Some Southeast Asian Junk

The Best Satay in Menteng (Sate yang paling enak di Menteng)

Satay is very important to me when I travel to Indonesia.  It is one of the best foods that Indonesia has to offer--very small chunks of tender meat skewed onto bamboo sticks and grilled over an open flame, basted with a salty sweet marinade and served with a tasty peanut sauce.  However, I have yet to find the best version of satay in the local area where I spend most of my time, Menteng.  There is a rather upscale restaurant named Sate Khas Senayan (Special Senayan Satay) which has very good meat served in air-conditioned comfort.  This place as outlets all over Jakarta, and is popular with the businessman/politician crowd.  But the sauce there is too bland, too smooth and refined and processed for my tastes.  On the other hand, there are two little roadside stalls, Pondok Sate Pak Heri and Rumah Makan Super Rasa (or maybe Jaya Rasa) that have the perfect sauces, a bit more chunky and thick with sweet soy sauce, nice little roughly-chopped shallots and pickle on the side, but the meat is not as good.  They are certainly more authentic, given that they use whatever part of the goat/cow/chicken that they can, but the meat is undoubtedly tougher and chewier.

So I'm asking the internet.  Internet people, what is the best place in Menteng (preferably in the Jalan Sabang area) for satay?  Remember, my two real goals for satay are (1) tender juicy meat and (2) authentic, not-too-processed sauce.  I like all types of satay, including beef, lamb/goat, chicken, and "parts."  Suggestions appreciated in the comments below.

(I have put the title in this post in Indonesian to attract Indonesians googling randomly who can advise me properly on this question.  Saya menerjemahkan judul post ini ke bahasa Indonesia untuk menerima pengunjung Indonesia yang nasehatnya amat diperlu.  Orang internet, restoran/rumah makan mana yang menyediakan sate yang paling enak di Menteng (khususnya dekat wilayah Sabang)?  Yang paling penting adalah: (1) dagingnya lunak, dan (2) saos kacangnya sedap dan agak kasar, tidak diproses hingga halus-halus.  Bisa sate kambing, sapi, ayam, apa saja.)

Liwat != Liwet

I knew it was good that I learned what liwat means in Malay.  Because it is important not to confuse it with liwet, which in Indonesian is a type of Javanese rice dish.  So if I order nasi liwet I will get coconut rice served with squash and minced chicken.  Otherwise I shudder to think about what nasi liwat will get me.

(The other good examples of where a changing a single letter makes a big difference include when I asked if there were towels for the beef curry pool [rendang/beef curry != renang/swimming] and when I told someone that JMP's school has a nice love for her and the students to sleep in [asmara/love != asrama/dormitory].)

JM's Trip to the Hills

JMP has been working pretty hard over the past week and a half, and her music school had a day off yesterday.  They arranged for this day off a trip to the hills of West Java, to a place called Cipanas which serves as a sort of vacation station for many Jakartans.

JMP can better recount her trip than me, but from her description it sounded like a blast.  Up in the hills it is much much cooler than it is at sea level.  The highest pass that they drove over was about 4500 feet up, but she reports that the temperature there in the middle of the day was a pleasant 21 degrees C (compared to about 30 C when she returned to Tangerang in the evening).  With weather like that, it's no wonder that the Dutch used that area as one of their hill stations for colonial weekend retreats.  I am still confused as to how it can be consistently so cool at that relatively low altitude when we are so close to the equator, but I won't complain.

At any rate, JMP got to eat banana-cheese fritters while sipping tea at an tea plantation that was an old Dutch settlement and to poke around the nice houses up there.  She reports having a very nice time.  She also learned that the prefix ci- is an old way of saying "water," probably borrowed from the local language Sundanese.  That would explain why so many places around Jakarta have names that begin with Ci.  Like Cipanas, Cirebon, Cililitan, Cijangur, Cianjur, Cilandak, Cipete, Cikodok, Cikidang, Cimanggis, Ciledug, Ciputat, etc.

Interviews

I have not had particularly good luck over the past week with my interviews.  When they happen they are good and useful.  I am just having a particularly hard time making them happen.  We make a plan for 10, I arrive at 10, but the meeting starts (at the earliest) at 10:45.  Or, something that happens more frequently these days, the meeting doesn't happen at all and I am told to come back on some other day and time.  Given that it can take hours to get to some of these places, this does not inspire confidence.  Indonesians call their tendency to be late to things jam karet (rubber time), but this trip it's much more than just being late for things.  Yesterday I learned that a press meeting that I had been personally invited to attend was postponed for two days--only when I arrived at the place where it was to take place.  I'm having revenge fantasies in which I am holding meetings in which I have something that they want, and if they do not arrive precisely on time I tell them to come back later.  Unlikely.

So yesterday while consoling myself with some tasty West Sumatran food, I had an interesting experience.  The radio was playing a kroncong song that sounded strangely familiar.  (Kroncong is an Indonesian musical style that combines Western and Indonesian styles.  It frequently has a sort of reggae or Hawaiian feel to it, with heavy emphasis on the back beat.)  I thought and thought about why the song sounded so familiar, and then it came to me: it was a downbeat version of "Walk the Line."  Instead of Johnny Cash's rich bass, the melody was played by an Indonesian flute or whistle.  Cool.

Aww Geez

You take one day off of checking the Malaysian news to see what's going in that country's fast-moving political scene, and you come back to this.

"Sodomy claim by aide is  fabrication, says Anwar."

I don't know much more about this story than what I see here.  The accuser is an aide who was hired by Anwar in March of this year.  I can tell you that the opposition media are claiming that this is a complete fabrication and that the government has engineered these allegations in order to derail his political fortunes.  I have also learned from the Malay-language media that the word for sodomy in Malay is liwat.  Never know when that might come in handy.

The wider political context is more interesting.  In 1998 Anwar was accused of sodomizing his driver, his advisor, and his wife's driver.  He was tried and convicted of this in 2000, although the charge was thrown out in 2004.  The general consensus among Malaysianists is that this charge was false and politically motivated, and meant to be both embarrassing (since now he had to talk about it) and to paint Anwar as immoral, offending the sensibilities the country's Malay population.  Since then, Anwar has been in jail, was released, and was behind the stunning electoral success of the opposition in March 8 elections of this year.

I have met Anwar.  I support his struggle for democracy in Malaysia, even if we differ on some smaller points.  I tend not to believe anything that the Malaysian regime says when it comes to the opposition.  I think that it's no accident that Anwar has been accused of sodomy at the very time when the regime faces its largest threat from the opposition in decades.  That the accuser is a recently-hired aide is probably no accident either.  That said, I have to be careful to tread lightly here--think of how many American politicians lead double lives in the sex department!  I think that the safest position is that Anwar should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and that I am inclined to believe (1) that he is innocent and (2) that he will not get a fair trial if it gets that far.

UPDATE. I should make clear that even in the unlikely event that Anwar were bisexual, it shouldn't matter. Although, we all know, it probably would.

NRL

When I am tired from interviewing people, it's good to sit back with a Bintang beer and watch some TV.  The Australia Network is great for this purpose, especially on the weekends when it shows rugby almost non-stop.  Australians take their rugby seriously.  Having spent a good portion of last night unwinding by watching the Roosters play the Bulldogs in a fiercely contested NRL game, I have learned a couple of things.

The first is that I really enjoy rugby league a lot more than rugby union.  JMP and I watched some rugby union when we traveled in New Zealand and again when we were in Australia, and my read is that rugby union is a lot slower with a lot less action.  Rugby league is in many ways like a faster, continuous, more brutal version of American football, with 6 downs instead of 4.

The second is that I have no doubt that the rugby league players are the fittest people that I have ever seen.  Simply massive shoulders, chests, and thighs, but not an ounce of fat on them.

The third is that Australian football, which is yet another sport, is weird.  Apparently the technical term for a referee is a "white maggot."

Nine Ways to Protect the Budget

The Islamic parties here in Indonesia are as concerned about high oil prices as anyone else.  One thing that I've found in my research is that these parties need to campaign a lot more about non-Islamic economic issues if they want to succeed at the ballot box.  Just being pious isn't enough, people want a government that provides basic services for them and creates economic prosperity.  (The evidence for this is overwhelming.  More on this some other time.)

The issue that parties need to figure out today is how to protect subsidies without inflating the national budget.  These are nine solutions proposed by party that's considered the most conservative Islamic party here, the Prosperous Justice Party.

1. Economizing on spending.  (My read: Sounds good, but this is awfully vague.)
2. Rescheduling foreign debt.  (My read: This is not a good idea for foreign investor confidence.)
3. Use as-of-yet unallocated money budgeted for state governments in 2007.  (My read: Better yet, state governments should spend these funds.)
4. Progressive tax on booming sectors (oil, gas, coal, copper, and plantations).  (My read: I'm not sure how this won't just cause producers to either raise prices or cut production.  The extent to which this occurs depends on something that I don't think we know, which is the tax-elasticity of production prices.)
5. Trim the costs of intermediation in commodities' trade. (My read: I don't know how trade in a commodity like petroleum can happen absent brokers.)
6. Eliminate inefficiencies in the gasoline trade. (My read: Again, this sounds good, but is awfully vague.)
7. Hedging on petroleum prices.  (My read: Probably a good idea, but I don't see how it solves any problems.)
8. Cut the profit margin on subsidized petroleum distributed to the national oil company Pertamina from 9% to 5%. (My read: I need to know more about how this works to understand how it would solve anything.)
9. Nationalize foreign oil companies.  (My read: Very very bad idea.)

We see from these proposed solutions are targeting those groups that are making profits from high oil prices (producers, intermediators, foreigners).  In this sense, they are quite populist.  We also see that I'm pessimistic about how effect these will be.  There are two main drivers of petroleum prices: the supply of petroleum and the demand for it.  In a world where the latter rises faster than the former, prices will rise.

Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat

In all the times I've come to Indonesia to study politics, I've never had cause to go to the House of Representatives until today.  My first project was all about authoritarianism and the economy, so I never had cause to meet with anyone who would have been elected democratically to anything.  Today, studying democratic things, the opinions of democratically elected people do indeed matter.

The DPR building is clearly on the old side and is not as nice as the Dewan Rakyat in Malaysia, which I visited a couple of times before.  It is located right in one of the nicest areas of South Jakarta, and sits at the center of dozens of acres of open land.  It is striking how much land they must have used to build this, and how valuable it would be today.

Two points of note.  First, the security around the DPR in Indonesia is far less restrictive for Westerners than it is for the DR in Malaysia.  I interpret this as the following: the (democratic) Indonesian government is more concerned about stopping terrorism than anything else, while the (authoritarian) Malaysian government is more concerned about stopping people from saying bad things about it than anything else.  Second, I have noticed that the security working around government installations (both domestic ones and foreign embassies) is noticeably more multicultural than that around malls and the like.  You are much more likely to see a guard with an identifiably Christian first name like Benjamin or a Portuguese last name like Reinaldo or a Balinese name like I Gde something-or-other.  You are also more likely to see a security guard of eastern Indonesian extraction.  I don't know why this is.

Real Indonesian

I watched a TV program the other day called Binar, which is a compression of the words Bahasa Indonesia Benar, meaning "True Indonesian Language."  It's sponsored by the Ministry of Education here, and it is aimed at helping Indonesians to learn how to speak their language properly.  It seems to be aimed primarily at teenagers.  It features a very common device in Indonesian cultural propaganda: a well-dressed 50-something woman who speaks slowly, calmly, and knowledgeably as sort of a fountain of information and a symbol of Javanese propriety.  (This is the image that former President Megawati Sukarnoputri presents.)  I don't know what the program normally deals with, but this time it was about the use of foreign words in common parlance--and how this is a bad thing. 

Indonesian is a language which, like English, is well known for its propensity through history for borrowing words from other languages.  Sanskrit, Arabic (and thereby Turkish and Persian), Chinese (mostly Hokkien, some Cantonese), Portuguese, and Dutch have contributed hundreds (if not thousands) of words each to Indonesian.  Currently Indonesian is borrowing words from English, and the program was focused on trying to stop this practice by reminding people of the "proper" Indonesian words for things commonly referred to using English.  It was funny because these proper Indonesian replacements are very transparently recent borrowings from other European languages.

Some examples, drawn from a mock dialog on planning a wedding:

email should be pos el (pos was borrowed from the English "post," and el is a short form of "electric")
calling should be  menelpon (the root of this word is telpon, from "telephone," and the prefix me- has been added as the Indonesian way of turning nouns into verbs)
by faks should be  melalui faksimile (faksimile from French is distinguished from faks and faksimali from English)
client should be  klien (the same word borrowed from Dutch a hundred years earlier)
wedding organizer should be  pengelola pesta pernikahan (pesta was borrowed from the Portuguese fiesta, and means "party"; pernikahan is a abstract noun constructed from the Arabic root nikah, or "wedding")
office should be  kantor (borrowed from Dutch)

There were of course a couple of examples of English borrowing that have entirely Indonesian replacements (exhibition = pameran, visitor = tamu, print = cetak, invitation = undangan).  But it was very interesting that the characters on the show kept saying "OK" to signal agreement or understanding.  And they saying that people using English words were attempting to put on airs (gengsi, from the Arabic ghinsi).  In my view, Indonesian, like French or any other language, has no hope of resisting English linguistic imperialism.

Three Things, Mostly Unrelated Except for a Food Theme

JMP Update: Everything is going swimmingly in Tangerang.  JMP is having a great time with her students, teaching pianists and violinists how to play the recorder and teaching her three flute students how to become better flutists.  She reports that her students are friendly and quite musically talented--much better than she even expected.  She is the envy of all other faculty at JISMF because she understands Indonesian and can identify unusual foods (e.g., "that's not a potato, it's a fish ball" or "this savory pancake is called martabak").

Food Mistake: Every once in awhile I will order something I've never had before at a restaurant so that I can have something new to taste.  Usually it goes well, sometimes not at all.  Yesterday was a "not at all" moment.  I ordered something called sop kikil, which I guess you might translate as ox shank soup.  Ox shanks sound good, I figured it would be a fatty shank bone with some meat on it, sort of like oxtail soup.  What arrived at my table was a bowl full of very spicy and meaty, very delicious broth with fried potatoes and chopped tomatoes and herbs floating on top.  Yum.  When I put my spoon in it, though, I learned that I had the main ingredient was bite-sized pieces of knee joint cartilage, accompanied by some soft fat and marrow.  The fat and marrow were good, but the knee joint cartilage (which you were clearly supposed to eat) not so much.  Fortunately, with all that great broth and a plate of rice, I was happy.

Found in Translation: I was at a Chinese restaurant the other day called The Grand Duck King.  It's specialty was fresh fish (of course).  The restaurant was my very favorite kind of Chinese fish restaurant, with a a good fish tank full of living things.  I found some colorful translations of non-native creatures.

Kepiting laba-laba ("spider crab") = King crab
Kepiting telur ("Egg crab") = blue crab
Kepiting banci ("Shemale crab") = I'm not sure what this is, looked like a plain old crab to me
Kerang gajah ("Elephant clam") = geoduck
Kerang bambu ("Bamboo clam") = razor clam (this makes sense when you look at one)
Ikan malas ("Lazy fish") = freshwater bass