"So Yasi, did you enjoy your dim sum dish that you..."
CHIRP CHIRP!
"...that you seemed to..."
CHIRP CHIRP!
"Never mind!"
Basically, after meals (especially in Indonesia) it seems that it is customary to try and vacuum the remaining food particles lodged deep within your teeth. From what I can see, the method is to first pull your lips apart, press them firmly against the gums, direct your tongue to the piece of, we'll say, pork stuck between your, we'll say, canine and first premolar and suck. The outcome is a high frequency sound that I would equate to a high pressure sporadic faucet leak or the common cricket.
General table manners vastly differ from culture to culture - salad fork on the outer left, eat with your hands, slurp, don't slurp. I get that. The irony enters when you notice that there are toothpicks on every table, every hawker stall, food cart or structure even slightly resembling a place to consume sustenance. Some people even have cigarette cases just for tooth picks, so it behooves me what the necessity for the sucking is. And believe me, I've tried it. Unless my form is horribly off, it's pretty ineffective.
It gets better. It seems that this post-eating ritual has made the leap. Yes, apparently it likens itself to the quarterback who licks his fingers before he hikes the ball and consequently licks his finger before performing any task. Either that or it's a type of tick commonly associated with a form of southeast asian tourettes that I'm unfamiliar with. On several occasions our taxi drivers found the urge (or compulsion) to chirp every 30 to 45 second. Fan-tastic!
It's official, there is one thing I most assuredly do no like about this place. Oh, that, and the smell of sauteing chillies. Really, it's actually noxious.
It must be time for a ginger tea, I sound cranky.
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