Orang amerika!

We worked in two more subdistricts of Bandung District on Weds, July 12. Hopefully, we’ll only have 1 more day of manure trader interviews left. We were accompanied by a woman from the local DINAS (livestock services) who had a ball…she bought snacks everywhere we went and ran around talking to people. When we finished for the day, we went back to her house and she tried to feed us. We had had a huge lunch: rice, fried tofu, chicken livers cooked in a gorgeous sauce and fried salted fish—small enough not to worry about the bones, except the vertebrae. With raw string beans and raw teeny, green, round eggplants. Delicious. (I am having a lot of fun picturing the yucky faces that some of you are making now…) I begged off eating more. While Utari was in the bathroom, the woman from DINAS (Junhariya) grabbed me by the hand and marched me outside to show me her neighbor’s mushroom greenhouses. The first few were locked, so we walked about (she still had me by the hand), looking for an open one. All the while, she was announcing “orang amerika! (person from America!)” to her neighbors. One of them tried to invite me in to eat a doughnut. Fortunately, we were on a mushroom-finding mission, so I didn’t have to eat any more. We finally found a neighbor who was a mushroom-greenhouse employee, and she let us in. Junhariya pointed out all the big, pretty ones to me, then proceeded to pick some of them off their little compressed sawdust substrate-thingies and hand them to me. By the time she was satisfied, I had a large armful of beautiful, huge oyster mushrooms—and absolutely no clue what to do with them. Fortunately, Dedi (our driver) likes mushrooms, so I sent him home with them. Junhariya was a hoot. I think we’re spending a day with her again at the end of the week. It should be fun.