New Year's Gifts for Affluent Jakartans

Yesterday, while running errands at the Grand Indonesia Mall, I popped into the posh grocery store in the basement to grab a few items one can't get anywhere else.  That's when I ran into the New Year's gift display of fresh fruit, which is a typical gift for the new year in many parts of Asia.

The display of strawberries immediately caught my eye. I was drawn to the package of two gigantic strawberries each almost as big as a tennis ball; they were about 6 cm long from my estimation.  At first I though they might have been grown near Chernobyl, they were so big, but an inspection of the package informed me they were from South Korea. The two strawberries were polished so brilliantly, they appeared to be made out of plastic, but they were in the produce section so they had to be real. Their surfaces were so perfect that an artist couldn't have sculpted anything more beautiful.

I gasped when I checked out the price tag. Over $10 for the two of them--more than many Indonesians earn in a day.  But the shoppers around me were grabbing them as if they were the most precious items in town.  

Curiosity killed the cat, people say, so I must have a healthy portion of feline inside me, because I took a package as well.  I couldn't resist the curiosity of discovering if these perfectly beautiful versions of strawberries tasted as wonderful as they looked.

Alas, as is so often the case in our modern world, the looks of things exceed their internal reality. The red part of the strawberry was reasonably sweet, though nowhere near as delicious as the tiny, blemished, and visually unimpressive Kyrgyz strawberry that costs one-hundredth the price of the Korean show-off.  And the pale part of the gigantic showpiece tastes as one might expect of a strawberry that isn't red--that whitish part tasted unpleasantly unripe. After eating this visual marvel, I was glad I didn't spend $40 to purchase the "rare and special" carton of stunningly beautiful, pastel pink strawberries from Korea that had captured my eye. They had probably been genetically modified to taste like perfume, I surmised.  

If you have an affluent love in Jakarta who won't settle for mundane New Years gifts, you can shower them with visually disarming strawberries, if you must.  But your time would be better spent if you simply gave them flowers, because a flower's visual appeal is what matters, not its flavor.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ta Prohm: "The Tree Temple"

Image
  Ta Prohm Temple is definitely my favorite temple beyond main Angkor Wat.  When the entire archeological complex was "discovered" by the French in the 19th Century, most of it was in ruins and they embarked on a decades-long restoration project.  Though the French are no longer in charge of Cambodia, constant restoration efforts are continuing at the Angkor complex to make sure the temples survive into the next decades. The French made a brilliant decision when they started their restoration to keep one of the temples in the semi-ruined state that they found the entire site.  They chose Ta Prohm to keep in a semi-ruined state, though some restoration is constantly done there, just to keep the structures from completely falling down. Ta Prohm is somewhat unique also, in that, while parts of it served as a temple, the majority of the structure served as a monastery and has a distinctive design as opposed to what one would find at more-standard temples.    Ta...
Read more

You Can Learn Much About Red State Americans at Fort Cody

Image
  Earlier in my U.S. trip, I visited my son in North Platte, Nebraska.  It's the reddest, Trumpiest part of a very red state.  And during my visit I stopped at Fort Cody, a fake U.S. Army fort built in the 1960s to lure tourists off the newly-built superhighways as they traveled to vacation destinations out in the Western U.S. like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. That's why you display the two headed calf that was born on a farm in Nebraska in the 1940s, then stuffed after it died having lived only three days. This kind of oddity would be advertised as something to draw curious tourists off the highway to buy the souvenirs in your tourist attraction.  As I visited Fort Cody, the fake Army fort, I realized that this "tourist trap" was exclusively designed for Red-State, MAGA Trumpists and totally reflects their values and mental picture of what America is and should be.  Luckily, you don't have to visit Fort Cody, but I can interpret it for you and show yo...
Read more

Cambodian National Museum

Image
Whenever I visit a country that's new to me, I always try to go to its national museum as soon as I can because: a. visiting the national museum is the equivalent of reading a book about that country's history, another about its religion, a third about its archeology, and another about its art, artifacts, and culture--all in the space of a two-hour visit.  It's an incredible "speed-education" of where you are. b. you learn about what a nation finds most valuable, significant, precious, and dear (officially).  and you learn too from what is excluded.  c. it's a great point of comparison to your own nation and/or to the nation where you currently find yourself living. The Cambodian National Museum didn't disappoint and I certainly learned quite a bit. Definitely the strong emphasis was on its stone and bronze work, particularly that related to Buddhism.  Unlike Indonesia, which houses more than 300 distinct ethnic groups and features a great diversity of ite...
Read more