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.
Morning workout
Actual dates: October 18-20, 2008
Such a hard life–strenuous yoga and Goldfish crackers in the morning. We went to great pains to ensure our Indonesian experience was as authentic as possible. » Continue Reading…
Kool and the gang
Actual date: October 18, 2008
The day after my parents’ mega-super-duper shindig we all packed into the car and went to Surabaya for a couple days on our way to Yogyakarta. Denise, Sofia, and I were scheduled to go to a get-together organized by some old (and I do mean “old”–graduated in 1994) high school friends of mine that evening. Some of my high school friends and I still keep in touch with each other through an unofficial, member-run class mailing list, and when I mentioned that I would be coming to Indonesia a few of them formed a small impromptu committee of sorts and put this gathering in motion–deciding on a time and place, sending out invites, and organizing every detail. One of them even picked us up from the hotel where we were staying, since we’re not familiar with the streets of Surabaya. » Continue Reading…
Snake fruit
Actual date: October 18, 2009
This is a fruit called salak, nicknamed “snake fruit” in English because of its scaly skin. The hard, scaly skin peels off to reveal the off-white fruit inside divided into 3 sections. The sizes of these sections vary from instance to instance: 3 relatively equally sized sections, 2 big and 1 small, or 1 big and 2 small. The larger sections have a hard pit in them.
This is a fairly labor-intensive fruit to eat. First you have to peel off the outer skin, which if you’re not careful can cut your fingers. I usually tear off the pointy tip and start working my way down. Then you rub the inner fruit sections to remove a transparent membrane/skin from them, which can take a few minutes.
The payoff is a fruit that isn’t very fruity to westerners used to thinking of fruits as being juicy and sweet, because salak is neither. Denise wasn’t a fan, but this is one of my favorite Indonesian fruits, probably second after the Manalagi mango, which is one of the many local variants unavailable in America. If you’re a fan of mangos and ever make it to Indonesia, you must try some Manalagi. When unripe the fruit is white in color, a touch tart with dark pockets of sugar concentration spread throughout the fruit. This is my preferred ripeness at which to eat this mango. When it’s fully ripe it’s incredibly sweet–way too sweet for me. We ate some (not enough!) in Indonesia, but I have no pictures of it. The mango intoxication made me forget my camera.
Sorry, don’t have pictures of the innards of the salak either. This was taken at 8 a.m. and I wasn’t about to eat any, so I didn’t think to peel one just for pictures. See, I told you I’m a terrible travelogger/foodblogger.
Crowd of hundreds
Actual date: October 17, 2008
The original impetus for our trip to Indonesia was that mom and dad were going to have a multiple-purpose get-together to celebrate mom’s birthday, their anniversary, their many years of service to the church (the church wanted to celebrate that–they weren’t showing off), and to give thanks for me and Denise having gotten married. That last bit was supposed to be celebrated in 2005, but that was the year of the Bali bomb incident and we took the U.S. State Department’s travel advisory (“Don’t go to Indonesia unless you have to.”) very seriously and ended up cancelling that trip. In retrospect with Indonesia being generally safe–not a warzone or anything–and our lives being in God’s hands we might’ve chosen differently with what we know now, but that’s how it went down at the time. So this get-together became a huge deal with hundreds of people invited and a huge feast of food mostly prepared and paid for by people who had known mom and dad for many years and wanted to help celebrate this occasion. » Continue Reading…
Mom, dad, and Susie.
Actual date: October 16, 2008
The first restaurant we went to was a Chinese restaurant in Surabaya right after we landed. On day 2 we went to our first Indonesian food restaurant: Gadjah Mada restaurant in Malang. I call it an Indonesian restaurant because its main dishes are uniquely Indonesian despite their distinctly Chinese roots. Gadjah Mada is known for its Pangsit Mie, which is a noodle dish (mie = noodles) served with dumplings similar to Gyoza (pangsit = a type of dumpling). Despite the name, instead of fried/boiled dumplings you can get it served with a variety of other meats on top of the noodles like shredded or ground meat, meatballs, etc. Beef and chicken are popular toppings, while pork is more likely to be served at Chinese-inclined restaurants where their clientele are less likely to be muslim. » Continue Reading…
Weary world traveler
Actual date: October 16, 2008
Day 2? What happened to day 1? I didn’t take any pictures on day 1–that’s what happened. Yes, from the moment we touched down in Indonesia through the end of day 1 I managed to not take a single shot. I’ll hide behind the excuse that I was tired and just ready to relax, but as a self-proclaimed photographer and one who thought about making a half-decent travelog out of the trip that really isn’t good enough. Do better next time. » Continue Reading…
Carry-on baggage
Actual date(s): October 13, 2008 – October 15, 2008
No, the title of this post isn’t a banned substance reference. This is the first in the promised series of Indonesia Trip 2008 posts, for which you can click the tag “Indonesia Trip 2008″ at the bottom of this post or the bottom of the page to access all posts in this category once I’ve built up more than one post.
Side note: we actually went to Singapore for a few days too, but “Indonesia-Singapore Trip 2008″ gives too much emphasis to the very short stay in Singapore (plus it’s a bit long), and calling it “Southeast Asia Trip 2008″ makes it sound like it was much farther-reaching than it was. Maybe “Indonesia-Singapore Trip 2008″ would work.
You’re reading the dates correctly. We really did leave on October 13th and arrive on October 15th. Our flight out of Jackson was October 13 at 6:30 a.m. local time, and our arrival in Surabaya was on October 15th at 10:00 a.m. local time. They’re 12 hours ahead, so that’s 39.5 hours of travel for those keeping score. A lot of it was layover time at airports, and we even managed a few hours sleep in an in-airport hotel in Singapore, but that’s how long it took total to get to Indonesia. Then it was another 1.5 hours or so to get to mom and dad’s house. What’s taking scientists so long to perfect the Star Trek-style teleporters anyhow?! » Continue Reading…