Well, the girls and I are officially on our own today. Jeff got asked to attend a forum going on at the hotel today and probably a dinner event tonight, so Sofia, Belyn and I are navigating solo today. We are going to go to a different complex (BDI complex) and spend the afternoon at their pool - I saw it on our look-see trip and it's a great facility for kids, and I guess a lot of other expats take their children there in the afternoon, so hopefully we'll get to start meeting some other people today!
Lessons learned the past couple of days:
1. Always look at the receipt they give you before you leave - if they tell you it's 5.5million rupiah, and you pay them that, and then you get back to the hotel, and the receipt says 5.4million rupiah, guess who got the other 100K in their pocket? Not me!
2. Always make sure the taxi meter is on and running - otherwise, you get charged a random amount for the trip, and it'll never be less than it was supposed to be!
3. Cheese strings were a staple in our fridge in Calgary - I could find 16 on sale for $5; here we pay about $12 CDN for 4 cheese strings.... they are officially a luxury and not a staple in our fridge!!! More than anything else we've seen, cheese is very very expensive here.
Onto the food... it's been three days and I'm already craving a kitchen to cook some of our own meals!!! The food isn't bad, it's just different. Sofia will probably have the hardest time, as she's not a huge fan of any spices, and most things here have some sort of spice added. They have a lot of different foods that we don't eat either - things like oxtail soup and oyster and squid dishes.... and everything looks like what it is... Jeff had a work dinner last night, and they went to a seafood restaurant where they had fish, crab, etc... and it's a whole fish that comes out on your plate. He said it was delicious, you just have to pick and pull it apart to eat it... a little bit of an adjustment for us!
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