Putubambu

Food is always an interesting topic in any culture. Tonight, my colleague Arleen and I strolled to the nearest sportsclub to see the dining possibilities. This is not a sportsclub in the Western sense - water in the swimming pool is brown, but the food court next to it has plenty of choices from Chinese to Indonesian varieties. Each island has its own traditions.

I had to refresh my Indonesian - with Arleen's help, we were talking a mixture of Tagalog, English, Finnish, plus all the Indonesian words we knew together. Ikan is fish, and ayam is chicken, but I ended up eating vegetables. For desert, we had a delicious rice cake cooked inside a bambu, and filled with palmsugar and coconut flakes. Its name is PutuBambu, but in Tagalog the name is even sillier - PutuBumbong. We both agreed this will be our regular desert.