Sunday, June 13, 2010

Bali Day 7: Lunch at Gulingan Village

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Our day started at lunch time on my final full day in Bali. We went to Gulingan Village for a pig roast.

Really, it was a Babi Guling roast. Babi Guling is Balinese for suckling pig and is a famous delicacy. It also sounds a lot like it should be the name of a Vegas Lounge singer.

Again, to get to lunch, we had to walk through the village. Below is the equivalent to the corner store in small town America...or the 7-Eleven in bigger cities.

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When we arrived at the location of the lunch, we were directed to walk across a bridge over a pond. It was breath taking!

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Once across the bridge, we found ourselves in a beautiful garden, our places already set at a beautiful table. The hats on our glasses were also practicle in that they kept the bugs out of our drinks, clever, clever!

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Again, we were pretty much eating at someone's house. Most rural Balinese are farmers. The house was surrounded by beautiful rice paddies. Of course, we all had to take a walk out in them for pictures.

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There were several thoughts I had as we walked out into the rice paddy. I was thinking about Vietnam Veterans and how they described going on patrols through the paddies. I also thought about how hard a day's work this would be to plant and harvest the rice. We did see both going on in various fields as we drove to our different destinations.

The fields were hot. The sun is very intense. I got sun burnt in just 20 minutes.


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Ahhh!

Back to the cool shade of the family compound.

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Such beautiful gardens all around.

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One of the beautiful women who served us.

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This is a palm. This is the one time the weird stuff my camera was doing to the images actually looked cool.

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This is the centerpiece on our table. It looks kind of like pointsettas, however I don't think that is what the pink and white leaves/petals are. Very beautiful.

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My palm frond glass hat protecting my water, our first course of spicy chicken soup. By the way, all of the palm hats, centerpieces and placemats were made by hand by this family that hosted this lunch.

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Meet our lunch.

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That would be what is left of our Babi Guling after carving. They placed its head on a plate with its four hooves. If you would like to make authentic Babi Guling, I found a recipe for it: Recipe for Babi Guling.

This is my lunch plate. I just want to say that the chicken patay I have was the best patay I have ever had. At 5 o-clock, I have my pig portion. The brown squares on top are pieces of the crackling skin. This is consdered the delicacy of the suckling pig. It tasted like pork rinds meets bacon. It was good. The pork itself was extremely tender.

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The family dog, complete with Grocho Marx eye brows.

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After lunch, as we departed for the walk back to our bus, the hosteses handed us these, they are birds in a nest. Very pretty.

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