Nasi Box; it's what's for lunch

When you are in Indonesia and your boss tells you that at 10AM there will be a meeting at so and so Ministry (and this is speaking from personal experience), you can be 95% sure that you will end up being at the meeting until noon and that lunch will be provided in the form of "nasi box."

Nasi means rice. We all know what box means. Put together, nasi box means "bento." It's basically Indonesia's version of a lunch in a box or sometimes dinner in a box.

This is the go-to type of meal for most of Indonesia's ministries and each ministry would have a favorite nasi box catering/restaurant it likes to order from. My directorate really prefers a Padang food nasi box called Wahid II, which is actually quite tasty.

There was a directorate once where I attended a meeting and the lunch box was hokka hokka bento, which is my least favorite of all the nasi boxes out there not only because I think "hokben" tastes like crap inside a foam tupperware, but it also banks on a gigantic portion of rice unbalanced by a tiny two-pieces of fried shrimp or chicken. Not really the healthiest of lunch or dinner meals.

I went to the Ministry of Defence once for a very long meeting, and that place gave all the attendees a huge box of D'Cost, a seafood chain.

Reliance on nasi box, though, can get a little overboard, in my opinion. Sometimes the catering people would just come and drop off the boxes, and we wouldn't know whose boxes they belong to so no one takes them. By the time we figure out that it's for us, the food inside is probably on the way to becoming rotten. And hence my stomach problems throughout 2011 when all I had every single day was nasi box (because I was at work 24/7... seemingly).

But getting nasi box certainly beats missing lunch because of a meeting, and nasi boxes saves me a lot of money. So there's the plus side.

The day when sacrifices are made

It's a little difficult to describe Idul Adha because I don't celebrate this Muslim holiday. I guess the background would be the story of Abraham and how he was told by God to sacrifice his first-born. In the Islamic version, the first-born is Ishmael. Well, Abraham was about to do it until a divine voice intervened, told him to stop, and sacrifice a goat in his first-born's place. The point is he was about to make the ultimate sacrifice for God.

Well, Idul Adha is a celebration of this story, but instead of first-borns, the Muslim population sacrifice cows and goats instead.

Indonesia being mostly made-up of Muslims, also follows the tradition of sacrificing and giving the meat to the poor. On idul adha, loud shrieking horror noises of terrified goats and cows can be heard throughout the entire neighborhood, but it's all for a good cause.

I've never actually seen the rituals, because I probably would faint, but my brother has when he was still in elementary school. He said it made him nauseated and he wouldn't want to witness such a thing ever again.

Funny enough, tomorrow is the 15th of October, which is both my birthday and this year's Idul Adha. I was born in the year of the goat, according to the Chinese zodiac..... I can't help but feel a little freaked out at the symbolism and coincidence of it all. Hope my neck won't get a chill tomorrow.