This morning we saw a strange sight while looking for a cab.  Now we’ve seen some people getting around in strange ways here, from four people clinging to small motorcycles to kids on bikes holding onto the back of a horse drawn cart to get a free ride.  This took the cake, though.  There was a guy driving his motorcycle with a guy sitting backwards behind him.  He was sitting backwards in order to hold onto a shopping cart, in which was a comfortably seated guy with his gardening equipment.  So the guy was getting a ride to work from his shopping cart.  It was pretty funny.  They didn’t go very far which was good.  I wouldn’t have wanted to see them try that on the crazy big road near our apartment.

We went shopping this weekend and found some of the elusive banana leaves! Finally.  So we had fun with them last night.  It’s cool, you stick them in boiling water for about 5 seconds and they get really soft.  You can roll things up in them after cutting them to size, and it’s just like making eggrolls (except they are not as prone to tearing).  We tried our hand at an Indonesian dessert, sweet sticky rice and banana rolls which turned out not so bad.  The hardest part was getting rice.  We had some, but when we went to soak it a bunch of bugs floated out. That was gross, so we threw it all out and TP went downstairs to get some new stuff. They only had 5 kg giant bags, so he brought one back up and, you guessed it, that one had bugs too.  On the third try we got a good bag. Yuck.

We also ran out of gas again this weekend.  TP asked the guard downstairs what to do and received a phone number.  He called, told them where we live, and ten minutes later a guy showed up with a heavy cannister of gas and took away our empty one.  Still a strange concept that people run around and do this all day long for $6 a cannister.  Oh, and he was barefoot like the guy last time.

We posted a recipe for Sop Buntut, or Oxtail soup, last week, and those of you who read the comments may have noticed a response from our Malaysian commentator.  He said that it sounded very unappetizing.  Figuring that this might be because of a difference in definition between Malay and Indonesian, we looked up buntut in our dictionary and found that it means tail or rear.  So when we were shopping this weekend, TP tried on a pair of pants, then asked me (in Indonesian) how his buntut looked.  The sales women lost it, they giggled for a really long time.  It was quite amusing, and confirmed our theory that the word can be used like "butt".  Unappetizing indeed!