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.
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.
The spread
We’ve tried the bread at Omonia before, but what really intrigued us was their menu full of tortas, tacos, empanadas, etc. When we stopped by the first time we were stuffed with dim sum so we only got some breads. This time we planned well ahead of time to be there with empty stomachs ready to enjoy a full meal. » Continue Reading…
La Morena
A blogger named YAR who runs the Carpe Jackson food blog told us about La Morena in the comments section of my post about Omonia, so of course we had to try it out a few weeks ago. It’s hidden away in a little nook of a strip mall just off Old Canton Road that looks to be populated mostly by Mexican or Latin American businesses. The storefronts aren’t visible from the street, so you can be excused for not even knowing it was there. I didn’t know until YAR told me, so thanks for the tip. There are only 4 tables, but the bar space makes up for that somewhat. It wasn’t a busy night, so we were able to sit down right away.
As an aside, when it snowed in December we were coming back from a Mexican restaurant. This time when we got out of our car to walk to La Morena we had some snow flurries fall on us. It’s a sign! » Continue Reading…
Ding How
A few weekends ago we revisited Ding How for another round of dim sum. First time around was good if slightly frantic in terms of service, which was understandable considering it was their first weekend of serving dim sum. The manager was so frazzled after that first weekend she considered abandoning the menu system and going to dim sum carts, which I was glad to discover they didn’t end up doing after all. With a large, high-traffic restaurant the cart system works great, but not so much with a cozier layout like Ding How where food might sit on the carts for a long time after cooking. They did, however, trim the menu a bit to make it more manageable, and items are now ordered by relative portion size and price. It’s a lot easier to sift through. » Continue Reading…
"Oh yes, sushi... you will be mine!"
Oops, in my haste to post as many Nifty Adventures posts as I could before the next guy started taking shots and posting them in the discussion thread, I missed this outing. When Susie was still here for Christmas we went out to Haru, I mean “Edo”, Japanese Restaurant. Haru is no more. New management has come in and renamed it Edo. Same location, same menu, same great ingredients–only a name change. Not sure why, but there it is. The new management had happened a while back, and we’d been to Haru/Edo a few times since and been happy with the food and service, but the official name change is recent. » Continue Reading…
Stix
After our baby-doctor visit we grabbed some lunch at Stix. Stix is a hibachi grill and sushi place similar to Kyoto, Bonsai, and any number of other “Japanese steakhouse” places in town. Stix had to close down for a while a couple years ago, but they’re open again now. Not sure how long they’ve been open–this is the first time I’ve been back since my office moved downtown. Or, er, we moved to a new office downtown. The old office is still right where it was. » Continue Reading…
"There's the baby right there."
Short version: don’t take pictures at a baby-doctor clinic, or probably any clinic for that matter. » Continue Reading…