Nyepi day with relatives in Seminyak Bali

Nyepi day, the Day Of Silence meant me doing some typing while my Indonesian relatives Ika, her sister Ningrum and brother Awang came over and helped fix a bbq.

Although on Nyepi people are supposed to refrain from eating, talking and cooking many Balinese who I know do all of these and I was not anticipating any problems from having a bbq in my garden. We have a perimeter wall of 10ft and during the day no one would be able to tell apart from the plume of smoke and the delicious smell of slowly roasting meat.

Nyepi begins before sunrise so no one was out at all. Breakfast for me consisted of a lovely apple pie that Ika bought and a giant cup of Java, sorry Bali coffee.

The Indos made a smelly array of tofu, noodles, rice and other stuff and dived into with passion.

Its funny living here in Indonesia I always hear stories of how little people earn, how hard it is to find a job and ho much people have to struggle to get by. Side by side with that I always see examples of what they are spending this hard-earned money on. My relatives all have cell phones that play funny tunes and showed up with a DVD player. I do not have either. Bling, bling ( a term I recently learned, meaning flashy shit ) has appeal no matter what economy you are dealing with. People over here who earn 500,000rp per month walk around with cell phones that cost 1.5m rp.

For the bbq I got some local beef from Bintang supermarket the day before as well as chicken legs on request from Ika. My system was to place the steak furthest out around the edge of the coals and the chicken legs closer in as chicken cooks faster. One thing about chicken is you have to make sure its fully cooked and having a bone in there makes the process slower so I paid attention to the timing.

Steak is easy. Two things to remember: Do not burn it. Only turn it over ONCE. I take 20 minutes to get a nice slow seal on one side, then when its looks ready, turn it over and slow cook it to perfection. All the juices stay inside the meat and it is never dry or burned. My mate Palu taught me that one. There is another thing about food that I have known for a long time and that Palu hammered home: Food always taste better by adding 1 or more of the following: Salt, pepper, butter, sugar. I sprinkle salt over my meat and add a good amount of pepper to the steak. I have accidentally discovered a great way to cook steak using a papaya. You take a super ripe papaya and mash the flesh into a pulp, soaking the steak in it. Papaya has a chemical that is a natural meat tenderizer and after several hours I add some salt, lots of black pepper, white vinegar, soy sauce. I plonk the chunks on the grill with globs of the papaya mash all over it. When the meat is ready it has a thin layer on the outside that is super soft and tasty.

On Nyepi none of my papayas where ready so we had to go with the Hurry-Up-Offence, salt and pepper only.

Ika, Ningrum and Awang cooked rice and vegetables and we all had a good family time stuffing ourselves. One nice thing about having muslim relatives is that no one gets into by beer supply, just have to make sure there are plenty of foo-foo drinks around for them.

We watched some pirated DVDs including Million Dollar Baby. The copy was decent. You can pick up DVDs till your hearts content in Kuta for 10,000rp each. If you get caught at customs I do not know anything about it.

Funny thing about the DVDs over here is they come mostly from Malaysia, the original pirate copy anyway. That means the subtitles are often in Malay as Ika calls it. Indonesians have to guess at the meaning and say in order to follow a movie with quick dialogue its hard for them. I watched part of a DVD with English subtitles that really had nothing to do with the actual words spoken.

In order not to offend any of the Balinese in the neighborhood we kept the noise down and lit a few candles at ground level. The whole thing worked out okay and I am happy to take a step out of my way to support a local tradition.

Maybe next year I might check into a resort to see how that is for visitors to Bali. I think the Conrad would work well with that big lagoon pool.