Bloggiee

$30/cup Coffee from Lampung

I was pretty surprised when I went to www.latimes.com and found an article about a $30-a-cup coffee from Bandar Lampung, my hometown in Indonesia.

This $30/cup or $600/pound (yes! in US$) is called Kopi Luwak, where the coffee beans are plucked from the droppings of wild civets (luwak). Civets are catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses

These civets move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.

In the animals' stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting. The result is a delicacy with a markup so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.

To anyone satisfied by a regular cup of joe with the morning newspaper, it might sound like a lot of hokum. Canadian food scientist Massimo Marcone thought kopi luwak was just an urban legend. Then he did some lab work.

He found that a civet's digestive system does indeed remove some of the caffeine, which explains why a cup of kopi luwak doesn't have the kick that other strong coffees do. The civet's enzymes also reduce proteins that make coffee bitter.

Be careful to avoid being duped:
"About 42% of all the kopi luwaks that are presently on sale are either adulterated or complete fakes."

A pound of their droppings yields less than 5 ounces of beans. Roasting reduces the quantity by an additional 20%. With just 500 to 1,000 pounds of the real thing coming on the global market each year, demand quickly drives up the price.

THE astronomical value of their droppings should be a boon to civets, whose reputation took a beating in 2003 when civet cats sold in China's markets were suspected of causing the lethal SARS epidemic. The animals are a delicacy in southern China.

In Indonesia, civets are struggling along with much of the country's wildlife to hold on to their habitat as a growing human population encroaches.

So, let me know if you've tried a cup of kopi luwak. ^_^

Read the complete article on LA TIMES:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-coffee13jul13,0,3547326.story?coll=la-home-center

Thunder in Greenland

Global Warming. It's an unavoidable issue, which will haunt us for the rest of our lives. But, it's an inconvenient truth we must accept.

It’s not just an environmental issue. It affects ours public health and national security. It’s an urgent matter of survival for everyone on the planet — the most urgent threat facing humanity today.

Citizens in Greenland have never seen thunder, except from TV. However, they listen to thunder-like sounds everyday. These are the sounds of the ice cracking inside the icebergs.

The movie "An Inconvenient Truth" explained clearly what's happening to our Earth currently and in the future. This issue is currently being addressed by leaders of the world. As politicians squabble over how to act on climate change, Greenland's ice cap is melting, and faster than scientists had thought possible.

A new island in East Greenland is a clear sign of how the place is changing. It was dubbed Warming Island by American explorer Dennis Schmitt when he discovered in 2005 that it had emerged from under the retreating ice.

If the ice cap melted entirely, oceans would rise by 23 feet, flooding New York and London, and drowning island nations like the Maldives.

A total meltdown would take centuries but global warming, which climate experts blame mainly on human use of fossil fuels, is heating the Arctic faster than anywhere else on Earth.

Greenland, the world's largest island, is mostly covered by an ice cap of about 624,000 cubic miles that accounts for a 10th of all the fresh water in the world. Over the last 30 years, its melt zone has expanded by 30 percent. This is only Greenland. But Antarctica and glaciers around the world are responding as well. The more the surface melts, the faster the ice sheet moves towards the ocean.

It is scary. Two to three days' worth of icebergs from this glacier alone produce enough fresh water to supply New York City for a year.

According to www.climatecrisis.org, the average American generates about 15,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year from personal transportation, home energy use and from the energy used to produce all of the products and services we consume.

You can calculate your own personal impact on their website. My score is 6.3 and the national average is 7.5 tons per year.

What you can do to reduce your impact at home:
Replace a regular incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb (cfl)
        CFLs use 60% less energy than a regular bulb. This simple switch will save about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. If every family in the U.S. made the switch, we’d reduce carbon dioxide by more than 90 billion pounds!

  Move your thermostat down 2° in winter and up 2° in summer
        Almost half of the energy we use in our homes goes to heating and cooling. You could save about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year with this simple adjustment. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy has more tips for saving energy on heating and cooling.

Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner
Cleaning a dirty air filter can save 350 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

       

For more ways to reduce your impact, visit also: http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_actionitems.asp

There are plenty of ways each person can help reduce his/her impact. Begin your changes at home. Let's work together to save our planet.

Long awaited, rightfully earned, much needed VACATION!!

At last! I'm taking a vacation! I think the last time I took 2 weeks off work was 3 years ago. And I stayed in California at that time.  It probably has been 6 years since I went back home to Indonesia. I was only 18 then! How the years flew by...

I'm really excited about going home, but also scared at the same time. I just hope everything will go well and I won't have a problem returning to LA. After confirming my vacation dates, I've been anxiously counting down the days to my departure date.
It's so much better when I was still a student and all I needed to worry when going back was what souvenirs to get. Now that I'm working,  there are too many things I need to arrange before going home, proven by the the late working hours for the past 4 days. Still have so much packing to do...

I think this time around, will be a good experience for me going back. After being away for 6 years, I'd probably be shocked by the changes in Indo. Hopefully it won't be too much of a culture shock, that I become a fob in my own country >_<.

My vacation would probably be too short. Hopefully, I can meet with some of my old friends in Indo and S'pore. We'll have so much catching up!

Many things have happened the past couple of months. I'm confident to say that I'm not the girl I used to be. Lessons learned and I'm left with a cold heart... not! I think everything happens for a reason and I believe that I didn't make a mistake. I made the best decision I have ever made in my life and I'm glad I have all of my friends' and families' support. Being single is not such a bad idea after all, but it takes some time to get used to it ^_^. Work has been keeping me busy and this is a great time for me to show my bosses what I'm made of and prove what I'm capable of.

Life is so complicated and being the worrywart that I am, I always try to move forward with my life, planning the future and finding ways to build a sound foundation for my future. (It's sad when you're the only one doing all the work, but at least now I can focus on myself).

But, I think this vacation will give allow me to think about the second stage of my future plans and I will have to make some of the most important decisions in my life. This is the point to decide what, where and how exactly I want to spend my future.

~~ Scared, scared, scared. 8 years ago, I was just a kid having fun in high school. Now, I'm a kid with ambitious plans for the future.

Wish me Luck! ^o^