Smart FM Radio

Every Saturday we’re in Palembang, Raj and I do an hour-long radio show called “Smart Up your Life.” The US Embassy in Jakarta sponsors the program, and they pick a weekly topic and send us a five-minute long sketch we play on the air.

Except for the English Library (which you’ll hear about soon), this has been my favorite Palembang activity. People actually listen, and it gives them a chance to listen to native speakers talking. Instead of focusing on grammar or structure, we talk about cultural differences between Indonesia and the US.

Testing, testing... 1, 2, 3...

We have topics like:
Shopping
Dating
Small Talk
Religion
Travel

Usually, the Indonesian host asks us a few questions, and then Raj and I discuss different aspects of the main topic. Listeners can call in or text their questions during the show. And they’re very specific—How many people do most Americans kiss before they get married? Why don’t Americans like to make small talk with people on the street like Indonesians do? How important is religion in the daily life of an American?

Hendra and Erna

Luckily, Raj and I almost always agree. Sure, our audience is people who already speak at least basic English (and thus tend to be a little more open-minded), but it feels really great to actually explain the differences in our cultures. So often, we have to gloss over things and we don’t really get to talk about it.

Are Indonesians being rude when they walk up to strangers and ask where they live? Definitely not. But neither are Americans who don’t feel comfortable answering a question like that.

I’m also surprised at how many cultural norms I obey in America without even thinking of it. “What do you call your mom’s sister?” In my case, Aunt Pam. “But isn’t it rude to address your elder by his or her first name?” Well, yes, but it’s ok if you put “aunt” or “uncle” in front of it.

Here, Hendra is sporting one of the

sweet Smart FM t-shirts we just got.

“How well do you have to know someone before it’s ok to ask his/her salary?” Hmm… never? Raj and I agreed that we wouldn’t even ask our own parents’ salaries.

“If people are fat, why can’t we just call them fat? Why do Americans call people tall or short or thin… but not fat?” That’s very rude in America, even though it’s really normal in Indonesia.

We’re always careful to explain that we don’t think one way is better than the other, just that as we meet new people and try to learn more about the world, we have a responsibility to be sensitive to other cultures.

The show is the one time a week when Raj and I see each other—the one fluent English conversation we have with anyone in person most weeks. We get Pizza Hut and JCo doughnuts. This week we treated ourselves to a whole box of jPops as a grand finale. Yum.

We almost finished the box.

They have awesome names for their doughnuts,

like Alcapone and D. Berrymore.

Heavenberry is my favorite.

Marhabah celebration

Just five days left in Palembang, and I’m still having new experiences every day. Well, not every day, but close.

This weekend I went to a Marhabah celebration at Rudi’s family’s house. As a reminder, Rudi is another English teacher at my school.

The marhabah is a sort of Muslim baptismal ceremony. The word literally means “welcome” in Arabic, so Rudi says it’s a sort of official “welcome to the family” event. Yenni, another teacher at my school who recently had a baby, told me about it, but I didn’t know I was going to get to see one!

Seven days after a baby is born, its parents are supposed to cut off all of its hair. Then they weigh the hair and give an appropriate amount of money to an orphanage. According to Yenni, one gram of hair = one million rupiah, or a little more than $100. So if your baby has a full head of hair, you might end up paying upwards of $400.

Technically, that’s when you’re supposed to have the ceremony, too—when the baby is a week old. But most people cut the baby’s hair off at a week and wait to have the ceremony until later. Yenni says they “get too busy.”

The ceremony at Rudi’s house was a sort of double marhabah, because they were blessing two two-month old baby girls in the family. The baby’s uncle holds him or her and parades the baby around the house for the family to see. The whole time, men in the family are banging wildly on drums and someone else passes around a canister filled with small bills for people to grab and keep.

Those bills are worth about $.10 each.

Kids were grabbing them by the handful!

The family must also sacrifice a lamb or goat: one if the baby is a girl, and two if the baby is a boy. (Grumble grumble.) Because there were two baby girls at Rudi’s house, his family had sacrificed one goat and one lamb.

Even though the baby’s hair was cut and weighed almost nine weeks before the ceremony, the important men in the family each took a turn and snipped off some as part of the ritual. The day is also significant because it’s when the babies officially receive their names, even though they’ve been called by them since they were born.

Rudi and his niece Rina are one the right.

Rina's older sister is the cutie in the dress.

Snip snip.

Rudi was so proud of his niece; it was a really special day, and I’m glad they shared it with me.

I have my rice and eat it, too.

If Indonesian food and I were in a relationship, I would say that it’s not a particularly passionate one, and it didn’t even start out that way. In fact, one of us (me) is always looking for a way out, and I sample all other kinds of food when I’m in the big city. But for now, I’m stuck with this one, so I’m doing what a good significant other should—I’m focusing on the good qualities.

Indonesians say they have many regional specialties, which is true. But the more I travel, the more I’ve discovered that this inventive dish here is simply called by that name when you eat it there. Know what I mean? There are exceptions, but most Indonesian food boils down to this: rice with a particular meat covered in a particular sauce.

Before I left, Mom bought me a book called Eat Smart in Indonesia, which promised me—on the cover, no less—that I was about to “embark on a tasting adventure.”

“Nothing edible in the whole outdoors escapes the cooking pot,” the book begins. At first, this sounds so of-the-earth, so economical. Then you realize they mean it.

My Lonely Planet was more reserved, warning me “Palembang fare takes some getting used to.”

Still, in the interest of full gastronomical disclosure, I have a confession. But if you want a measure of my emotional growth (or regression) in the past year, then you should know…

I ate a dog.

I know, I know. Just months ago I mourned a bunny being served for dinner. (Although, to be fair, a dog has never been the patron animal of any super fun holiday.) But I ate one. I’m disappointed to admit it doesn’t taste very different from any other meat. It was dark, and I ordered it served in a mixture of chili sauce and its own blood. Perhaps I no longer have a soul.

Woof.

The worst part of the whole experience is psyching yourself up for the first bite and realizing you have a whole order left to go. “If you don’t eat the rest of it, the dog died in vain,” John said. Crap. I finished maybe a third of it.

Anyway, that will not be appearing on the following list. Neither will those nasty pempek fish-balls. Nearly finished with my grant and with 9 months of Indo-culinary research under my belt (heh heh), I’m ready to unveil Katie’s Indonesian Food Hall of Fame:

Cinnamon [kayu manis, or “sweet wood” in Bahasa]: It literally grows in trees here, and you can buy it in three-feet-long pieces. I think if I made a list of things in the world that are purely delightful, cinnamon would be near the top. Along with people who can juggle.

Sweet cinnamon

Pindang Tulang: large pieces of beef still on the bone served “simmering in broth flavored with shallots, garlic, ginger, laos, turmeric, and lemon grass.” It tastes like a spicy vegetable soup, and it’s a Palembang specialty.

Pindang Tulang.

(I stole this picture.)

Nasi Uduk: “rice cooked in coconut milk… traditionally served with fried foods such as chicken, lamb, offal, and tofu. Individual portions of rice are served in banana leaves, topped with crispy, fried shallots”

Also called "fat rice."

(I also stole this one.)

Gado-Gado: “a salad of blanched or steamed vegetables topped with a sauce made with spices and ground peanuts”

Ok, yeah. It looks kind of gross.

Tempe Goreng: (I know we have tempeh in the US, but I’d never had it until I came here.) fermented soybeans “fried with palm sugar and chili peppers”

(And I stole this one.)

Sate Ayam: “chicken grilled on skewers and served with peanut sauce” (Ok, the quoting does seem like overkill, but I want to get it right.)

Mmm... sate.

Es Puter: “hand-turned coconut milk sorbet” mixed with red beans and sticky black rice. It may sound gross, but I assure you, this is divinity in dairy form.

Brrr. And yum.

Manggis: From the moment my lips first touched a manggis (mangosteen in English), I knew I was in love. My whole life, I’ve wanted to eat a passionfruit. And then I did, and it was disappointing. It looks like fish eggs on the inside. But then I tastes manggis, and I realized that’s what I’d been looking for all along.

Raj likes them, too.

Rambutan: How can you not love a fruit named for how hairy it is? Even Obama wrote in Dreams of my Father how much he loved it his first night in Jakarta: “The three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop.” I hear ya, Barry.

They're like little creatures!

Rediscovering Bali

A few weekends ago, I made my second trip to Bali. Somehow, I managed to spend four days there without ever setting foot on a beach. That wasn’t really my goal, but it ended up being just fine. If the purpose of a beach is to relax, then my trip certainly did that anyway.

We were aiming for more of a cultural tour of Bali—temples, markets, and just plain good food. We spent the first two nights in Ubud in a hotel that reminded me of something like a Hindu Secret Garden, with a temple and garden behind a high wall.

One of the coolest parts of the trip was meeting up with my penpal Karen.

Apparently, towards the beginning of my grant, what had been my most recent blog post was picked up by Google as a news story about Indonesia, and it was emailed to anyone who signed up for regular news alerts from the archipelago. It was awesome, even if I really had no idea it was happening then. I received a lot of borderline scary emails from conservative Muslims we’ll say encouraging me to convert. But I also got emails from a bunch of really cool Americans who used to visit or live in Indonesia. And that’s how I e-met Karen.

An American psychiatrist living in California but raised in Ohio (whoop!), Karen was going to be in Bali visiting her boyfriend, so I tried to schedule my trip to coincide with hers. It was so fun to finally meet her. I’m hoping we can meet again when she visits her family for holidays in Ohio.

I also visited Bali with the goal of getting a bunch of souvenirs at the markets here. I used to love bargaining for my purchases, and I still get a little rush from it. But here in Indonesia, it really gets exhausting to bargain for everything you want to buy, from food to clothes to gifts to transportation.

For example, I wanted to buy a silk batik scarf. Aaron and Vidhi had both bought one earlier for between $4-$5. It helps to head into battle knowing what a reasonable price is, because sometimes you really have no idea. Here’s how the exchange (a typical one) went: (except I changed Indonesian to English and rupiah to dollars to help you make sense of it all [PUN!])

I walk by one of a billion booths of scarves set up and touch one. Almost immediately, a large Balinese woman is touching me and telling me I absolutely must have it, as though I could not have possible chosen a more perfect scarf in the world.

Saleswoman: “You are so beautiful! So beautiful! Yes, you like this. For you, I give a special price. Only $22.

[$22?! That’s almost five times what it’s worth. Now we start speaking in Indonesian.]

Me: My friend paid $4 for this scarf earlier today.

Saleswoman: Ooh, you speak Indonesian? Ok, for you, smart, pretty girl, I give you an even more special price. Just $12.

Me: No, my friend just paid $4 for this scarf.

Saleswoman: $8 is my final offer! I can sell it to you for no less!

Me: That’s ok, I understand. Thanks anyway!

She now blocks my way with a gigantic floor-length mirror and throws the scarf around my neck to show me “how beautiful it will make me.”

Me: Oh, you’re right! This IS a beautiful scarf! I wish you would sell it for $4.

Saleswoman: Ok ok ok. From you, I will just ask $6.

Me: I am not paying more than $4.

Saleswoman: I must feed my children! If I sell you the scarf for $4, I will make no profit! I have to eat! Please take pity on me!

Me: Ok, I don’t want to hurt your business. I will shop somewhere else.

I walk away.

Saleswoman: Ok, ok. $4.

Me: Thank you! I’ll take it.

Saleswoman: $4.50

Me: Uh, what? No.

Saleswoman: Ok, ok. $4. And I will not be able to eat tonight.

Me: I’m sorry about that.

Saleswoman: You want two for $4 each?

Me: Sure.

And immediately, there are no hard feelings. She wraps the scarves up carefully, smiling at me, and she throws her arm around my shoulder and tells her friend about the great sale she just made. Is it possible I still got swindled? Almost definitely.

I made a stop back at Wayan’s house, too. She’s the fortune-telling medicine woman from my first trip. I didn’t get my fortune read, but I got some of her “magical oil,” and we took a picture for Mom.

The next day we rented a car and driver and toured some Balinese temples.

We started with the Pura Besakih, the largest and most important temple in Bali. Lonely Planet got another one right: “Perched nearly 1000m up the ide of Gunung Agung is Bali’s most important temple… in fact, it is an extensive complex… Unfortunately, many people find it a deeply disappointing experience due to the avarice of numerous local characters.”

The temples themselves were beautiful, but it was nearly impossible to enjoy them with all the local “guides” constantly demanding that you pay them.

More Lonely Planet wisdom:

“Besakih’s hassles and irritations go back years and mean that many visitors now skip this important sight.

Near the main parking area is a building labeled Tourist Information Office. Guides here may emphatically tell you that you need their services. You don’t. You may always walk among the temples. No ‘guide’ can get you into a closed temple.

Other ‘guides’ may foist their services on you throughout your visit. There have been reports of people agreeing to a guide’s services only to be hit with a huge fee at the end.

Once inside the complex, you may receive offers to ‘come pray with me.’ Visitors who seize on this unsanctioned chance to get into a forbidden temple can face demands of $5 or more.”

Here’s what Aaron said afterwards in his blog:

"Despite this Pura Besakih (aka the ‘mother temple’) was pretty interesting, once we finally got in past the ‘mandatory guides’ (they weren’t but we ended up paying a guy a little, mostly just to be left alone). At several of the temples, most of us were struck by how insincere some of the temples seemed. While it was demanded that tourists wear sarongs and sashes, there were other people throwing their cigarettes around and hawkers of all kinds in the temples. I have absolutely no qualms with wearing appropriate clothing, but when it seems like that is required mostly so that tourists have to rent a sarong, that isn’t right. This is supposed to be a holy location, but it turns into a gimmick. I don’t know how else to describe it other than to say that there was not an authentic feel, it seemed the temples were there primarily for tourists to see; though to be fair we did go to the biggest temples that tourists commonly visit."

Author Chuck Thompson wrote, “It feels awkward to be a visitor in a place reserved for the intimate acts of strangers—like accidentally stepping into your friend’s parents’ bedroom when you were a kid.”

That’s exactly how I feel when I visit mosques or temples: I know I’m allowed to be there, but I just can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m going to get caught somewhere I shouldn’t be.

Per usual, there were signs warning against entering any of the temples if you were menstruating. I, uh, wasn’t, but I wondered if I really would have stayed out if I had been. I guess it’s part of respecting another culture, but it’s a difficult rule to observe when it go so much against what I’ve been taught and believe. I wasn’t entering any of the temples to pray, and it’s hard to imagine I would have somehow comprised the sanctity of the temples by going inside anyway.

We also visited a tea and coffee plantation, where we got to sample a series of different flavors: ginger tea and coffee, lemongrass tea, Balinese coffee, and hot chocolate. It was really neat, and it didn’t cost anything at all. My favorite was the lemongrass tea, although I spotted a lot of sugar at the bottom of the cup, so that may have been why.

Gunung Kawi was the last temple we visited,and by far our favorite. Huge shrines have been cut out of the rock, and they stand more than 8m high. The area surrounding the temple was amazing, too, with rice paddies and palm trees in alternating shades of bright green.

The last night we met up with my favorite ELF Maura in Legian, who had just arrived in Bali for a conference. She was nice enough to let us crash in her hotel room, and we continued our tour of most-delicious-foods-and-drinks of Indonesia.

I love Bali. Some people think it’s too touristy, and many Indonesians almost resent that it’s often the only thing foreigners know about the country. But I think it’s just another part of Indonesia, as “real” as any other part. And it has bagels. Yum.

CRASH! (in Palem)BANG!

Only three more weeks to go? Is that even possible? I have no idea how to describe the way I’m feeling, but I’m sure I’ll be trying. I’ve resolved to blog a lot over the next 21 days, because I have some more things I want to tell you about, and I don’t want to turn into one of those people who writes a blog after I get home just to write a blog.

It’s a pretty bittersweet feeling to be so close to returning home. On one hand, I feel like this massive adventure—which I’ve anticipated and feared and loved—is days away from just… ending. On the other hand, some of the frustrations I’ve had over the last 8 ½ months seem to have been magnified lately.

My friend Vidhi said it well in her blog:

maybe the smell of fresh cut grass and summer lemonade is clouding my senses. maybe the thought of running into my parents arms at the airport is making these last few weeks particularly hard.

there are no schedules here. my classes are constantly cancelled. teachers get paid for extra-curricular activities they never lead. men get to smoke and judge women who do. cheating in school and on spouses is expected. money that could be going into education is used to buy snacks for meetings. my school has power outages every day, but the glitzy mall Sun Plaza is always air conditioned and glamorous.

im tired of all the stares i receive. i don't really understand why people here stare at me anyways. most indonesians think i am indonesian. im brown. i have black hair. and i dress appropriately for the culture. so why are you STILL glaring at me? if i was white, or pink, or green i would understand. im also tired of not fitting in, even when i look like i fit in...

Ok, I don’t have any glitzy malls or brown skin, but I can relate to the rest of that. And she goes on to explain how some other Americans she met at the airport were rude. The other two Americans in Palembang are really, really nice, but other than that, most expats here are notoriously unfriendly.

I think the biggest reason for my recent frustration was that Rajiv got into a motorcycle wreck.

I still say that if I could start this 9 months over, the first thing I would change would be to get an international driver’s license and rent a motorbike. My biggest complaint this year is how completely stranded I feel at times. I’m 45 minutes outside of the city, and I can’t even walk anywhere to buy dinner. Still, maybe it’s for the best that I don’t have a motorbike. A) Because I have absolutely no idea how to drive one, and B) Because my doctor friends tell me that motorcycle crashes and stabbings (many while on motorbikes) make up an overwhelming number of ER patients here.

Every Saturday we’re both in Palembang, Raj and I meet up and do a radio show at a local station through the US Embassy. [Another blog on that soon.] Then, we go to the mall, eat a delicious JCO doughnut (I swear they’re even better than Krispy Kremes), and eat dinner.

Raj rented a motorbike in February after getting his license when he went home for Christmas. So he drives himself home, and I call my buddy Ari, my ojek, to come pick me up. It’s such an important part of the week for both of us. It’s venting with someone who understands completely. The Raj dinner part, I mean. Not Ari, though he's nice.

But the last time we met, Raj got in an accident. And—get this—on the same road where my purse was stolen! (Indonesians would say there’s an evil spirit there, and they might be right.) He was turning right (with his signal on), and instead of slowing down or swerving around him, another motorbike with two men on it ran right into the back of his bike. Hard.

Raj was thrown over the front of his bike and onto the street while his bike skidded across the road. The other bike crashed, too, and it hit another bike with a couple on it. They lost control and crashed, too.

Raj is lucky he was wearing his helmet. He says after the impact, he only remembers laying in the middle of the road and seeing at least 200 cars and motorcycles drive by without stopping at all. Pieces of his bike had broken off, and he watched while someone even stole one and ran off. The two guys who caused the wreck immediately jumped on their bike and left, though Raj says pieces of their bike were laying in the road, too. His bike wouldn’t work.

He tried calling me, but of course the network was screwed up, and none of his five phone calls went through. I’m not sure what I would have done, anyway, and I think that’s another of my central frustrations: helplessness in times of need. Luckily, he was able to call a teacher at his school to come pick him up.

When my purse was stolen, I yelped and jumped around, and no one stopped to help me. There were at least 40 people just sitting on the side of the road eating from street vendors, and all of them just watched. But at least I wasn’t laying in the middle of the road. Not a single person helped him up or even stopped to see if he was ok.

The good news is he is ok, and a repair shop was able to fix his bike for only about $100.

I’m sorry this isn’t a happier post, but happier ones will follow, I assure you. I’ve been trying to think about what specifically I find so exasperating. I think it’s that my whole life right now is such an exercise in extremes.

On one hand, I have more independence than I’ve ever had in my life: I live alone, and I decide what I do, what I eat, and where I go. And yet, on the other hand, I feel so completely dependent on other people. I have to call for rides to get food, to go shopping, to get to school, etc. I have to walk and wait and pay each week just to have drinking water.

Same as with what I packed to bring: I managed to fit nearly everything I’ve needed for nine months into two suitcases and a bookbag. I have a little microcosm of my home, and yet… I have so little with me that it all fits into two suitcases and a bookbag! (Note: this does not include souvenirs. Oh my, no. It does not.)

And, most importantly, there’s the idea of being surrounded by people all the time. People are constantly stopping by my house unannounced, asking me for help with papers, and taking pictures of me when I walk by them. And yet, I wouldn't really fit in here permanently. I’ve talked to the other Fulbrights, and I think most of them feel the same way. There are so many people everywhere, and yet, aside from the other ETAs, you’re the only one who’s really like you.

But I promise—barring any more robberies or crashes—this is my last negative blog. There are so many exciting things happening right now, and I’m taking picures of all them.

Oh, and Raj has his bike back now. But this weekend while we were eating dinner, someone stole his helmet.

All Greek to me

My fellow teacher Rudi and I were having some communication issues last week. He picks me up for school on his way in in the morning, and he drives me home. I have 3.5 hour breaks between classes and English Clubs sometimes, so some days I ask Rudi to take me home.

I always say, “Rudi, would you mind taking me home now?”

And he was constantly getting this odd look on his face. He would pause a moment, and then say, “That would be fine.”

“You don’t have to!” I’d exclaim. But he would insist and say it was no trouble.

Finally, I found out what the problem was. “Katie, what do you expect me to say to that question?! It is one of the hardest things in English!”

Huh? Ooh. “Do you mind…”

He said, “Do you want me to say ‘yes’ or ‘no?’ I don’t know what is the right answer!”

So I explained that technically “no” is the right answer to a “do you mind” question, but he could always clarify what he meant. “No, I’d be happy to.” Or “No, it’s no problem!”

Rudi continues to test my knowledge on a daily basis with the English questions he’s thought of since the last time I saw him. Whew—on Mondays, he usually has a full two pages. They’re typically things like this:

Why is a lunch box not always a box and a trash can not always a can?

What is the difference between got and gotten and when should I use each?
(Most Indonesians use these interchangeably, but not my Rudi.)

Can you practice choir? Usually you just have choir practice.
But you can practice football? Yup.

What is the difference between “kind of” and “sort of?”

Why is the “i” in organize and organization pronounced differently?

You know the coolest thing about Indonesian? The verbs. They have verbs for everything. They have a verb that exclusively means “to have a moustache.” They have a verb that means “to take someone’s virginity.” They have a verb that means “to cook rice by boiling it.” All just one word. I mean, three separate words. That’d be weird if all those were all the same verb. Eww.

I really have always felt that one weakness of the English language is that we don’t have a way of asking “what kind of sick are you?” Someone says, “I’m sick.” And we say… where? Is it the flu? What’s wrong? (Those last two would work, I guess.) But Indonesians just say a direct translation of “What sick?” I like that.

I had no idea how much a language can affect the way people think. Do you know how many tenses we have in English? SIXTEEN! We have sixteen whole tenses! No wonder it’s hard for people. And we’re not talking Shakespeare’s English here: there are 16 common, everyday tenses for English speakers.

Indonesian has one tense. If you need to know that something happened in the past, you use context to figure it out. Obviously “I eat dinner yesterday” happened in the past, so it would be like “I ate dinner yesterday.”

But Rudi was explaining how English is so hard for Indonesians (and other foreign speakers, I would assume) because they literally have to change the way they think. For example, “If I’d known you were coming yesterday, I would have gone to the store.”

(Here’s where I want to start singing that song: If I’d knowwwwnn you were comin’ I’da baked a caaaake. Baked a caaaake.”)

Indonesians don’t have a way to say that in their language. They would break it down into two present tense sentences. “I do not know you come yesterday. I should go to store” would be a near-literal translation. Rudi said the ability to think one thought that means all of that at once is something he had to work hard to train himself to do. Isn’t that fascinating?

I really used to think that your brain was one thing unto itself, and language was just what comes out of your mouth, how to explain what you think. I guess that’s still true, but Rudi insists, and I’m starting to agree, that language can enable you to think more complex thoughts, faster. Hey, maybe there’s some uber-language out there that would force us all to go beyond English-language thinking…

Anyway.

Also, there are just so many more words to learn in English. I guess it’s nearly impossible to count the number of words in a language (Does dog count separately as a verb and a noun? Is hog-tied one new word or two old words joined together? Dig, dug, digging—one word in different tenses or three different words altogether? Etc.) Still, experts who know more about this sort of thing than I do estimate that the English language has somewhere around 750,000 words. An Indonesian dictionary from the ‘80s (yeah, it’s outdated, but go with it) contained 25,500 Indonesian words. So… there are a lot more words in English.

Ooh, and also according to the esteemed Dr. Wikipedia, here are some English words that come from Indonesian:

amok (as in “to run amok”)
gecko
gong
gingham
orangutan

Yeah, ok, so those are about the only ones, but still. The others I don’t count because you would directly associate them with Indonesia or Asia, like batik or rambutan.

PS- When I was looking up how many words were in the English language, I also learned that you’re pretty hot stuff if you know even 20% of that ¾ million. How enthralling. And riveting. And intriguing and exceptional and captivating. Eh, I probably wouldn’t even scratch the surface.