Where have all the eggs gone ?

Shopping in a town like Maumere is qute easy.

There are two traditional markets for fruit, vegetables, fish and meat  - for meat, read chicken, although there is occasionally daging babi (pig meat) available if you go very early in the morning. (By the way, if you want a chicken you usually choose it on the hoof as it were. Most people then tie their purchase to their motorbike upside down by the feet and despatch it to the next world when they get home. However, the chicken seller will also do this messy business for you at the market if you want, thank goodness.)

And then there are the kios. As in most Asian countries, these are literally everywhere and are usually small bamboo structures in front of people's homes selling such staples as pulsa (phone credit), cigarettes, paraffin (for cooking stoves), washing powder, hair oil, sweets, superglue, motorbike cleaning products, instant noodles, sugar and of course, eggs. Every shop sells eggs, you see stacks of egg trays everywhere (your purchases are put into a plastic bag for you to carry home and one egg costs RP1.000). My egg consumption has soared while I've been here, they come with rice dishes, noodle dishes (i.e. almost everything), and are usually either fried or hardboiled.

Until this week, that is. On Saturday I went to the small kios near my house to buy some eggs for Sunday breakfast. No eggs.... oh well, I thought, that's strange. The next day I tried two other kios- no eggs. Very odd... On Monday, no eggs anywhere... Yesterday I went to the market where there are (usually) dozens of places to buy eggs. Guess what ? (Well, there were quails' eggs but they're not the same.) Eventually I asked why there were suddenly no eggs anywhere - the answer was the title of my last post - musim hujan, rainy season. Apparently all the eggs sold on Flores are imported (another surprise) and the egg boat hasn't been able to come because of the stormy weather....

Every day you learn something new I guess.

Wind and eggs

Two random thoughts :

Everybody will tell you that there are only two seasons in Indonesia : a dry one and a wet one. However, they forget about the one in between - the windy one. For the last two weeks, it has been blowing a gale most of the time. There are a number of consequences to this - dust and roof noise. The first is self explanatory, the second relates to the fact that the tin roof on our house does not seem to be held down very securely and rattles and vibrates noisily right above my head ALL NIGHT LONG.
Yesterday, I was invited to a first communion party in a village called Waigete, about 20kms from Maumere to the east. While driving there, I was following a guy on a motorbike (semi-automatic type so he didn't need to use his left hand to drive). In his left hand he held a small plastic bag containing some eggs (this is how you buy eggs here, loose in a plastic bag). After a while he got tired of holding the eggs carefully in his left hand so he leant down and very carefully worked the handles of the plastic bag over the passenger footrest on the left hand side. All this while driving at about 45 km/hr, weaving in and out of other traffic, I'm just sorry I didn't have my camera !