It took me by a complete surprise when Ibu Janet De Neefe offered the chance to participate in Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2014. I read her invitation email several times to make sure I wasn't misinterpreting her message, and I was so excited I don't think I've sent her a proper thank you yet!

To better explain the magnitude of Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF), it brings together no less than 150 writers from around Indonesia and 25 other countries, sharing their view on global issues, big ideas and extraordinary stories. With this magnitude, UWRF might be the most important annual International event in Ubud, hence feeling thrilled and dwarfed at the same time is a bit normal reaction I guess.

As a foodie, I find UWRF becomes even more interesting when it begun to incorporate culinary topics and workshops performing national renowned hosts like William Wongso, Bondan Winarno, and Chef Wan from our neighboring country Malaysia.

The Event

Representing Bali food bloggers, I will be doing a blogger sharing session on the first day of Kitchen Sessions, side by side with Ibu Amanda Katili Niode from Omar Niode Foundation.

Ibu Amanda herself is Chair of Omar Niode Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Indonesia working to raise awareness on the quality of education and human resources in the field of agriculture, food, and culinary arts. She's also Indonesia’s First Certified Culinary Travel Professional of The World Food Travel Association, as well as member of National Council on Climate Change, and Manager of The Climate Reality Project Indonesia. We've met before on one of the event she sponsored in Bali about creative cuisine and sustainable tourism.

As the topic, we settled on sharing our stories about Street Foods. Yes, those good ol' culinary treats you enjoy side by side with the bustling traffic!

Why does it matters? Because beside of its yummy and cheap price, they often act as the front runners in promoting the local cuisine culture, as well as becoming inseparable part of a traveling experience.

This feat will be in line with my contributions into the writing of Makansutra Indonesia 2013 Guide book last year, and series of article writings I've done for in-flight and food magazines outlining the beauty of Bali's street foods.

To accompany the street food experience, I will also bring variety of street food satays for the audience to sample.

Should you're in Ubud for the festival, don't forget to stop by. It's free and there's 20 seats only! (byms)

More information about The Kitchen Program.
More information about UWRF
More information about Omar Niode Foundation.

Location map:

As food bloggers are more often and often getting invited to fancy dinners, it's no wonder that this hobby is quickly viewed as an alluring one; especially considering dinner invitations held by famous restaurants and hotels are ranging between 600K to 900K, or 1.2Mil IDR including wines or cocktails.

However should you are familiar with the phrase "With great powers comes great responsibilities," those dinner invitations usually comes with an unwritten obligation. Quickly recognized as alternative media, food bloggers too, are expected to broadcast about the event on their own media channels; blog and social network, so there's no such thing as a free loading folks!

Therefore while those invitations in your inbox might excites you, or even makes you proud, let's have a look at what's really going on.

The Costs

Wait? What costs? Aren't we talking about FREE invitations?

Well yeah, but let's not forget that it still requires time, and time is your biggest asset. In this case then, to be able to produce a quality writing, the blogger must go through a series of pre and post-event activities, for example:

1. Research: what's being recommended the most, what's the chef specialities: 30 minutes
2. Travelling back and forth: 1-2 hours
3. Food tasting, taking photos, and interviewing the chef: 3-4 hours
4. Photo editing: 2-4 hours
5. Writing: 2-4 hours
6. Publishing multiple photos on Twitter, Intagram, Facebook: 30 minutes-1 hour

Hence for a night out enjoying fancy dinners, there's at least 9 hours required for pre and post efforts, not to mention the 1-2 hours spent for exercising and recovery to burn those extra calories.

If you value your time for as low as 100K IDR/hour, that means you spent 900K IDR worth of efforts for committing to one FREE dinner invitation. And that's excluding travel expenses, camera's cost, internet bills or electricity. Or the pain of building up your skill to become the food blogger you are now.

Suddenly the "FREE" invitations doesn't sound like one any more eh?

The Rewards

To be fair though, let's have a look at rewards offered from such invitations:

1. A good night out
2. Content for your blog
3. Acquaintance with chefs and their cooking styles
4. Chance of networking with people in the industry
5. Expanding your gastronomic knowledge
6. Goodie bags, sometimes
7. Etc.

While there's no real money put on the table, depending what you're food blogging for, you might find those rewards interesting, and worth the efforts. 

I myself found #3 and #4 worth for now (and #6 for the wifey), that's why I do accepts dinner invitation, especially when there will be interesting people attending.

What about you? Do you find dinner invitations worth the time spent, and why? (byms)