Hari ini Kamis, 3 Maret, 2011

It is always inspiring to see family members getting together to celebrate special occassions such as birthdays. Today, I was invited by Ibu Melissa to attend her husband's birthday party at XO Suki, with Ibu Novy and her husband. What was particularly inspiring about this party is when everybody sung a series of Bahasa birthday songs led by Romo Elen, SVD, followed by the traditional blowing of the birthday cake. Ibu Melissa then got one of the cup cakes and gave it to her husband and two children. Likewise, the family friends, who were mostly couples caught my attention. They seem to be very close to each other and although I could not understand what they were talking about, I felt how they tried to make me feel at home with the group.

Earlier this afternoon, we had no lunch. As you know, we depend so much from the generosity of the parishioners, so like St. Dominic and the brethren waiting for the food brought in from begging, I patiently waited, going every now and then starting at 12:00nn and still no food. 1pm came and still the table was empty. It has always been a wonderful sight how that empty table would suddenly have food, but I think today was one of the excemptions. I was not expecting a kind of Angelic repass wherein the brethren of old were given food by angels when begging was not enough, but an angel did come in the form of Romo Boedi who asked me to go out and have lunch outside. We ate at a restaurant called Djangkrik or cricket, were you will be welcomed by a large wooden cricket at the lower part of the main door. Although I initially thought that they did serve insects there, they had frogs instead. Ofcourse, that is not what we ordered, I ate a combo rice with a lot of small portions of chinese dish while Romo Boedi at mie also with a lot of toppings. We likewise ate pangsit whichis like fried wanton but this type uses bigger wraps so that it would seem like kropuk. It was quite a hearty meal and I had the chance to glance at the menu and have Bahasa 101 with the kinds of dishes and daging like babi, sapi, ikan, ayam, kepiting, burung merpati, cumi etc. After almost two weeks of stay in Surabaya, most of my vocabulary is related with food and eating.