An Indonesian in Mississippi. Not as catchy as "An Englishman in New York"
Key card
Actual dates: October 21-24, 2008
We left Surabaya and headed to Yogyakarta to visit Borobudur Temple, Kraton Yogyakarta (palace), and the Malioboro street market. While we were there we stayed at the Grand Mercure Yogyakarta, which since then has apparently been rebranded as the Phoenix Hotel. I like Grand Mercure better myself–sounds more, well, grand, which really is an apt adjective for this fine hotel.
Happy family
Actual date: October 19, 2008
Rewind is back! More specifically Indonesia Trip 2008 is back!
Happy Labor Day 2010, everybody. Denise has been nudging me to resume posting about our trip in 2008, so here I am doing some of that while enjoying Labor Day. I’ve decided to start putting the “Actual date” info in red so as to minimize confusion for future posts about the trip. Hopefully when you see the line of red text you’ll immediately know it’s a Rewind post, especially since I’ve also got some stuff from earlier this year that I’m behind on that will be making its way here soon. Rewind-splosion. No, we didn’t go to Indonesia again. Yes, this stuff is from 2 years ago. But it’s still way cool and I’m not gonna let good blogging material go to waste. Again, when reading this blog just ignore the accepted rules of time and space and go with the flow. Time travel is a common occurrence in the Pamudji-verse.
Party time
Sofia turned 4, and we threw her her first honest-to-goodness birthday party. Actually mostly Denise threw the party, and I was basically along for the ride. We didn’t do anything big–inflatable pools, beach balls, sprinklers, party favors, cake and sherbert, lemonade, and a few of Sofia’s friends from church and the neighborhood. Even so, Sofia was a bit overwhelmed and kept mostly to herself while the party was still raucous. Oh, she had fun. It’s just that she mostly had fun by herself. We’ll have to work on that.
Penelope's eyes
♫ “She has her eyes, she has my Lily’s hazel eyes…” ♫ Oh… ehem. Sorry, got nostalgic for my college days for a sec there.
I’d been trying to get a good shot of this since Penelope was born, but she’d never stay still long enough or keep her eyes open enough to do so. She has these beautiful grayish-brown/brownish-gray colored eyes. Asians with eye color anything but black (very dark brown, but might as well be black) are rare, so this is an exotic look. Thank you, Denise.
There’s a new show on Cooking Channel called Food Truck Revolution. It highlights what’s apparently one of the hottest new trends in food–food trucks. Taco trucks have been around for a long time–not around here, but in other parts of the U.S.–but these trucks are different. How about sushi, Southern fare, Korean fusion, crepes, buttermilk pancakes, “gourmet” tacos, wagyu beef dishes, etc. from a truck? Suspicious? Maybe, until you see them in action. These are honest to goodness restaurants on wheels, and the food they’re serving up looks amazing.
Aside from the obvious interest in the food, it was also interesting for me to see how these food trucks operate. Many of the owners use Twitter to update their followers on where they’ll be and when. See, I’m usually a Twitter-phobic. It’s typically useless dreck from people displaying the banality of their lives for all to see. After all, how informative, interesting, or profound can you be when you’re limited to 140 characters at a time? But this is a good use of Twitter. With the proliferation of smartphones and almost all office workers having Internet access, a truck owner can tweet their location and that message immediately goes out to everybody following his Twitter account. Mass communication doesn’t get more direct and immediate than that. I never thought I’d approve of the commercialization of social networking outlets and in general it still makes me queasy, but in this case I don’t mind small local businesses using grassroots methods to keep in touch with their fans, especially with the ever-changing nature of the food truck business.
We caught the first episode last Sunday, another episode is coming this Sunday, 8/29/2010 and I believe it also reruns later that night. I don’t know how long this show will run or if it’s just a mini series, but it’s fun so we’ll watch it while it lasts and dream of the day that Jackson gets its own food trucks. There are rumors of a taco truck in Jackson, and I’ve seen a taco truck driving down I-55, but until I eat food from a food truck in Jackson I won’t believe it’s real, and even then we’ll be a long way from where bigger cities are with their food truck scenes. I look forward to a world where I can receive tweets from my favorite food trucks telling me what street downtown they’ll be on that day.
Seoul Restaurant
One last post about my trip to the coast. On my way out I stopped at Seoul Restaurant–unsurprisingly a Korean restaurant. It’s just one turn off the main drag in Biloxi, but when you drive down the street it’s on you might wonder like me if you’re on the right street at all since you drive through a residential area to get to it. Just keep driving for a bit, cross the train tracks, and it’s on the other side of the tracks on the left.
I believe this is the first Korean restaurant I’ve ever been to. To my knowledge there isn’t one in Jackson (please correct me if I’m mistaken–I’d love to go to one here), and I didn’t know much about Seoul Restaurant before I went other than a couple visitor reviews online, so for me this was a bit of a gamble but one I was excited to take. I’m not one to throw my money away at the casinos, but I’ll bet on good food any day.
Seafood gumbo
I had the privilege of being guests to members of the Pass Christian Yacht Club, which is why we were able to eat at their restaurant. They don’t normally let in riff-raff like me. Upon browsing the menu I was surprised to see how reasonable the food prices were. I guess they get you with the membership dues so they can afford to not charge crazy money for food.
A few of us got the seafood gumbo appetizer. The photo might look like a muddy mess, but if you know what you’re looking at you know there’s probably some good stuff in there, and there was–nice lumps of crab, shrimp, etc. Quite good gumbo. I’ve had better, but this one got no complaints from me.
Mary Mahoney's
I was down on the Coast with Brian, and he insisted on taking me out to eat at Mary Mahoney’s in Biloxi. Twist my arm a bit harder–I don’t think I’m quite convinced yet. Coincidence (or not) that I had made a mental note about Mary Mahoney’s while doing a pre-trip search for eateries on the Coast. Brian claimed Mary Mahoney’s to be the best restaurant in the area, so of course I was psyched.
Oh, and for the sake of some readers who get excited about restaurant posts only to find out much later that these restaurants are in a different city (*cough* Rebecca *cough*), I’ll try to state the city in the title if it’s not in the Jackson Metro area.
Oil clean-up site
Yes, I’m back!!! Boy, who knew having 2 kids would be so much work, especially with a colicky baby? Not me. I have some down time and figure what better way to return to the blog then to celebrate the end of the oil gush (ok, probably a bit premature, but let’s hope it’s true) with a blog post about oil? In a few years we’ll look back at these oil-filled days and reminisce fondly. Ah, the good old days when oil = bad, and environmentalism = good. Such simple, innocent times. “Ah, the Summer of 2010,” we’ll utter with a nostalgic sigh. » Continue Reading…
Lovely ladies
“Penelo-phernalia”… oh man, I’m so clever. So yeah, now that I’m mostly back from the land of the walking dead here are a few more pics. If our family weren’t so nice they’d already have the pitchforks out. 5 days without a single pic of baby Penelope–a travesty.