner had just moved to Singapore a year ago after helping to open Gitane—so he still feels the yen for the Bay pretty strongly). “El Farolito!” one of us would say, to be rejoined by “Bloodhound!” or “Deep Mission past Cesar Chavez!” or “Avocadoes!”

Sensing kindred spirits, or perhaps just desperation, the owner disappeared into the back and emerged with an off-menu item: one big bottle of Blind Pig IPA, which M and I received as a desert wanderer might receive a bottle of water. Next came a mystery round of shots, which the owner revealed to be Cazadores after we’d all tossed them back. And the pièce de résistance arrived as we signed the check, when the owner disappeared once more, this time returning with a small bottle of the essential, elusive, palate enhancer: Cholula.

“A bit of home to take with you,” he said.

Nectar of the gods

And now, back in Jakarta, I find myself once again among the foreign. There’s a chicken in the parking lot outside, and most cars contain a sleeping man in the driver’s seat—the personal driver waiting for his boss to finish lunch or coffee or shopping or whatever—and a passing monsoon pummels a laneless jumble of forever honking traffic.

The homesickness has already all but left me—though it’s sure to resurface tonight, when I dig the Cholula out from the nest of clothing concealing it in my backpack—and I’m realizing that it’s not despite of Jakarta’s differences but because of them that I’ve been able to miss home so little. It is familiarity that causes upset, tastes of a bygone era that create this longing. But if that bygone era tastes like Blind Pig, I think it’s worth all the emotional fallout.