Food update

I have discovered a new type of food, and have been eating it whenever I get the opportunity; it’s called Peranakan or Nonya and is a mix of Malay, Chinese and Indonesian cuisines, and it is delicious. My favourite dish is laksa, a noodley soup that can have coconut milk in, can sometimes be very sour, and is filled with things like chicken, prawns, tofu or egg, depending on where you buy it. It’s always tasty, and comes with a big dollop of sambal floating on top to spice it up. Also available in these restaurants is a nice bread called roti chanai, which is the same as the parathas you can buy in the Indian restaurants in the UK. They're cooked to order and can be stuffed with a variety of fillings, I recently one full of sardines which was wonderful. 

A more traditional Indonesian food I have been eating recently is bakso, the meatball soup / noodle dish. Previously I didn’t really enjoy it, finding them a little bland. I have now discovered that if I mix in loads of kecup manis (sweet soy sauce), saus (a red gloopy sauce of some description) and sambal then it becomes very tasty and addictive. If I do this in front of Indonesians they seem a little confused, and shake their heads in amusement; apparently kecup manis does not belong in bakso.

I have recently bought the Jakarta good food guide. It is full of restaurant reviews from all over the city, of many different cuisines, and from 5 star hotels to 50p a meal kaki limas. It’s very inspiring, and I’m looking forward to working my way through it. One of the places I’ve been to is a western/Japanese food place in flashy South Jakarta. I had a wagyu steak burger. I’d not had wagyu steak before, as it’s freakishly expensive, so thought this would be a good way to try it (burgers = cheaper, Jakarta = cheaper, by UK standards anyway). It was really nice, but I was still slightly underwhelmed considering the fuss that is made about it. Also I ordered it medium rare, which is a mistake for a burger as I couldn’t bite through it; I had to take the burger out of the bun and cut it up with a knife, kind of defeating the object of ordering a burger in the first place.

My cooking of Indonesian food in still decidedly average. My pastes are getting better, or smelling better anyway, and they now have a much better, smoother texture because I’ve bought a big flat Indonesian style pestle and mortar. I think the problem is I am using UHT coconut milk. Next time I cook something I will try to make the coconut milk myself, but it does seem like a massive hassle. I don’t really fancy smashing a coconut open and then grating it, there are just too many ways for that to go wrong. 

The Baduy Tribe

Depending on how you measure it, Jakarta is one of the biggest cities in the world, and Java one of the most densely populated islands; so it came as something of a surprise to find that less than four hours travel away there exists a tribe that completely rejects the modern world. On a busy holiday weekend I crammed myself along with my companions into the packed public transport and headed south to visit the Baduy Tribe. Despite it being a holiday weekend, where every accessible green space close to Jakarta is overrun with people, there was hardly anyone there: people either don’t know about the tribe, or they don’t care.

There are two main areas, the inner Baduy and the outer Baduy; the inner being more pure, with the outer acting as buffer between them and the outside world. Very few people are allowed to visit the inner Baduy, and even fewer are allowed to live there: even if you were born in the outer Baduy, you may not live in the inner Baduy. Foreigners are certainly not allowed into any of the three inner Baduy, so I visited several of the thirty eight outer villages.

The Baduy people live a very traditional life, rejecting many of the luxuries that most people take for granted. Electricity is the most obvious example, but it’s the simpler things that surprised me; there is no glass, so no windows, or glasses to drink from, and no cutlery other than the small selection for use by visitors. Their income comes mainly from growing rice, which is sold across the rest of Java. Since this is taxable, the Baduy send a delegation to Jakarta once a year to pay the tax, and since transport is forbidden, the delegation walks the whole way!

A Baduy house is built from wood and bamboo, and the walls seem to be weaved together; they are very natural and beautiful creations, and although the doors are attached by metal hinges, and the occasional screw is in evidence, they are still remarkable. It takes three months, and about £1500 to build one of the houses. More remarkable are the bamboo bridges across the rivers. Built from bamboo poles lashed together, they only take three days to build and are truly a sight to behold, and yet they only sway as much as the Millennium Bridge in London.

Small signs of the modern world are the flip flops worn by some of the tribe, the ones that don’t have amazingly toughened and huge feet, very hobbit like! There is a small amount of rubbish around, probably left by visitors, as I saw no evidence of any of the tribe using anything that creates litter. This almost total lack of litter also seems to have another benefit: there were very few mosquitoes and other bugs and nasty things. The Baduy apparently don’t use soap to wash, but I did see some of the women using washing powder to clean their clothes in the river. The river serves several purposes: washing clothes, washing yourself, general socialising, and, as I didn’t find out until after I had finished swimming, going to the toilet. 

Toll Roads and Schrodinger’s Cat

One for the eternal questions raised by travelling by car in Jakarta is whether to take the toll roads or not. Theoretically they should make the journey quicker, but practically they are sometimes so jammed with traffic it would have been quicker to remain on the smaller, shittier and still traffic clogged roads that weave around them. Apologies to any physicists reading, for what is doubtless a very poor analogy, but Jakarta’s toll roads are like Schrodinger’s cat: you can’t tell if they’re busy until you’re on them, and by that time it’s too late. For those interested, the Wikipedia article on Schrodinger’s cat can be found here.

Other pseudo-intellectual news: I recently made my higher level students research the philosophy of ethics including utilitarianism, deontology and such luminaries as Kant, Plato and Derrida. They didn’t get it. 

The Burping Masseuse

One of my little pleasures in Jakarta is going for a massage. I don’t go to a seedy, happy ending type of place, but to a clean and professional establishment, where for £6/hour you can enjoy massages ranging from a Japanese shiatsu to the gentler Javanese style. The shiatsu massages are wonderful, they involve the masseuse climbing onto the table, and walking over your back, clicking your joints with her toes. I didn’t really know what I had asked for the first time, so was quite surprised when I found myself lying helplessly on the table with someone standing on my neck. Another trick is when they rub their feet quickly the length of your body, in effect surfing your back before they shoot of the end of the table. It’s all very nice, but I’ve found I have simple tastes: whether it’s my feet being massaged, the palms of my hands, or strangely, my ears, but the most notable thing is that the masseuses spend the whole time burping! The first time was incongruous, I thought that maybe she had had too many fizzy drinks before starting. But no, it seems to be an occupational hazard; every massage I’ve had, the masseuse has burped several times, so much so that I don’t really notice it any more. I don’t have an explanation for this, I can only guess that I may be something to do with the pressure they are exerting. 

The Thousand Islands and Pulau Tidung

There is a group of islands north of Jakarta known as Pulau Seribu (The Thousand Islands), many of them very close and reputedly dirty and polluted as a result, while others are privately owned, although you can stay on them for a small fortune. I have had several different people recommend one of the more distant ones, Pulau Tidung, one even saying it is like Bali before it got popular. So that is where I went last weekend, joining a cheap tour with a friend, which meant travelling on the public ferry, and staying in some pretty basic accommodation. The ferry left at 6am, and was crowded, uncomfortable, and looked as if it had been found in the land that health & safety forgot. But no matter, three hours later we arrived at the island. There are actually two Pulau Tidungs, a large inhabited island, connected to a smaller one by a wooden walkway.

After dumping our stuff in the accommodation, we were taken for some snorkelling on a smaller boat. It was lovely to be out of Jakarta and sailing between tropical islands, but the weather wasn’t great and not dissimilar to a beach trip in Wales: it was drizzling and not all that warm. The snorkelling was ok, nice enough water but a lot of dead coral. We explored the town a little; the people seem to lead a basic and quite traditional life, and although the streets are quite narrow, you do still have to keep dodging bikes and scooters, just like Jakarta.

The Sunday, however, was much better. We walked the length of the island (about 2km) and across the walkway to the smaller island. The weather was hot and sunny, the islands stunningly beautiful, and suddenly the comparison with Bali didn’t seem quite so fatuous. The walkway is fantastic, stretching between the islands through super clear water, and with a little bridge that people take turns jumping and diving off. Although the islands are beautiful, and the sand is nice, the beaches themselves are not amazing, being short, very shallow, and slightly dirty.

The return to Jakarta was significantly less smooth than the trip out. Essentially, there were too many people to fit on the ferry. There were also too many people to fit on the fishing boat the island laid on, which departed looking dangerously overcrowded. So the remaining island goers sat around in the sun, getting hotter and more agitated as no one seemed to know what was going on. Eventually another ferry turned up, from where I don’t know, as it certainly wasn’t scheduled. There were blissfully few people on it, so despite the wait and uncertainty, the journey back was relatively comfortable and quick.

It didn’t take long to come back to earth; as we neared Jakarta we sailed through rubbish and what smelt like sewage, we were then forced into a sweaty and crowded angkot before driving through the stinking fish market, and into the deafening traffic where every driver seemed to be leaning on his horn – hello Jakarta!

On loan

For the last couple of weeks I have been working at another branch of my schools franchise; it was quite novel at first, a chance to see a different area and how other schools do things, and to meet some new people. Unfortunately two hours a day sitting in traffic tends to kill the enthusiasm. The school itself is very similar, although certain systems and ideas are better implemented. The kids also seem to be better behaved: blackberry use is amazingly low, they all bring in their own pens and books, and actually queue at the door at the end of the lesson to be let out.  However, the teacher’s morale seems to be just as low as it is at my school. This is apparently a result of the school’s penny pinching, lack of flexibility and refusal to make any concessions regarding teacher well being, confirming that it is the franchise that is a rapacious profit machine, and not just my school.