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Nirvana

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I decided to escape the giant glass tower, where I have spent 98% of my time this year. So last weekend I enjoyed a 24-hour vacation at the Grand Kempinski Hotel in Downtown Jakarta, wearing my N95 mask and face shield.  Ate lunch at Oku, the Japanese restaurant inside the hotel that flies its fresh fish directly from Tokyo's finest seafood market. I can say that my sushi was as good as one can obtain outside Japan. When the tuna is as smooth as butter and tastes as fresh as the treats from Neptune's table, you know your sushi is special. Add some tempura and gyoza and I attained something about as close to Nirvana one can reach on this plane of existence, with apologies for trivializing the divine with my excessively happy rhetoric, but when one is perfectly contented...
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Lawang Sewu

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If there's something the Dutch love more than tulips or windmills, it's their trains.  And it stands to reason that when the Dutch were colonizers of Indonesia, that one of their first impulses was to create an extensive train system to criss-cross Java. And from 1860 to 1940 the Dutch did precisely that, building over 6500 km of rail lines on Java during that time. Toured Lawang Sewu, the architectural monolith that housed the Dutch Railway headquarters after its completion in 1907. Semarang served as HQ due to its central location as the hub of the system. It is an imposing building, given its local nickname of Lawang Sewu, meaning "1000 Doors," by the city's inhabitants whose minds were boggled by this symbol of colonial power. After WWII and the Dutch departure the building fell into serious decay. But this art deco/colonial hybrid has been restored and now serves as the national railway museum. The massive stained glass windows in one of the towers are truly ...
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Tropical Treat of the Day: Salak

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As it is the season of Chinese New Year, the compound grocery store is well-stocked with mandarins and other citrus fruit, at the expense of local fruit. But I was able to find one novel treat: salak. Salak is the name of the fruit and species of palm tree it is harvested from and, though cultivated elsewhere, the salak palm is native to Java and Sumatra. Salak is also known as Snake Fruit for the outer skin it possesses. When I peeled my first Snake Fruit, I instantly understood this nickname as the skin had exactly the look and feel of the recently-shedded skin of your neighborhood boa constrictor.  What does it taste like? The fruit itself has the consistency of a giant bulb of peeled elephant garlic. The taste, as is the case with so many of the tropical fruits I have tasted here, isn't particularly analogous to any Western flavor I know. The best I can say is that it resembles a combination of apple and pineapple flavors, but not exactly. In the quarantine world, trying new fr...
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