The skin of the cow: when food doesn't meat [sic] my expectations

I hadn't been eating a lot of meat here, but a couple of weeks ago I gave it up completely. It's not that I don't like meat (I probably ate the equivalent of several pigs in my two months in Italy), it's that the meat here is often of unspecified origin. Maybe it was the intestines in the fried rice, or the gizzards in the jackfruit curry, or perhaps the liver satay my friend ordered because we didn't recognize the word for liver at that point in time, but I finally said no more.

I was doing good at being a vegetarian, but then the other day I ordered some nasi sayur lodeh (nasi is rice, sayur means vegetable, and lodeh is a type of squash but often means a coconut curry; click here for a clearly vegetarian recipe).

I didn't notice anything amiss at the time, but when my roommate ordered it the next day, one of the Indonesian teachers informed us there were little bits of cow skin floating around in the mix of vegetables. Not meat, just skin. Somehow I had not noticed this the day before, but I was reminded of my reasons for becoming a vegetarian in the first place.

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This Saturday I am heading south with a couple other teachers to do some volunteer work in Mojokerto. Teaching the spoiled rich kids every day has been bringing me down a little, so I jumped at the opportunity to help out. Supposedly, a school with very limited resources is holding a charity event to help upgrade its English program. We'll be playing games with several different groups of little kids.

While the volunteering will require me to get up at about six in the morning, I am quite excited.

And then I will reward myself for my good-heartedness by going to an all-you-can-drink martini lunch on Sunday.