Watched today’s Amazing Race Asia while ironing my clothes,

So what did the contestants do ? Get clue card from the snake farm, did some Sumatran dance with the bowl (minang dance) then push the Bakso (Bak is 肉, literally means meatballs ) cart, and then take a cab to Monas (Monumen Nasional), then they waited for this guy

amazing race asia

to tell them if they qualify for the next round. Too bad for the pinoy couple, they just chose the wrong choice….Anyways, good try!

So what’s the difference between the Asian version and the Angmoh version? Well, in the AngMoh version, they all speak like American. In this Asian Amazing race, you can hear English with Indian accent, Pinoy accent, English with English accent~ I wonder how they choose these contestants?? Malaysian english accent, and also the Singapore kinda English, the Indonesian team’s accent doesn’t really sound so Indonesian that I’m familiar with. So the Asian version actually has this feature, which I can term it as a big pot of rojak.

This episode tried hard to show the viewers bout the cultures of Indonesia in a candid way.

Here’s a part from the show : The Indian contestants went to the school, SMA60 (In Indonesia, some public schools are labelled instead of named, u can see SMUN 42, SMA 65 and all sorts of numbers that are actually school names, I wonder why don’t they use proper names, don’t they have a lot of warriors and stuff?? )

The challenge of the Fast Forward Section was searching for a walkman that says ‘Congrats, U found the right walkman’…… was pretty lame. Grabbing students’ earpiece and hearing if that’s the message that was being played is really cb. Why can’t they come up with something better? And to the students, I wonder if they actually get to use the walkman after participated in the act, after having to walk around like zombies?

!tukang basoThen there comes the part of pushing the cart, the Bakso Cart. The Malaysian group, a cute Malay girl and another chinese girl decided to sell their Bakso instead of pushing the cart. Indigenous to the Indonesians, they all like Bakso, I’ve tried taking it, but just couldn’t really appreciate it. The average diameter for baksos in Indonesia are around 5 centimetres. They are not prepared the most hygienic way and sometime last year, there was a case where it’s rumoured that mouse flesh was used to make the Bakso, which made some Tukang Baksos (bakso sellers) lose a lot of business. Along with this case, there was also an outcry where there are samples of Bakso being treated with Formaldehyde (Formalin, u know, the stuff they use at labs to preserve stuff). This all happened because of poverty, when you can’t even feed yourself, what’d u do?

Selling bakso seems like an easier way to get out frm the race rather than pushing the cart and expecting not to spill a drop of the kicap or Soya Sauce. In indo, the spelling of kicap is Kecap. Mind to tell you, I always have this feeling towards kicap in Indonesia, it’s just black colour salted water. Compared to brands in Malaysia and Singapore, our’s is just plain better. Fini. Poverty does have a lot of impact on the food culture. People all make things up to serve the market. The market is generally poor, hence, cheap soya sauce is being made.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.