written on July 14, 2010
We got up really early at 4am this morning and got on a plane to fly to Jakarta. Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia. So far it's been a lot of cars, big roads, expensive taxis, and expensive food. There are a lot more foreigners here. A lot more people speak English. Big shopping malls, restaurants, and fancy stores. It's a really big change from Padang. Almost like going from the village to the city.
We're here Wednesday and Thursday and had planned to have three meetings a day for both days. But people are out of the country and traveling so we're down to only one meeting a day. This is not such a bad thing for us since we have a lot of work that we need to do. We're staying at a pretty nice hotel. Huge bed, soft pillows, real shower, hair dryer, pool, gym, free breakfast, etc. We all appreciate it a lot more coming from our dorm room in Padang.
Friday morning, we're taking a bus to Bandung, where we have another meeting. There is a university there, ITB, that has some of the best science research in the country. We may or may not develop a partnership with them. We're not really sure about their interest in the project and if it's worth the effort of setting something up. I guess we'll see how the meeting goes. If we want to set up some form of partnership, I think we'll need to spend at least a week at ITB to find the right people to work with.
Update (7.15.2010): We're no longer going to Bandung. Meeting the guy in Jakarta instead.
Coming to this big city feels kind of weird after having been in a small city/town for a couple of weeks. Padang feels so much more walkable and welcoming. I really like our little neighborhood in Padang. We basically have everything we need within walking distance. Really getting used to the place. Already missing it.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Food
written on July 11, 2010
This is a very important topic. I think I spend at least half my time talking about food with people. It's either the project or food.
People eat a lot of rice here. It's always white rice but not really the kind that I'm used to. I think my family usually get jasmine rice from Thailand. Here the serve a shorter grain that's puffier and not as sticky. All of my housemates find it ridiculous that Indonesians would eat rice three times a day. Their meals consists of mostly rice with small pieces of meat and chili sauce.
When you go to a restaurant, they will get a plate with rice and you can pick out what you want from their selection of dishes that they've already cooked. Most things are swimming in chili sauce. There are usually a few kinds of fried fish, chicken, beef cooked in sauce, and vegetables. Vegetables are free. More like garnish than anything. After you eat, you go up to the register and tell them what you've eaten. This part was the most difficult part of eating but it's been getting easier. You can also ask for “Padang style” where they will bring all the dishes in small plates and you just take and pay for what you want to eat. They tend to charge you more than you eat this way though so we don't do this very often.
We've been buying bread lately for breakfast. They call bread “roti” which I think is a borrow word from India. Their bread (and everything else) tends to be sweet. They're like what you get at Chinese bakeries. They're not hard like western bread. I really think I prefer this soft, sweet stuff more than the western kind. Westerners don't see this real bread though.
Speaking of sweetness, everything here is either super spicy or super sweet. You can get fruit juice almost anywhere. They would first put chocolate syrup at the bottom (mostly for decoration), fill the cup half way with sweetened condensed milk, squeeze some juice, and then dump in sugar. Tea is served with a ton of sweetened condensed milk as well. I really like sweetened condensed milk but this is really too much! Sometimes I feel like I'm just drinking sugar. I wonder if they put sugar into sugarcane juice too.... I heard that this is a regional thing though. Some parts of Indonesia, no sugar is the default.
This is a very important topic. I think I spend at least half my time talking about food with people. It's either the project or food.
People eat a lot of rice here. It's always white rice but not really the kind that I'm used to. I think my family usually get jasmine rice from Thailand. Here the serve a shorter grain that's puffier and not as sticky. All of my housemates find it ridiculous that Indonesians would eat rice three times a day. Their meals consists of mostly rice with small pieces of meat and chili sauce.
When you go to a restaurant, they will get a plate with rice and you can pick out what you want from their selection of dishes that they've already cooked. Most things are swimming in chili sauce. There are usually a few kinds of fried fish, chicken, beef cooked in sauce, and vegetables. Vegetables are free. More like garnish than anything. After you eat, you go up to the register and tell them what you've eaten. This part was the most difficult part of eating but it's been getting easier. You can also ask for “Padang style” where they will bring all the dishes in small plates and you just take and pay for what you want to eat. They tend to charge you more than you eat this way though so we don't do this very often.
We've been buying bread lately for breakfast. They call bread “roti” which I think is a borrow word from India. Their bread (and everything else) tends to be sweet. They're like what you get at Chinese bakeries. They're not hard like western bread. I really think I prefer this soft, sweet stuff more than the western kind. Westerners don't see this real bread though.
Speaking of sweetness, everything here is either super spicy or super sweet. You can get fruit juice almost anywhere. They would first put chocolate syrup at the bottom (mostly for decoration), fill the cup half way with sweetened condensed milk, squeeze some juice, and then dump in sugar. Tea is served with a ton of sweetened condensed milk as well. I really like sweetened condensed milk but this is really too much! Sometimes I feel like I'm just drinking sugar. I wonder if they put sugar into sugarcane juice too.... I heard that this is a regional thing though. Some parts of Indonesia, no sugar is the default.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Conference: Indonesian Style
Written on July 8th, 2010
Today we attended a UNESCO conference on building back better after earthquakes. Registration goes from 8:00am to 8:30am so we arrived at around 8:15am or so. We registered and walked into a completely empty room. We chose seats and everything and proceeded to wait forever. The opening ceremony didn't start until almost 9:30am, nearly an hour late! Everyone was still drifting in, checking cell phones, on laptops, etc. They pretty much stayed on time for all the talks though. I guess the speakers all just expect to have less times than was advertised.
Today we attended a UNESCO conference on building back better after earthquakes. Registration goes from 8:00am to 8:30am so we arrived at around 8:15am or so. We registered and walked into a completely empty room. We chose seats and everything and proceeded to wait forever. The opening ceremony didn't start until almost 9:30am, nearly an hour late! Everyone was still drifting in, checking cell phones, on laptops, etc. They pretty much stayed on time for all the talks though. I guess the speakers all just expect to have less times than was advertised.
As with meetings, having people talking on cell phones and walking around is pretty normal for conferences. It was kind of nice to be able to walk to get tea or go to the bathroom whenever though. Most of the presentations were in Indonesian so it was kind of hard for us to follow everything.
The food was pretty good though. Snacks for meetings and conferences consists of two kinds of small pastries. One is usually more substantial, usually either a meat thing wrapped in tofu skin (kind of like something you would get a dim sum), and a sweet thing like sponge cake. There is usually also a really spicy chili somewhere in the first thing that you must be careful to find and take out if you can't handle super spiciness. For lunch we ate at the hotel's restaurant, which had food in buffet style. The food was pretty good. It even had one dish that was mostly vegetables. Getting vegetables is a big thing for us here, if you couldn't tell already.
Not sure the conference was all that helpful, even for people who understood Indonesian. I go to a lot of ASCE events in the Bay Area, not necessarily to learn the topic of the talk but to network with people. The networking is much easier when you speak the same language.
Fun Food Adventures
Written on: 2010.07.07
Hopefully the entry before this one contains pictures! We've been having some really crazy adventures this week. As if our lives weren't busy enough, the World Cup semi-finals and final starts at 1:30am in this country. So our plan so far have been to sleep a few hours, wake up, and then sleep some more.
Last night was pretty crazy. After a long day of language classes and meetings, we went to the Construction Clinic (where the Andalas University students have sort of an office) and did some seminar preparations. This seminar has been put together so fast that it's really amazing. Things tend to take long when you're in a foreign country. Here, there tends to be a lot of waiting for people after we've scheduled meetings. But this seminar has basically been put together in a week. We've already reserved the hotel, invited people, and preparations are going full speed ahead.
Continues writing on 2010.07.08
After we finished up for the day, we took the local public transit back to where we're staying. The public transit system consists of these minibuses. The previous post has pictures of them. They basically take out the chairs and put in benches along the sides and pile people in. Sometimes it gets pretty cramped. There are different colored ones that drive different loops around the city. You just hop on the one that you need and get off whenever you want. They have a set price of 2,000 rupiah (about $0.20) per person per ride. Longer rides cost slightly more. There's never a wait for these things because the drivers themselves are actively looking for customers. It's like an organized taxi system. It's pretty nice since there's no waiting or having to get off at a certain stop. They'll stop whenever. There are also “city buses” that run along the main roads. They work the same way.
When we got to our place, we were pretty hungry and went around looking for food. This wasn't hard since there are a lot of choices around us. We saw this cart that was advertising matebak, which VC really likes. She's been talking about them and described them as sort of like flat omelets with different types of filling. So we decided to order three for dinner. As we were waiting, we noticed that they were making something that were more like cake. Then they started putting on lots of butter, along with sugar, tons of chocolate sprinkles, and sweetened condensed milk. They're really into sweeten condensed milk here. Everything here is crazy sweet. At some point, we noticed that all the other customers were kids. We realized that this cannot be our dinner so two of us went to get some vegetables to go with the noodles that we would cook.
Greg and I went to across the street and was about to go into a restaurant when VC walks up to us and asks if we had paid already. We were like, “no, we thought you stayed behind to pay.” And then we noticed that the guy following her was one of the guys from the matebak stand. Turns out that when VC tried to pay, the guy said, “belum, belum” which means not yet. She tried again and he repeated himself so she thought “belum” meant “already”. We didn't have exact change so she went back across the street with that guy to pay him.
Greg and I were still laughing about this when we got to one of the restaurants. They had some cooked spinach left and I tried to order some to-go. I definitely got the word “vegetable” and “to-go” right but she was really confused at why I would want just the vegetables. People here think of vegetables as more like garnish than anything edible. Greg suggested that we get some rice to go with the noodles and I immediately realized this would be the only way to get her to give us some vegetables. So we ordered a thing of rice and asked for vegetables to go on it. She proceeded to give us like a couple of leaves and then asked if we wanted sauce. She pointed at two different sauces and then at the various meats. And we were like, uh, can we just get more vegetables? We thought this whole exchange was pretty hilarious. The rice and vegetables came wrapped in banana leaf and looks kind of like “zong zi”.
We got back and shared the matebak with our housemates. It is super, super sweet. We made the noodles and rice but they were tasteless because the spinach was not soaked in chili sauce. So I decided to open a packet of “mock meat” that a friend's mom gave to me in Cambridge. It's tofu that's flavored like chicken and put into a vacuum sealed bag. Sichuan special, I think. So our dinner consisted of this super sweet cake, rice, noodles, spinach, and chicken flavored tofu. I'm sure there will be more of these adventures to come.
Hopefully the entry before this one contains pictures! We've been having some really crazy adventures this week. As if our lives weren't busy enough, the World Cup semi-finals and final starts at 1:30am in this country. So our plan so far have been to sleep a few hours, wake up, and then sleep some more.
Last night was pretty crazy. After a long day of language classes and meetings, we went to the Construction Clinic (where the Andalas University students have sort of an office) and did some seminar preparations. This seminar has been put together so fast that it's really amazing. Things tend to take long when you're in a foreign country. Here, there tends to be a lot of waiting for people after we've scheduled meetings. But this seminar has basically been put together in a week. We've already reserved the hotel, invited people, and preparations are going full speed ahead.
Continues writing on 2010.07.08
After we finished up for the day, we took the local public transit back to where we're staying. The public transit system consists of these minibuses. The previous post has pictures of them. They basically take out the chairs and put in benches along the sides and pile people in. Sometimes it gets pretty cramped. There are different colored ones that drive different loops around the city. You just hop on the one that you need and get off whenever you want. They have a set price of 2,000 rupiah (about $0.20) per person per ride. Longer rides cost slightly more. There's never a wait for these things because the drivers themselves are actively looking for customers. It's like an organized taxi system. It's pretty nice since there's no waiting or having to get off at a certain stop. They'll stop whenever. There are also “city buses” that run along the main roads. They work the same way.
When we got to our place, we were pretty hungry and went around looking for food. This wasn't hard since there are a lot of choices around us. We saw this cart that was advertising matebak, which VC really likes. She's been talking about them and described them as sort of like flat omelets with different types of filling. So we decided to order three for dinner. As we were waiting, we noticed that they were making something that were more like cake. Then they started putting on lots of butter, along with sugar, tons of chocolate sprinkles, and sweetened condensed milk. They're really into sweeten condensed milk here. Everything here is crazy sweet. At some point, we noticed that all the other customers were kids. We realized that this cannot be our dinner so two of us went to get some vegetables to go with the noodles that we would cook.
Greg and I went to across the street and was about to go into a restaurant when VC walks up to us and asks if we had paid already. We were like, “no, we thought you stayed behind to pay.” And then we noticed that the guy following her was one of the guys from the matebak stand. Turns out that when VC tried to pay, the guy said, “belum, belum” which means not yet. She tried again and he repeated himself so she thought “belum” meant “already”. We didn't have exact change so she went back across the street with that guy to pay him.
Greg and I were still laughing about this when we got to one of the restaurants. They had some cooked spinach left and I tried to order some to-go. I definitely got the word “vegetable” and “to-go” right but she was really confused at why I would want just the vegetables. People here think of vegetables as more like garnish than anything edible. Greg suggested that we get some rice to go with the noodles and I immediately realized this would be the only way to get her to give us some vegetables. So we ordered a thing of rice and asked for vegetables to go on it. She proceeded to give us like a couple of leaves and then asked if we wanted sauce. She pointed at two different sauces and then at the various meats. And we were like, uh, can we just get more vegetables? We thought this whole exchange was pretty hilarious. The rice and vegetables came wrapped in banana leaf and looks kind of like “zong zi”.
We got back and shared the matebak with our housemates. It is super, super sweet. We made the noodles and rice but they were tasteless because the spinach was not soaked in chili sauce. So I decided to open a packet of “mock meat” that a friend's mom gave to me in Cambridge. It's tofu that's flavored like chicken and put into a vacuum sealed bag. Sichuan special, I think. So our dinner consisted of this super sweet cake, rice, noodles, spinach, and chicken flavored tofu. I'm sure there will be more of these adventures to come.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Okay, I'll try to write shorter entries from now on. Especially since I can't even remember what I wrote. This week is pretty intense, just like all the other weeks.
This week, we have 3 language lessons at the university. I think the lessons are very good. The professor teaching us hardly speaks any English (to us) so it's more like an immersion class. The classes are two hours long in the morning. We've been having trouble getting to the university right at 8am because it's so far away.
After the Indonesian class, we also had a class on the Minang language. I think Indonesian is a cleaned up version of Minang. Minang is a much more interesting language linguistically. It has diphthongs and stops and such. But it's not so useful for us since we don't think we'll be using the language. It's good for us to know something so that if we hear it, we'll know that they're speaking Minang and can guess the Indonesian word.
We've had two more pretty good meetings so far. Work on our seminar next Monday is going ahead at full speed. We've gotten a room at a hotel and everything. It's pretty cheap (relatively speaking) here to run a conference at a hotel.
We're going to Jakarta next week as well. Booked the hotels, decided on flights, and other things. Hopefully things will go well there as well.
This week, we have 3 language lessons at the university. I think the lessons are very good. The professor teaching us hardly speaks any English (to us) so it's more like an immersion class. The classes are two hours long in the morning. We've been having trouble getting to the university right at 8am because it's so far away.
After the Indonesian class, we also had a class on the Minang language. I think Indonesian is a cleaned up version of Minang. Minang is a much more interesting language linguistically. It has diphthongs and stops and such. But it's not so useful for us since we don't think we'll be using the language. It's good for us to know something so that if we hear it, we'll know that they're speaking Minang and can guess the Indonesian word.
We've had two more pretty good meetings so far. Work on our seminar next Monday is going ahead at full speed. We've gotten a room at a hotel and everything. It's pretty cheap (relatively speaking) here to run a conference at a hotel.
We're going to Jakarta next week as well. Booked the hotels, decided on flights, and other things. Hopefully things will go well there as well.
Monday, July 5, 2010
First Week in Padang
Sorry I haven't written in a few days! Things have been pretty crazy but in a good way. We got to the place that we're staying (maybe) for the next two months. Greg and I got here on Tuesday afternoon. One of the Andalas University students met us at the airport and helped us get to the place we're staying. This was really nice because it would be really hard to have to find our way.
Tuesday
Our flight was really fast. It almost felt as fast as the bus ride to the airport. We barely got to the cruising altitude when we started descending. We had no trouble at customs. There was actually a very, very short line for foreigners. One of the first things I saw were the Minangkebau architecture. There were more of these buildings than I had thought.
We took a airport bus to the city. We're staying at the Faculty of Medicine of Andalas University. They have some guest houses for foreigners who have some business with the university but are not students. Our other housemates are from New York, England, Ivory Coast, and Japan. All three of us are staying in one room. It's not too crowded but we only have one bathroom. The showers here are interesting. There's a big thing of water in the corner of the room and a plastic scoop that we use to pour water on ourselves.
The housekeeper was waiting for us when we arrived. So glad that FS was with us because he helped us talk to the housekeeper and figured out a bunch of stuff. Then he took us around our part of town. We got a SIM card and some other stuff.
----Continues writing on 2010.07.04----
Wednesday
The first two days were pretty chill. FS showed us around town and helped us get some necessities. We didn't do too much because we were tired from traveling, jetlag, and waiting for Andi and Veronica to come back from Japan. They arrived in the afternoon of the second day and we all went out for dinner, along with most of our housemates.
Thursday
Thursday morning, we met with the President of Andalas University. It was nice that he took the time to meet with us and exchange a few words. We met some of the faculty and students as well. After the meeting with the president, we were able to get on the internet for a little while. It seems like internet will be pretty limited to finding wireless while waiting for our meetings and at the construction clinic. We also had a meeting with Professor F, who oversees the Andalas University side of the project. We needed him to help us set up meetings with a few people in the government and he called them up right there. It was great. No back and forth. He took us out to lunch as well.
After lunch, he sent us to the construction clinic with his driver. At the construction clinic, we met with TB, who is a very experienced engineer who advises at the clinic. His view on this whole tsunami thing is that it is a waste of resources and that we should be concentrating on building earthquake safe buildings. I can see where he is coming from but it is still definitely important to plan for the tsunami. It was pretty tense for a while when he talked about his views. And then after he made his point, he starts asking about other stuff, such as where we're staying. He lives in Jakarta and only comes out here once in a while and it turns out that the University had put him at the same place. He thought the place was indecent and had them move him to a hotel. He says he's doing some designs for a school and in return, they're putting him up in a hotel. He proceeds to call Prof F for us and tries to set up the same kind of deal for us. We're not sure what the progress on this is yet. Not even sure we want to move since we've gotten used to this place and our housemates are pretty cool people (more on them later). Anyway, we're not too sure how we should act around this guy. We're hoping he'll just forget this whole thing but apparently, he has a really good memory.
He gave us a ride to a shopping mall where there is a pretty big supermarket. We got some much needed vegetables and other supplies. The cuisine here doesn't seem to have a lot of vegetables, mostly rice+sauce+meat. I will post some pictures soon! I cooked some of the veggies that night for dinner while the other two went out and got fried chicken and rice. We didn't have salt so the veggies were not that great but it was nice to have vegetables. I think I should have brought some vitamins with me but I think I'm doing well so far. Haven't had any stomach problems even though we've eaten at a lot of small family run places.
Friday
We started Friday morning off with a two hour wait at our first meeting. It turns out that the guy had a pretty good excuse but he won't tell us what was going on for the longest time. We ended up meeting with some of his subordinates and then he arrived just as we were about to leave. The meeting went pretty well though. I think we got a lot across.
Friday is prayer day and all the men have to go to the mosque and pray around lunch time. So our next meeting was at 2pm. This time the guy was ready for us and he was very receptive. We were all surprised that all the meetings so far have gone so well. The officials were very interested in what we've done during the last quarter and wants copies of our work. It's really cool that the things that we've worked on are actually being used.
That night, we spent some time revising our work, trying to finish everything so that we can watch the world cup. We had plans to go out but ended up just watching the game at our place, which wasn't bad since our housemates were also watching.
Saturday
We're working 6 day weeks at the minimum on this trip. Saturday was a rough day of field investigation. We visited 4 potential sites for the soil berm and wrote down various pieces of information. It was really tiring to be out walking around all day. We were all super tired by lunch time. We had lunch a little late too because we were visiting a more remote part of town.
We came back exhausted and got some cooked noodles from a shop across the street. The noodles came with soup, tofu, and meatballs. They were really good, definitely eating there again. I think I will miss eating so cheaply when I get back to the US. The food here has been great so far.
After eating and showering, we went out to a bar (not many of these around town since most people are Muslim) to watch the Germany-Argentina game. The bar that we went to had a projector so it was really good. The bar was packed full of people and we managed to cram in there with some friends of friends. We ended up meeting a Cuban economist who is working on similar stuff as us, a German surfer who lives in Australia, and some girls from other countries. The people we've met on this trip so far have very interesting stories. They've all traveled to so many different places and have done so many crazy things. One of our housemates is from New York, did his degree in education, taught in China for two years, worked on a cruise, traveled all over Asia, and is now teaching English in Padang simply because he likes Indonesia and wants to live close to the ocean. Another one of our housemates is English and is here to do research for his Masters dissertation. He seems to have traveled a lot as well. Haven't gotten the his whole story from him yet. We also have a housemate who is from the Ivory Coast and is here teaching French and learning Indonesian. His Indonesian is really good.
Anyway, we stayed at this bar for a while after the game just chatting with people and enjoying the band. We also decided to go to an island the next day for 4th of July.
Sunday
We got up pretty early considering how late we got back and headed to the harbor. I was not very happy about getting up so early on our day off. I don't believe in setting an alarm for a day off. Anyway, we thought the boat left at 8am but actually the office opens at 8am and the boat doesn't leave until 10am. So we decided to hike up this mountain nearby. It took us a while to get there and on the way up, we met a local who said that he can get us a boat ride back to the harbor. So after we got down from the mountain, we waited a while for his friends to come with a boat. But it got to the point where we didn't think taking a boat would be fast enough so we hired some motorcycles to take us back. This was unfortunate but a much faster option.
We went to Sikwau Island. It took about an hour by boat and we were all squished in the back. But it was totally worth it because the island was super nice. The sand was soft and the water was warm. The only thing was that there were a lot of coral. The water was really really nice and we all got sunburnt.
We came back after a very relaxing day and had coconut juice and a dish consisting of tropical fruits with peanut and chili sauce on top. It was a great day out overall.
Everything is so cheap here. We've spent about $100 this past week for the two of us. This includes food, transportation, stuff that we've bought, etc. This island adventure was a bit on the expensive side, comparatively but it was a good deal still. We paid $20 per person and this included roundtrip boat ride and lunch. We didn't even know that lunch was included at first.
It's been great so far. Hopefully I will learn to find my way around the city soon and pick up some of the language. Everyone thinks I'm a local anyway so that's not a problem. I'll try to post some pictures and write more in the future.
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