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Published: January 31st 2006
Slum
A typical scene of third world country, where the economic gap between the rich and the poor is in extreme condition.New Year’s Eve is on tonight!
It was around nine in the evening when Beau and I arrived in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta, after roughly eight hour flight from Seoul, South Korea. Mom, Dad, my sister Leona, brother in law Julius and niece Kayla, were meeting us at the
Soekarno-Hatta International Airport arrival lounge, and we were fortunate enough to experience the notorious Indonesian street ‘riot’ celebrations for New Year’s Eve on our way to my aunt’s house in
Kelapa Gading.
I was expecting many New Year’s Eve festivity chaos and wild things to happen throughout the mega polis. To start with, we drive at the ‘wrong’ left side of the road, as Beau describes it, and everybody seems to be in close proximity to each other: pedestrian, cars, mopeds, and food vendors. People are everywhere with party hats and paper trumpets, zigzagging their ways, only inches away through rows of cars on their mopeds.
I had a great time catching up with my family once again, especially to finally meet Kayla, my two year old niece, for the first time. My family bought me and Beau many
Bajaj
Gosh, this thing was fun to ride on. After you get pass the gasoline smell and the exploding sound, you would love this pimple. authentic Indonesian snacks and local fruits, of which by now I’m fully aware that many of them simply only has local names as I had difficulties in translating them to English for Beau.
Naturally Beau becomes the center of attention; it seems like he has a hard time to cope with overwhelming culture shock. It might sound cruel, but it is entertaining to watch Beau acting with some mishaps, meanwhile I’m doing by best to explain the complex Indonesian culture and to translate almost every conversations to English (and to Indonesian). Whiew.
As our family’s tradition, at the strike of midnight on New Year’s Eve, we made a toast with traditional Chinese sparkling wine of
Pu Tao.
Selamat Tahun Baru! Happy New Year!
Saturday, January 1, 2005 - Jakarta, Indonesia Today is an ultimate challenge for catching up with Indonesia’s eating and culinary!
Indonesian fruits are unique to the South East Asian region. Fresh tropical fruits are available everywhere, from local supermarkets to street food vendors. There are wide selections from the most common ones such as bananas (with more than forty different varieties ranging from 4 inches to 1.5 feet in
MoNas
National Monument of Indonesia. fruit size), papaya, mango, guava, star fruit, to some of the most extreme ones, such as durians (spiky skinned fruit about the size of volleyball, mushy on the inside with a strong smell of rotten onion, textured like yellowish wet socks on your mouth, but devilish delicious), jackfruits (rough texture on the outside, about the size of a Scottish terrier, layers of yellow sweet rubbery insides), kedongdongs (green fruit sized of an average orange, of which shells are so tough that you have to literally throw them to the floor in order to crack them open), passion fruits, mangosteen or manggis, duku, scaly salaks, and hairy rambutans. I have no idea on how to explain the rest in words.
My family got Beau a ‘tropical fruits’ poster for him to learn from a man selling many posters at one of Jakarta’s traffic jam.
Comprehending Indonesian flavorful food, which mostly contains many local spices, is even more complicated than learning tropical fruits names. As the capital city, Jakarta is the ‘melting pot’ of cuisine from other parts of Indonesia, a country of more than 17,000 islands of 300 ethnic groups, which speak their own languages. Other parts of the
Tropical fruits of Indonesia
(from left-right) duku, kedongdong, salak, marquisa, guava, manggis, and durian. world also contributed the Jakarta’s rich selection of meals.
The most common ones are the tasty
Satay Ayam or chicken kebab on a stick, served with sweet peanut sauce, and
lontong (steamed, banana-leaves-wrapped rice that cut into squares).
Soto, or very strong flavor but tasty curry , which has unknown ingredients as sometimes whatever found in the field is thrown into the pot, boiled with spices. Most of Indonesian cuisine is served with
krupuk, or fried chips made of flour, addictive food accent that can be snacked on. Chinese food dominates our diet during our visit in Jakarta, so tasty fried toad legs on brown sauce and noodles served with meatballs become our daily routine.
My favorite is the Teh Botol, bottled sweet tea that is a very popular Indonesian soft drink. Indonesians are not big into alcohol, as it is predominantly Muslim, so even though the famous Bir Bintang is all over the place, the culture dictates a different way to treat alcohol.
Have you heard about Habaneras as the hottest peppers in the world? Well, it’s proven to be a wrong statement, and ask Beau for a confirmation. We had a very good laugh at
Cicak
The Indonesian version of geiko. Beau in a small Chinese restaurant when he found several small green pepper about 2” long, locally known as
cengek. After hearing my answer confirming that the peppers are super hot, he took a big bite of the pepper anyway, with my whole family watching in disbelieve. His kaleidoscopic face was turning from pink into steamy red then close to shade of purple. Drinking ice water and Teh Botol didn’t help, so Mom gave him a hot tea to wash off his tongue tasting palette, which I’m sure was an extremely burning painful experience, but definitely helped to ease the pain. Even Beau was laughing along with us, after crying for some time.
Beau has left his glasses in our Seoul hostel yesterday, so we went to Kelapa Gading Mall to have a pair of glasses subscribed for him. The eye exam was definitely an interesting one, as I acted as a translator between the eye doctor and Beau. So while Beau was reading (in English) what the screen shows, I have to translate the letters and numbers. ‘E’ becomes ‘eh’, ‘K’ becomes ‘ka’, ‘A’ as in ‘father’, and so on. Fortunately they are open during the New Year’s
Fried toad legs
They are very tasty! Day, and the glasses will be ready this evening.
Sunday, January 2, 2005 - Jakarta, Indonesia The travel advisory of the official US website suggests all US citizens in Indonesia to register at the Embassy in Jakarta or Consulate General in Surabaya or Bali. With Beau in mind, we visited the American Embassy in Jakarta. What’s up with US Embassies in all Muslim countries? The US Government constantly has a feeling that their Embassy in Jakarta is under threat, as the result, it is fenced off with barbwires and heavily guarded by Indonesian law enforcement. Almost nearly half a mile to either directions of Jl Merdeka Selatan, is blocked off with construction concrete bars, seems like the DMZ area in North/South Korea border I’ve seen on TV. Inside the embassy is technically a US soil, so everyone needs a passport to enter the embassy. No additional stamps applied to the passports though.
Riding an Indonesian tuk-tuk or
Bajaj (pronounced like, “buh-ji”) is a defining moment. It is definitely an Indonesian pastime; Bajaj was originated in India, which made its first debut in Indonesia back in the 1960s. They are all over Jakarta, very remarkable with
Roasted fish
Interesting ... the bright orange color and noise like a motorcycle about to blow up. As modern cars and sedans started to take over Jakarta’s road, Bajaj became scarcer to find, especially after the government banned all traditional transportation means of old Jakarta’s Bemo (a smaller version of Bajaj), and Becak (rickshaws).
MoNas, or the Indonesia’s National Monument, equivalent to the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., is conveniently located nearby the US Embassy ground. The basement of MoNas provides many illustrative dioramas of Indonesian history, while the ground level contains many important national archives, including the 1945 Declaration of Independence from Dutch occupation, announced by the charismatic first president Soekarno.
The international world finally recognized the bravely statement in 1949, creating a four year historic discrepancy of Republic of Indonesia’s birth year. Top level of MoNas contains the famous gold plated flame sculpture, and the only way to get up to the top is by elevators. From observation deck above, we saw the nearby Mesjid Istiqlal, the biggest mosque in South East Asia, sits side-by-side with Dutch architecture of National Cathedral, showing the ideal religious freedom philosophy of Indonesia.
Ironically, the two religions are constantly put to the test;
Durian
It was a struggle to open these suckers, in addition to the smell that wouldn't go away for days. with the climax of 1998 Jakarta riot which discriminated against the Chinese ethnic group who are mostly Christians or Buddhist by the native Indonesian’s Muslims. Thousands of people, mostly Christians, were killed in the riot, while others fled out the country and never set a foot back in Indonesia ever since. This is when the President Soeharto regime was replaced by force from his 32-year reign of power.
The ticket lady in MoNas complemented on my Indonesian language skill when I bought two admission tickets for Beau and I.
‘
Bu, beli dua tiket untuk naik ke atas Monas’ (Ma’am, I need two tickets to go to the top of MoNas). I smiled while waving some Indo rupiahs. Maybe I was using a very formal form of
Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia. And standing next to white Beau didn’t help, either.
‘
Ehh, fasih yah Bahasa Indonesia nya!’ (Wow, you’re very fluent in Indonesian!). Definitely was impressed, she was staring at us while passing two tickets back through the window opening.
I was a little bit flabbergasted, maybe because this was my first time I was complemented for speaking my mother tongue language. ‘
Terima kasih! Saya dari Bandung.’ (Thank
US Embassy, Jakarta
A heavily guarded US Embassy in Jakarta. you! I’m from Bandung - FYI, it’s a city in West Java, about 3hr driving from Jakarta). I winked at her, and we proceeded to the elevator that would bring us to the observation deck of MoNas.
Bahasa Indonesia is derived from Malay language that becomes the Indonesia’s official national language after the 1928’s attempt of integrating Indonesian cultures and languages throughout the expansive archipelago. From what I’ve read,
Bahasa Indonesia wasn’t even the first language of majority of Indonesians back in 1960s, which speaks more than 300 different languages instead. The
Bahasa Indonesia becomes the only language spoken in younger generation in bigger cities such as Jakarta, forgetting the native Javanese or Sundanese, two of the biggest spoken languages in Indonesia.
Did I tell you about how much Beau is adapting with his culture shock? In fact, he is bonding very well with my two year old niece Kayla, and they are both learning one of Indonesian popular kids songs, “
Cicak-cicak di Dinding” (Cicak on the wall). Cicak is a household creature, looks a lot like a gecko, and runs fairly quickly to catch a nearby bug. Well, at least that’s what the song illustrates, which both
Monumen Nasional
I was standing proudly in front of the National Monument. Beau and Kayla can perform pretty well:
Cicak-cicak di dinding.
Diam-diam merayap.
Datang seekor nyamuk
Hap! Lalu ditangkap. (Cicak on the wall is quietly crawling. A mosquito comes over, and hap! It is caught.)
It is hard to translate Indonesian to English sometimes, due to its lack of tenses and plurals.
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