Celebrated Independence Day with a July 3rd BBQ and a Game on TV…..On Sunday We Found a Quaint Little Restaurant on the Side of a Hill.....

…..Saturday nights are BBQ night here at the hotel and Saturday fell on July 3^rd so, what the heck, I celebrated a day early. BBQ over here means basically “grilled” but they do a pretty good job. You pick out the food you want grilled—everything from seafood to ribs—and the chef cooks it on the grill and brings it to you. They have about six different BBQ sauces—one that tastes like ours and five that are pepper-based and head-jerking spicy. The secret is to figure out which one is regular—kind of like Russian roulette. Not exactly Texas BBQ, but not bad either.

The game on TV was the Germany/Argentina World Cup match and the sports lounge was packed—standing room only. I think the Aussie and I were the only Westerners there and the crowd seemed about 50/50 for both sides. It was really a loud, raucous bunch with no trouble and a really good time.

We finished the first full week of work Friday and I had a pretty good group—as you can see in the photo, they weren’t averse to laughing it up for the camera. I have a really good interpreter (the one standing in the back) and he can literally translate into Indonesian as I speak which is a rare talent. I’m half-way through this job and it hasn’t been bad.

On one of my first blog posts after we got here, I questioned the distance to this restaurant with the directions of +/- one kilometer.

Well, it became a standing joke between the Australian and me: if we could actually find the place, we'd eat dinner there no matter how good or bad the food. Then, for some reason, the sign just disappeared one day.

We made a couple of walks down the road but didn't know how far to go and couldn't find it. He made it a personal project to track this place down and did Google searches, checked over Google maps, and on Saturday we set out to see if this place actually exists. It does, but +/- one kilometer is a long ways to walk. Using his Google maps we hiked probably close to an hour, made a couple of turns we weren't sure of, and darned if we didn't find it. It is the neatest little restaurant--built on the side of a hill in several sections in what I would call cabanas, or little rooms separated by hallways and stairs. It is really interesting and neat. The company that owns it also has a large resort in Bali so the place had that ambiance. We were hot and sweaty so we just looked around, checked out the menu and made reservations for Sunday evening. They also had a small art gallery with crafts and paintings and I bought some souvenirs--something I hadn't been able to find since we've been here.

Sunday--July 4th--we took a taxi back and ate supper. Really a nice place and good food. So, in the end, I celebrated the 4th of July with a New Zealand tenderloin steak.....