greasy friday

The Fritter Man is a man because it is a he.
He has a huge wok with boiling used oil. So dark you can't see the bottom. Before 6:00 AM he's already there, dipping pieces of bananas and soybean cake (we call it "tempe" here in Indonesia) in thin flour batter and plunging them into the wok.

The wok he's using is on top of a gas burner with a controlling gauge kinda thing. But if the gauge doesn't work, he has to pump the gas burner. I have no idea how it works.

The Fritter Man occupies a small corner at the entrance of an office building's cafeteria. Right at the base of the parking building. He has a glass showcase where he dumps all of the crispy cooked fritters. He taxes you 1,000 IDR (10 US$ cents? somewhere around it) for three pieces of any fritters you want. The menu of everyday is: soybean cake fritter, tofu fritter, bean sprout fritter, banana fritter. I don't know whether he has this famous "cassava fritter", which is a must-exist fritter among thousands fritter men here in Jakarta. The guy bags my fritter in a small used-paperbag. Apparently the bag bearing an imprint of the state's seal and was marked "secret" used to be a "performance appraisal sheet" of government officers. I guess he got it from the office next to the parking building. It's the head quarter of the Department of Education. I guess that's where the Minister of Education gets a nice airconned office with plush furnitures.

The used-paperbag was drenched with oil as I put them on my table. It's a greasy friday, baby..