It’s all well and good to learn a language out of a textbook or with Rosetta Stone software, but over the past four weeks, I’ve perfected the Lily Roberts Language Learning Method. Under the LRLLM (catchier title to come), students will spend all day riding their motorbike from the grocery store in Gianyar to the grocery store in Ubud. They won’t immediately turn around upon reaching their destination, however — they’ll be required to spend at least an hour wandering the aisles of each store (cultural immersion!) and occasionally spending money (bonus: this will stimulate the local economy).
You wouldn’t ordinarily think of a city street as an opportunity for vocabulary and reading comprehension practice, but I’ve picked up some of my favorite words there. If you think American billboards are cluttering up your highway views of corn fields, try driving around Bali for a few days. Every inch of available street space has been used, most often to advertise the establishment directly below, but sometimes for a completely indiscernible purpose. But helpful phrases are plentiful. If ever presented with the opportunity, I could easily tell an Indonesian where the nearest beauty parlor is or when you can find Biskuat Susu. (Biskuat Susu — literally “milk biscuits” — are basically plain shortbread cookies, but with a really enthusiastic chicken on the wrapper. Indonesians are big on using cartoon chickens to entice you to buy their product.) “Two for the price of one!” I’d say, or “Turn left before you get to the temple to find the best mattresses in town!”
During my first hour on Bali, driving from the airport to Ubud, I encountered a highly worrisome sign. Around the airport, many signs are in English for the benefit of wayward Australian tourists who (mistakenly) believe that they should drive themselves around. I believed I had encountered one such sign when I read the words “CAT OVEN,” accompanied by a shakily-drawn arrow pointing down a suspicious alley. Now, I am by no means a cat person, but I considered this a bit extreme. I had long since decided that I had imagined the sign or simply misread it in my sleep-deprived state when I saw another sign, only slightly less sketchy, that read “Cat Oven.” One cat oven on an island might be a misspelling or some kind of weird culinary treat, but I decided that I needed to get to the bottom of this if there were indeed two cat ovens on Bali. So I did what I normally do when I don’t understand something in Indonesian, which is ask my students. I thought that if people were putting cats through some kind of torture, those people would most likely be teenaged boys, so I asked Tomi, a sixteen-year-old who helps out with administrative tasks at school. “What’s does ‘cat oven’ mean?” I asked in Indonesian. “Oh,” he explained, “you put the ‘cat’ on your motorbike to make it look cool. Or maybe you put it on your house, or sometimes for art.” I was a bit confused. Tomi had pronounced C-A-T like “caht,” rather than using the Indonesian word for the thing that says “meow.” “Kucing?” I asked. “Meow?” Tomi laughed for about ten minutes. In Indonesian, it turns out, “cat” means “paint.” I never got a full explanation for why the place that paints flames on your motorbike is called an oven, but at least I can be (somewhat) sure that I won’t be getting kitty in my fried rice any time soon.
Other practical and semi-useful words come from time spent in the grocery store. First of all, just know that “grocery store” is a completely inaccurate description of these consumer Meccas. There are two that we frequent: the Bintang, which means “star” and is the name of Bali’s most popular beer, and Hardy’s, which I assume is named after some guy named Hardy. The Bintang is kind of like Marc’s — there are inexpensive groceries, but you can also find shampoo, motorbike helmets, underwear, and trashy novels. Hardy’s, on the other hand, is like Super Target. This is a four-story operation — the first floor sells shoes, electronics, and has a food court; the second floor has groceries, a bakery that sells, as far as I can determine, a total of zero bread products but whose motto is, “The best bread in your town!” (which, come to think of it, is actually true, seeing as my town has no bread); the third floor has household items and yet another food court; and the fourth floor carries clothing and accessories for the whole family. At Hardy’s I’ve learned “flavor” and “special,” as well as “fat-free” and “fortified milk for children.” These may sound like pointless words to know, but while watching an Indonesian soap opera the other night with my neighbors, two characters got in a fight about ice cream flavors (“Rasa coklet!” “Rasa strawberi!”). They never resolved the fight because one of the character’s fingers suddenly fell off, but I congratulated myself on understanding a whole ten seconds of the plotline.
Food-related vocabulary, I’ve found, is better practiced while driving by a street vendor than when you’re attempting to actually purchase food you intend to eat. Luckily, there are a limited number of important culinary terms — fried, noodles, soup, rice, chicken, fish — that are combined to create the names of most Indonesian dishes. Sometimes I’ll encounter a new word on the menu (for all you Arabic speakers out there, menu is “daftaar makanan” — eating notebook — which made me feel really intelligent), but these are often best avoided until you can either ask the cook for a specific account of the components or wait for someone else to order it and then adjust accordingly. While my Indonesian is passable, I lack simple vocabulary for many situations, so asking questions about food can get harrowing. I was halfway through a crispy fried item that I had been told was made from “the small animal that makes the sound “kuah” in the rice field” when I discovered a portion that was shaped like a head and was suspiciously small for the duck I had assumed I was eating. “This animal has eggs?” I asked. “Of course” the old lady responded. Not reassured, I came up with another question: “This animal is what color?” “Green,” said the old lady, getting tired of my twenty questions. I suddenly remembered the word for duck and asked if that’s what I was eating, which the old lady thought was hilarious. The next customer took pity on me and, accounting for my complete lack of animal-related vocabulary and my first grade sentence structure, told me that I was eating “the animal that sits on your wall in the night.” I paused, considering the chewy texture of the item in my mouth. “This is… a lizard?” I asked, warily. “Yes!” said the old lady, brightly. “We didn’t think you knew that word!”
