This morning I went diving at Shark Point with Rob, Ziv, and Fuji. It was awesome! I like diving during the day so much more than at night. Well, I like both, but I just love the colour during the day. And we saw sharks! Shark Point is said to be called shark point in the same spirit that you nickname a 300 lb man Tiny. But we saw a little baby shark, and Rob caught it by the tail and held it so we could feel it. It fely just like sandpaper. Now I know why famous swords in old stories have sharkskin handles. Hilts. Whatever. Rob, maybe you can give me the proper sword word from the knife store next to your flat.
Fuji has an underwater case for her camera, so hopefully we’ll get some good diving photos out of this trip so that you can all see what it’s like. A bit. As much as a digital photo can capture the spirit of diving, anyways.
In the afternoon Roland, Budi, Ly, Danny, Ziv and I went to an Indonesian festival at the University of Sydney. It was mostly food, with some other things like mini-golf and a jumping castle for kids, a big tug-of-war area, traditional dancing, and a stage with a band. But the main thing was the food. Two new weird foods for the weird food list: avocado juice (very good) and some strange drink made up of ice, sugar water, coconut milk, green worms made out of wheat, and crushed durian fruit (not so good). Sydney Uni reminds me of a castle. Or a monastery. It feels old, old, old, and quiet. Even when there’s an Indonesian festival celebrating Indonesian Independence on the front lawn.
We had a random assortment of foods at a food court for dinner, and Roland told us of this other game that they play in Indonesia on Independence Day. How it works is this: You have a bucket full of eels, and you have to pick up the eels, run across to a bottle on the other side of the pitch or whatever, and try and stuff the eel into a Coke bottle (or similar) as fast as you can. It’s done as a relay race I think, like spoon-and-ball races. Only with eels. LIVE eels. That wriggle all over, and are often dropped on the ground as you’re running because they’re so slippery and wriggly. And then they get stuffed into a Coke bottle. And then, what happens to the eels? Roland says they probably just eat them. They’re probably dead after this whole game anyways. But Roland says it’s very funny to watch.
Oh, and where do they get these eels? The open sewers! What? Yeah, Roland says, when they were kids they used to go eel fishing in the open sewers (there were apparently tonnes of eels in the sewers, and they’re all open, like they were in Ghana, only I imagine they have more water. Although Roland says he wouldn’t call it ‘water’ so much as ’sludge’). So they’d catch these eels in the sewers, and sell them to this man who would take them and sell them in the market. Roland’s family would then, I guess, go and buy back the sewer eels in the market. Ugh!
As a child Roland also used to have Chinese Fighting Fish (a.k.a. Beta Fish). You could buy them outside the schools for about $1, and then the kids would raise them and train them to fight. Roland did this by feeding his betas live fish (again, from the sewers), sometimes he’d feed them fish as big as themselves. And the beta would always win. Roland had about 20 at one point, all kept in their own jars, and trained to fight. Then all the kids at school would face off their betas against each other and put bets (marble bets, not money) on whose fish would win. Over half of his lost, so I guess he wasn’t all that great a trainer. I feel that Indonesia’s animal crueltly laws are pretty lax. Although cock fighting is apparently illegal, so they do have some sort of laws. They just don’t extend to fish I guess. Both eels and Chinese Fighting Fish.
Indonesia sounds crazy. I’ll have to visit someday.
