WHAT IS GADOO GADOO?

4 September 2022

I'm here in Bali for a month. Do I escape a routine and stressful home life? Not really - I bring my routine with me : excel, blogg, correspondance, chat with family and friends, politics, airbnb, Youtube .... And I can hardly describe my life as stressful.

But the routine activity volumes are down because a new destination means local activities to explore. Beach burn, walking round town monuments galleries temples museums, shopping centre (Krishna is good for Indonesian visitors, a bit inland; Beach Broadwalk is trendy for foreigners).

Talking to the taxi driver yesterday on our way to Krishna, he said most of his work was taking foreigners to restaurants, the insides of which he'd never see. He wondered what the restaurants were like, but could never know as they were not his class, not his paygrade. He wondered what his customers do back in their home country, and what they think about.

So one day he asked a customer what he would eat in that restaurant and the man said "gadoo gadoo". Well, gadoo gadoo is local food - some vegetables, boiled egg, peanut sauce, chinese wafers (like I ate yesterday at Krishna)  here's a picture of a quality example....of course no meat, meat is very expensive to buy here for local people.

The driver was surprised and asked the man  "what is gadoo gadoo?" And the man replied describing a dish with vegetables yes, meat (he thought probably a steak), french fries. Which is true, this was the tourist's typical restaurant gadoo gadoo!

So the native population in this tourist economy are a simple people, homogenous, conformist, living a poor life, often in a minority to a colonising army of tourists, whose faces change every few days.

This is a true story, but it's also a variation on the old "prince and pauper" fairytale.