Fake plastic flowers

Last week Mike, a VSO volunteer based in Java, visited Ruteng. He has been here before & is quite well aquatinted with the people and the geography of the area. So I was surprised when having offered to cook Zoe & I dinner all he could produce was a pancake.

Now this was not a reflection on his cooking abilities (well, to be honest I don’t know about that, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt) but, as he explained, a reflection on the ingredients available in Ruteng. Apparently he had gone to the ‘supermarket’ expecting to be able to buy vegetables – fresh or frozen – and couldn’t. Well of course he couldn’t, it is quite normal to me now that the ‘supermarket’ doesn’t sell any kind of fresh produce – there is not a constant enough electricity supply to keep products cold or fresh. So most things are canned (meat, fish, some fruit & veg), dried (mushrooms, noodles, fish) or in instant-just-add-water packages (noodles, pasta, rice). If I spot a western item (tonic-water, baked-beans, corn flakes) I bulk buy, ‘cause next time I go it won’t be there.

Having got the hang of what is and isn’t available in the ‘supermarket’, I have started venturing into other shops. It is often difficult to tell from the outside what type of thing a shop sells, and frequently they will sell a confusing range of items. For example the ‘bakers’ also does a good range in computer equipment & women’s handbags, whilst the religious icon shop seems to make a nice profit out of selling mobile phone top-up.

On the other hand, there are one or two specialist shops. My favourite is the plastic-flower florist (people don’t keep houseplants inside the house, only stylised collections of undeniably plastic flowers), I haven’t checked but maybe they also do a nice line in plastic fruit, now that really would confuse the visitors!

The plastic-flower florist, Ruteng