Hello everyone,

welcome to my new blogging style, it's short and manageable and hopefully rather frequent. Here's the latest:

I'm in Jakarta right now. Today, after the ferry ride back from the 1000 islands (like the dressing, same place) followed Feri, my handsome couchsurfing host and Elly, his lovely friend, to a Museum.

They asked, 'wanna go to a museum' to me and Noe (French for Noah) and we were kind like, yea awright, so off we go. and...AND...AANNDD! It was the most incredibly serendipitous thing, turns out this museum was the home of none other than THE Jan Pieterzoon Coen. Oh Mah Gahhh! Like, I was just getting swept along in this torrent of day after Christmas, central Jakarta, kids and teachers and parents, all locals surprisingly, and then there it was, an unforgetable portrait. Jan Pieterzoon Coen. So I'm bad with names, didn't actually remember his name when I saw the *original* work right there (*I'm telling myself it's the original, cause everyone else did, but like, no "no flash" not much written on the plaque, basically, "this guy lived in this house, he was Dutch and enjoyed nutmeg, brutal conquest, and long walks on the beach."

So I'm like jumping out of my pants with excitement, Elly was eying me like, this Bule doesn't even know who this guy is, and then I lay the whole story out as I remembered it: Brutal conquest, stole the spice economy in Europe from Lisbon, not to mention stole the spice islands import business from more mainland-style marajahs, annihilated populations of small to medium sized islands, and did it all with a business like detachment and religious vocabulary in a funny dutch accent.

So now it's all pouring in, I'm remembering my semester in Peru, the way I read "the taste of conquest" over many a lackadaisical turd delivery. I remembered turning over and over in my head, how do I describe what I want to do and see and learn to the Watson people. My fire about food was always there, ecologically we (ecologists) all know that, sorry Monsanto, you and we may survive, but only if massively monocultured tracts of land do not. But that book I read turned me on to the cultural and actually religious impact of the trade and use of food and spice. The Dutch were only able to scrounge enough money together in the first place for that kind of conquest because fast days in Christianity required massive amounts of fish. If the dutch had one thing, it was fish, sometimes in the most bothersome locations. Enter the dikes and windmills.

So all this is like flooding my mind, it dawned on me that the long (continuing) story of the spice trade (think CocaCola and TacoBell 'Fire' sauce) somehow freaking lassoed me, I forgot the epic importance of trade and movement of goods when I finally settled on one formula for a project proposal. Having not been able to describe really where the fire came from for this project about food Watson just didn't understand, but that's OK, cause here I am.

Such is the crazy truth about how "The Taste of Conquest" by Michael Krondl sorta grabbed me, then I sorted through all the directions I could go for the love of food, settled on 4 months Siberia at Magadan, 4 New Zealand, and then 4 in Italy. I had some kind of logic to that I think. That fell through and I said, OK ok, JUST Italy. That fell through cause of the schengen visa and my status as non student, non-well known brand of fellow, non interested in hanging out at embassies, so I said... listen up Hendrix, I'm gonna wait on deciding where to go next. Got a refundable ticket to Croatia, so... yeah might not go there. Then I started Hating Italy. Sometimes I accidentally capitalize a word. It's not random, it just happens when I really mean it. I was so pissed at Italy, mostly I had a magical wonderful beautiful time, but some hard turbulence around week 8 and 9. It was cold and time to get gone. So I took the advice of two migrant essential oil and crystal and heat pack dealers, met them at the Christmas Bazaars of Turin. They did a thing that I was able to remember from what seemed like a long time ago, they looked in my eyes and smiled.

That was welcome warmth, in a frigid land of fashion and pandering. They were like "we live between Bali and Turin, Bali is wonderful, go there and you can for sure work on this farm We know about, there's always young people there and yes, people are less caffeinated there, where the coffee actually comes from" So I was like... yeah

And then I got my ticket and now I'm here and It is friggin sweet.

G'nite


-Ben