Cuisine in Indonesia and Indonesian cuisine

Indonesian food is usually rice or noodles with prawns, fish and chicken. There are of course other items like calamari but pretty much everything that contains meat comes with chicken and prawns and fish. Of course, I've been here only a couple of weeks and have not tried everything. Dishes, like the aforementioned, generally also include green onions and several types of herbs. Chili sauce is a condiment and comes in packets with even Pizza. On Saturday two teachers and I took the Austrailian teacher's kids to Pizza hut. They wanted the "Meat Lover's" pizza which here means a whole lot of chopped up beef hot dogs--pretty gross. Pepporini would have been much preferable and it was on the menu. I noticed also that they served a stuff crust pizza that is stuffed with beef sausage--of course pork is not available. The cheese is generally considered terrible by all Westerners who love cheese--on the pizza it tastes like any other. Another pizza offering was "beeforn" which, if you can believe it, is beef sausage and corn. In Singapore I noticed (and I can't recall if I already posted this anecdote) that SE Asians have a rather humorous misunderstanding of what Americans eat. We were in a food court which housed a variety of restaurants including Thai, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and "Western." The Western restaurant advertised its notion of the "Classic American Breakfast"--scrambled eggs, pancakes, and fried chicken. Fried chicken is abundant in Medan and it is usually called "Kentucky Fried Chicken" even when it does not come from KFC. McDonald's and Starbuck's have a presence here, along with KFC and A&W and even Dunkin' Donuts. Other shops, presumably locally run, trying to compete with these, include Texas Fried Chicken, and, comically, California Fried Chicken. There is also a Papa Ron's. Most expats in search of steak or burritos go to a place called The Traders which unlike every other place in town, is relatively expensive. Generally one can eat out for under 2 dollars US, at Tradder's most things run to 3 or 4 dollars and some items are as high as 30.

It is quite easy to find very good Chinese food, Sushi, and Thai and I believe that I will be dining at "the best Thai restaurant in Medan" tomorrow night. This is the recommendation of a Singaporean teacher who seems to knows the city, and food, quite well. She is also the one who saved me from feeling obligated to eat bean pudding, so I trust her.

Generally, the food is good but I have had cravings for items that are not available or available but of a very poor quality. My roommate and I have been the recipients of many pastries, bread, and recently a very nice, and exquisitely decorated chocolate mint cake. The refrigerator is rather small and so there is almost no room for anything else and much of it will have to go to waste.

On the van ride to school this morning I noticed a couple of children who, unlike the others we passed, were not clad in a school uniform but rather, very dirty and ill-fitting clothes--one t-shirt featured the face of Charles Barkley when he was with the Phoenix Suns, that was roughly 12 years ago. As circumstance would have it they were knelt at the mouth of a squalid alleyway bordered on both sides by rundown buildings. Not every child in Medan goes to school.

The Chinese expats, and those Indonesians of Chinese descent, will often say when recommending a restaurant or shopping area that it's "safe." Originally, I thought that this meant that they were worried about my safety as an American abroad, but Medan is not Aceh, nor even Jakarta--it's large Chinese population seems to be apolitical, and the Indonesians here rally far less often that do in other cities. When I have talked to local Indonesians who are not Chinese, they are friendly and while we cannot really communicate, they don't seem to have any anti-american bias which is to say that they can distinguish between policy and people. The word for "I'm sorry" in Indonesian is "Maaf" (pronounced 'Ma off'). One gentlemen responded when I told him I was American by saying "Amereeka, BOOSH. BOOSH NO!" I said "Bush, Maaf" and he erupted in laughter. What the Chinese mean when they say that a place is safe is that it is safe for them. The Chinese were given preferential treatment by the Dutch during colonial times and used their status to attain great wealth. The disparity between them and the average Indonesian is vast and when there is political upheaval, it is the Chinese who are targeted, not Westerners of whom there are so few that little resentment seems to exist, again this Medan, not Aceh.