5:41 pm Miri Marina www.mirimarina.com

Hi All,

  Today Joy and Jim Carey on the boat Kelaerin from Bellingham, WA USA and Randal and I biked into Miri.  We stopped first at the Harbor Master and then had a wonderful lunch of Banana Rice.  Banana Rice is wonderful rice dish served on a placemat size banana leaf.  Around the mound of rice they place small servings of different vegetables  and then offer you the choice of 3 sauces, dahl, chicken or fish.  It was very good.  I had asked about lamb Redang and so also received a dish of that which was also very good.  Joy ordered a lemon flip to drink and then Jim had one since it was so good.  What made it so thick?  Raw egg yoke much to Joy’s horror.  We only found that out after the meal.  I had a lemon/honey drink that was more lemon than honey so very good.  Everything was very good.  Randal also had the banana rice, some curry chicken and a 100 Plus which is a carbonated version of Gatorade.  Our bill was about 40 ringits, around $12 US.  After that we biked the mile into town to the small wet market for cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes, and mangoes.  Then we checked out the fish market and then we just went biking around.  The city is full of one way, no u-turn streets.  But the drivers mostly were very curtious. I think we will quite like it here!

  So that’s it.  I still owe emails about Santubong and the waterpipe smoking woman of Kuching.  Hopefully I’ll catch up while we are here.

Ru

Batik at the Crafts Bazaar

One of the stalls at the Rainforest World Crafts Bazaar was run by a lovely and patient Indonesian woman from Jakarta. Visitors could attempt to use a canting tool to apply wax to a simple picture drawn on a white cloth. The image looked like something one could embroider and we actually used an embroidery hoop to hold the cloth though she did say that mostly children used them and adults often just held the cloth in their hand. Here are photos of Elizabeth doing batik. Hers came out quite good. Mine had lots of wax blobs.

Elizabeth and our teacher. She didn’t mind showing and re-showing and then saying, “Turn the blobs into art!” (Though it was only mine that had lots of blobs. I had gone first and maybe the wax wasn’t so runny or maybe I just had less steady hands.)

Elizabeth being shown how to hold the canting tool.

A steady hand!

The instructor was wearing a lovely skirt and at her feet are the tools and melted wax for making batik.

Tools of batiking and some samples and a map showing Indonesia.

Elizabeth’s project. I found that when I held the cloth up the wax wouldn’t come out of the canting tool and when I held it level the wax came out in blobs. I was encouraged to turn the blobs into “art” but they just really looked like blobs. It was lots of fun to try.

I really also liked our batik teacher so brought an American flag bandana for her too when Randal and I returned for the Music Festival. She was very proud of Indonesian batik and encouraged everyone to come to Jakarta. The crafts bazaar and the music were held simultaneously so you could do both during the day and evenings.

And since I wrote so much about it, one photo of Banana Rice. They haven’t put the rice down on our leaf yet; but you can see the pile of it in front of Jim. He had white rice.

There was spicy ginger pickle too and some whispy bread. Randal is holding the orange chopsticks. The rest of us used forks though eating with just your fingers is also acceptable. The lamb Redang is in front of my plate.