Good Day, Language Enthusiasts!

Polyglot Indonesia Jakarta Chapter, in commemoration of the upcoming National Food and Nutrition Day/National Nutrition Day on 25th January, collaborated with Zywielab in its first meetup of 2018 titled “Good Food is the Way to the Heart”. Zywielab (short for Zywie Laboratorium), takes the center stage during this meet up because as an information hub focusing on nutrition, the people of Zywielab are the best ones to explain about the relationship between food and nutrition to our participants.

Polyglot Indonesia Jakarta Chapter's Good Food is the Way to the Heart meetup was attended by fifty people from various backgrounds. Our standard practice during a meet up is to open up several language tables where our participants will be put into according to their registration answer. During this session ten language tables were available: English Table 1, English Table 2, French Table, Spanish Table, German Table, Dutch Table, Russian Table, Mandarin Chinese Table, Japanese Table, and Korean Table. Our target is for each respective language table to use and practice their communication skills.

Zywielab delivered two presentations during the meet up: the first one was  by Muhammad Nur Hasan Syah who explained about the concept of balanced nutrition and the nutritional value of Indonesian traditional cuisine by using gado-gado, nasi tumpeng, and satay as examples. Rifqi Ahmad Riyanto, as the second presenter, reminisced about his time in Russia, enticed the participants about the traditional Russian cuisine he used to eat, and also gave clarification on their nutritional value. During the presentations session, our beloved Polylgot Indonesia Jakarta Chapter's language enthusiasts were very animated and eagerly asked our presenters about food and nutrition intake especially in relation to the current diet trend and how to choose the best dish for a healthier diet.

The second session during this meet up is to encourage our language enthusiasts to speak in the language of the table; we did so by giving the instruction to choose one traditional Indonesian dish recipe and discuss their take on how to make it healthier. Our Polyglot Indonesia Jakarta Chapter's language coordinators on each table were there to guide the discussion and help our participants when they were facing difficulties on how to explain their ideas. These ideas were then presented and shared with other participants during the third session. It was very interesting to see how each language table chose a dish and came up with creative ideas on how to recreate it into a healthier version.

Before our meetup ended, we conducted a simple competitive trivia game in which each table competes against the other tables to quickly guess the name of a certain dish shown on the screen. Of all thirty pictures, half of them were traditional Indonesian cuisine and the rest were traditional cuisines from all over the world. Our participants were able to guess more than half of them. The winner of the game was the alliance made by the Spanish, Dutch, and Russian Table.

As per Polyglot Indonesia Jakarta Chapter's post-meetup tradition, we took a group picture together with our collaborator, Zywielab, and also a picture from each language table. We are very grateful for the collaboration with Zywielab in this superb meet up and appreciates highly Hoshino Tea Time in providing us with a comfy place for our activity. For the complete photo documentations, please check our Facebook fanpage.