Eat, Pray, Love and Discriminate

I've read the book Eat, Pray, Love. It was alright, I guess, but not something I want to reread tho. It's a beach book, nothing more than that. If you want to read about living and eating in Italy, Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy by Frances Mayes is much well written, to be enlighten I'd rather read Dalai Lama, Meister Eckhart, or Coelho, and as for love, there are gazillion books out there about it since the beginning of time.

At this moment Brad Pitt's company is filming that book in Bali with Julia Robert and Javier Bardem starring in it.

On one hand, it's a good way to promote Bali, (and probably also Indonesia). It's not often that foreign companies is granted the permission to do filming in Indonesia. It's a pity, I think we could attract more tourists by promoting it that way. Look at Thailand for example, they attract more tourists to Phi Phi Leh Island after the released of the Beach. Of course, we also need to be careful about the environmental and cultural impact from it.

On the other hand, when I read this article on JakartaGlobe, I cringed. Do I live in South African Apartheid era? Yes, I know expat in Indonesia get paid so much more than Indonesian. Yes, I know average Indonesian goes ga-ga when they meet bule. It's upsetting to read not only a foreigner gets paid $100 a day, which is 5 times as much as Indonesian extra, even foreigner kids get paid 2.5 times as much at $50! But the fact that they separate locals from their foreigners counterpart that did it for me. Why cant they just put two kinds of food and let people eats what they please? Why locals eat their nasi bungkus in some tent, while foreigner eats their western food in the Pura Dalem along with the cast and crew? Are local not worthy enough to mingle with the cast and crew or even eat the same thing? Whose fault is that, the foreign company who hires them or the local legislations and ruling that allow that to happen?