Junk food of the week: Seaweed chips

Lay's is clearly battling for the Asian market with a line of potato chips including Salmon Teriyaki (not as strange as you might think) and Seaweed. The latter is a natural for chips because it's good with salt. These are tasty. I wouldn't be surprised if they sold them in the States.

The truly odd thing about Indonesian chips is they often have loads of sugar - sometimes as much sugar as salt. Very disconcerting when you've bought them to go with onion dip.

Street kitty for Emily

My niece has a standing order for more cats. Admittedly, this is a rather distant one ...


I shot him/her early in the morning, which is pretty much the only time a cat can lounge in the middle of the street around here!

Sorry, praying

... says the sign on a momentarily-closed phone-card kiosk, sometime around sholat ashar (afternoon prayers).

Books: Commercial Girl

Another in the long line of teen books I've been reading.


Theme: Girl meets boys

Plot: Juwita is smart and beautiful, but she faces a major obstacle to success: she has no money. Guys keep falling for her, though, and is it her fault if they want to give her cash? She gets through medical school pretty much by taking donations from men. Now she's graduating and ready to start her own life. Whom among her benefactors will she choose to start it with?

Discussion: Indonesia teenlit has problems when it comes to "loose" women, because there seems to be a rule that you can't have physical contact. I read this book a while ago, and as far as I can recall it doesn't have a single kiss in it. So it's a little hard to figure out why these guys are falling all over themselves to give Juwita money for a platonic relationship. She makes no bones about asking, either - when an older man wants to buy her a fancy gown, she says "A person like me needs money more than an expensive dress."

The book walks an interesting and rather brave moral line, however. Juwita faces danger a couple of times in her interactions with men. But she's never really punished, and the book doesn't seem to take a disapproving tone toward her. She knows her own worth and doesn't angle for cash; she always waits for the man to offer. In the end she marries the one guy who hasn't tried to purchase her affections. So she emerges 'clean' in spite of it all.

To me, this seems similar to the way people tolerate noodle vendors pushing carts down the middle of the highway or hawkers selling newspapers at stoplights. Poor people do whatever they can to survive, and Indonesians generally seem pretty willing to let them do it.

When will I learn?

"The rainy season is over" I said to Chad when we walked out the front door yesterday. It felt like someone had turned on the giant oven that is Jakarta, and it was going to slowly heat up to the melting point from now until August.

Wet graffiti, wet plant

Then I went Menteng Dalam to do some man-on-the-street interviews. As soon as I stepped out of the cab, the skies opened. It rained with great force for over an hour. I had to take refuge in a little noodles, eggs, photocopies, detergent, softdrinks and medicine store. The woman there was nice and gave me water but wouldn't let me take her picture.

Your one-stop everything store

The rain totally snarled the roads and the 4-mile trip home took an hour and a half. The taxi guy even drove over the concrete dividers into the busway lane - KATHUNK KATHUNK KATHUNK KATHUNK, with an extra, ominous bang on the undercarriage - to escape total gridlock.

My new rule: never say "The rainy season is over" unless you have an umbrella handy.

Cooking with Ibu Trish: Sambal kecap

Sweet soy sauce or kecap manis (KEH-chahp MAH-neece) is a key Indonesian flavoring. It tastes a bit like a cross between soy sauce and molasses - both sweet and salty, with a thick consistency like maple syrup. If Indonesian TV commercials are to be believed, your reputation as a woman and the happiness of your family life depend on the brand of kecap manis you use. I'm obviously taking a big risk by buying generic.


Sweet soy sauce lends its darkness and sweetness to Indonesian fried rice (nasi goreng) and various noodle dishes. If you happen to find some in an Asian store - we used to buy it in Bloomington - you can mix up a quick dipping sauce called sambal kecap as follows:

• 5 red chilies, such as bird's-eye, sliced
• 4 small shallots, peeled and sliced
• 4 Tbs. sweet soy sauce
• 1 tsp. lime juice

Deep fry some cubes of tofu and go wild! Or serve with satay, alongside the peanut sauce.

A tyrant falls?

As I mentioned early on, we really like Jakarta movie theatres. The movie theatre company, however, is a different matter. There's only one, Cinema 21, and they're perfect in every way except that I don't think they really like movies. They seem to view them only as money-making units, so they pick three or four lousy Hollywood blockbusters and show them on every screen in town.

Now, however, they have what they so richly deserve: a competitor.


Blitz Megaplex is going for a cool artsy look. They have 11 screens and so far they're playing a pretty fun mix of small, big, and regional movies. This weekend we saw a Korean movie called THE HOST which you must go see right now, unless you're my sister Cathy, in which case it might give you nightmares and shouldn't you be studying for a test anyway?


The other good thing about Blitz, besides their movie selection, is that they jam cellphone signals. There's a significant percentage of Indonesian moviegoers who love nothing better than a nice long chat on their cellphone in the middle of a movie. Have American audiences gotten this bad?