We Found Bagels

A prominent complaint of my wife's, ever since we moved to Jakarta, is the absence of bagels.  Even Starbucks doesn't have bagels.  Of course, the local restaurants, even the chain restaurants doing business locally, cater to local tastes.  It's good business.  And Indonesians don't seem to have an affinity for eating bread for breakfast.

An associate of mine recently became a partner in a Jakartan bagel business called Bagel Bagel.  The week they opened, I purchased enough bagels for everyone on my staff to try one.  That is when the comedy began.

I watched as many of them took their first bites.  The look of sheer confusion on their faces as they bit into the bagel expecting the taste of donut and tasting, well, something much different than a donut, was absolutely priceless.  I offered up the cream cheese, in two flavors, and watched with amusement as the bagel beginners spread the cheese on top like frosting on a cupcake.  It was then I felt it appropriate to explain the finer points of bagel consumption:  cut it in half, spread the cheese on the inside, and either eat it like a sandwich or like toast.

Then the questions began:  "Is it supposed to be hard on the outside and soft on the inside?"  Yes, it is.  "Do Americans really eat this for breakfast?"  Yes, we do.  "Why isn't it sweet?"  It isn't supposed to be; it's healthier that way.  One said to me:  "This will take me an hour to eat.  It's very heavy."

I thought the bagels were delicious and ate four of them, over-consumption counterbalancing the healthiness of bagels compared to donuts.  The owners were smart to put the bagel shop in an expat community and offer free delivery in the Kemang area.  Expats will eat this stuff up!  I hope Indonesians will also begin to appreciate bagels.  I don't think they'll ever get past the requirement of rice being part of anything considered a meal.  Much like pizza, I think bagels will eventually become one of Indonesian's favorite snacks.

I'm Mad as Hell and I'm not Going to Take it Anymore

My wife humors my internet distractions - fantasy sports, online games, blogging.  She did impose a few rules for me with my blog:

1. Don't drink and blog
2. Don't blog while mad
3. Don't reveal too much

I'm having to break rule #2 today.

 

As I mentioned in my last blog, we shipped 120 pounds of food from the US.  As of today, we've discarded roughly forty pounds of it, and the amount increases daily.

 

On Monday, I was the first to eat some of our newly arrived food (other than the brownies from the weekend).  Every morning, I have a bowl of oats with raisins and honey for breakfast.  With my first bite, I knew something was terribly wrong.  I gagged at the taste.  I thought maybe I had eaten a big glob of honey (a flavor I can only appreciate in small doses), so I tried a second bite.  This time, the raisins tasted odd.  I spent time separating all the raisins to one side of the bowl and ate a few more bites of the oatmeal.  The flavor was not improving.  After my fifth bite, I gave up.

 

Included in our box of food were two boxes of raisins.  They had broken open in transit and were open and uncovered for at least two weeks in a variety of conditions.  They smelled okay, but we didn't trust them.  I texted my wife and asked if they were in my oats.  She said no, but that she smelled the oats and they smelled of perfume.

 

Then it hit me.  In addition to food, we bought some laundry supplies - stain stick, spray and wash, and dryer sheets.  My oatmeal tasted like the dryer sheets smelled.  About an hour later, I was feeling nauseous and dizzy and decided to go home for the day.  My stomach was uneasy the rest of the day.

 

We inspected all of our food.  Much of it smelled like the dryer sheets.  The few items we risked preparing - Cheerios, chocolate pudding, Rice A Roni - tasted like the dryer sheets.  The thing these all have in common - they were inside cardboard boxes with a paper-based internal packaging, or no internal packaging at all.

 

So, thanks to the Walmart Great Value brand dryer sheets, we've discarded about $100 worth of the food we shipped.  The list includes:

• 2 boxes Cheerios value size
• 2 boxes Quaker Oats 2lb, 10 oz whole old fashioned
• 1 box raspberry jello 6 oz
• 5 boxes cherry jello 6 oz
• 4 boxes strawberry jello 6 oz
• 7 boxes chocolate pudding 6 oz
• 6 boxes of Rica A Roni 6.4 oz
• 1 box blueberry muffin mix

Using the Walmart website, I submitted a product complaint about the dryer sheets.  In it, I have requested that Walmart send me a replacement for all of the food I've had to throw away.  If they refuse, my next step will be to notify Consumer's Reports and the FDA of my experience, with a copy to WalMart.  I have not yet decided a Step 3....I hope I do not have to.  Based on what I now know about dryer sheets, Step 3 could get ugly.

Closing down the week

I'm feeling much healthier now, despite the continued long work hours, and I'm ready to finally do the sight-seeing and window-shopping I had intended to do last weekend. I'm also going to buy a DVD player that I'll use in the hotel and then use in the new house when we move here.

Today we had to say good-bye to a great colleague, a burgeoning friend, and an excellent consultant. I've spent the last year working closely with him on the "project from Hell", and I will truly miss working with him. He is yet another casualty of our continued struggles with the existing financial environment. Luckily, copper appears to be hovering around the $1.50 mark, and, if sustainable, we should be able to maintain another year of strong profitability...just not the outrageous profitability of the last two years. Hopefully, we can soon bring him back to work with us on other projects.

Last night, my departing colleague took me to a local Indonesian restaurant. At 6 PM, we were the first people to arrive and had the place to ourselves. The normally attentive service was even more so to their only customers. They replaced the plates on our table so quickly I jokingly remarked that they must have a shortage in the kitchen and need to quickly wash them to use at another table.

The restaurant itself was very Mediterranean in decor - odd in the South Pacific. Mahogany furniture, floral table clothes, large paintings on wall-papered walls. It reminded me of any of the finest restaurants I've been to in the US - "The Cellar" in Los Angeles, "Donovan's" in Phoenix, "Cygnus" in Grand Rapids. We ordered beef sausage as an appetizer, and then split four other dishes, mostly beef. My favorite was asparagus sauteed in a spicy peanut sauce - it was absolutely delicious. I've had a lot of dishes prepared using peanut sauce, or a spicy peanut sauce, and I have to say I am hooked! I am craving my Chipotle burrito, though. I think I'll eat at Chilli's (yes, the one you know and love) this weekend.

The best part of the meal - after the good conversation we had about working in the IT industry, living in Indonesia, and our families - was the final price. If you eat at any of the US restaurants I named above, you're probably going to pay a minimum of $80 per person. Our total tab was less than that after wine, 4 main dishes, appetizer, and a strawberry smoothie (guess who ordered that).

Earlier in the day I had been quite adventurous with the food. I was babysitting our recent production release of the latest version of our "project from Hell" product, so I wanted to be at my desk as much as possible. This meant I couldn't really go out for lunch and I was tired of eating at Wendy's. This time, I went to an Indonesian food court and ordered Nasi Sapi Lada Hitam - Rice, Beef and Black Pepper (pepper black). I ordered it "to-go", so they packed it in a Styrofoam container and brought it to my table. When I got back to my desk, I found my rice in the container, and my Beef with Black Pepper in what I can only describe as a plastic grocery bag tied tightly. Wendy's gives me my "to-go" drink (in a cup) tied tightly in a plastic bag, with my meal in a paper bag, and they put both in another plastic bag. It's like everyone owns stock in the plastic bag company, or the government enforces a "three plastic bags per person" regulation. I haven't asked.

A few other odd ends to catch up on:

1. Fast food does not have drive through around here - not that I've seen anyway. They do, however, deliver. I'm going to try it with Chilli's later.
2. For being the rainy season, I haven't seen much rain. Light shower now and then, ominous skies quite frequently, but not much rain. I've actually seen blue sky, too. First time for that in Jakarta.
3. I've decided that smiling at the guy with the assault rifle is a good move. Every main building has 4 or 5 security guards that check out cars before they are allowed to move close. The bombings of the Australian embassy (across the street from our building) and the JW Marriott (the hotel I'm staying in) several years ago still has everyone vigilant with security. I think some of it is the whole over staffing I've discussed before, too. I've never seen an armed guard, though. Most just have a nightstick. Here, after your car is checked, and they have you walk through the airport security check, they have an armed guard on the walk up to the main lobby. I've made a point of acknowledging him and saying "hello" every time I see him. Hopefully, he'll remember me if he ever has to use that gun.

9/8 - Back in the office

I woke up early to try and catch an hour or two of some NFL games, which began at 12 AM JKTA. Scouring every sports channel available to me in the hotel didn't even find anyone reporting highlights - it truly is an American phenomena - so I had to settle for seeing the scores on the internet. It just isn't the same.

When I woke up this morning, I could tell it had rained over night. The windows still had fresh drops and the streets glistened with moisture. The roads were much busier on the drive in than they had been my whole trip. Ramadan has the same effect on Jakarta that Christmas does on the US; or July does to Arizona: everyone leaves or stays home. Seeing so much traffic surprised me. Then I saw the puddles. Huge puddles in the middle of the street. There had been no rain in the two hours I had been awake, so this was left over from whatever happened overnight.

I arrived to the office a little before 8 AM and the place was mostly empty. Because most of the office is up by 3:30 AM to eat before they start their fast, seeing an empty office this early was a bit of a surprise. I even checked my watch to make sure I had not come in an hour early. Then I found out that the overnight rain had lasted three solid hours. This isn't common for Jakarta, and there was flooding everywhere. Not the destructive flooding you see in the Midwest, or every hurricane in New Orleans. More like flooding where the streets become rivers and your feet get wet on the petals because there is water in your car.

Today I did not have scheduled meetings. The team is finalizing the design documentation so I was available for questions, but spent most of my day researching outstanding issues from our prior project and developing a plan to resolve all of them.

Tonight, I realized how difficult it is to be an American with food allergies in Jakarta. I've had to get very good at recognizing by name and by sight what food is safe for me to eat. I went to the club for dinner, and found the only main dish they had was chicken. Not really in the mood for salad, mashed potatoes and sauteed vegetables, I went down at ate in the buffet. Really nice restaurant, but, per usual, almost everything was fish or poultry. I ended up finding some plain steamed rice with lamb baklava.

The other culinary realization I had today is that I really like the juice varieties here. I commented on my prior trips how it was nice to have mango and guava juice again. Today I tried strawberry juice. Keep in mind then when you ask for juice out here, it doesn't come from a bottle or a can. They make it fresh. They take the fruit you requested, put it in a blender with some ice and that is your juice. Strawberry juice is my new favorite.