Medan, May 7 & 8

Thursday, May 8. Dan and I flew from Jakarta to Medan. It took two hours to cross the rest of Java and fly pretty much the length of Sumatra. This picture shows the northern parts of Jakarta as we took off toward the north and then turned west.

We flew the length of Sumatra, most of which was covered in clouds. Periodically, I could see the land below, most of which was no longer forest, but which had obviously been cut down and turned into farms.

Medan is located just east of Aceh Province, the most conservative Muslim province of Sumatra. Aceh is the area most damaged by the tsunami and also the site of a violent separatist movement that has taken tens of thousands of lives until 2005 when the rebels signed a peace accord with the Indonesian government. The bomber responsible for an explosion outside the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003 was Acehnese.

Medan itself has a large Chinese population, and is approximately 40% Christian. The area around Medan is originally Batak, a people who were Christianized by a German missionary, Nommensen.
We arrived in the evening and were driven to the hotel, called The Aryaduta Hotel. After an hour to freshen up, we met Dani Solchin, Ferry, Rudy, and Iva in the lobby and took Dani's Medan car (plus driver) to a Chinese restaurant, where we ate very meaty crab, grilled, stir-fried sea snails, steamed local freshwater fish, and a few other dishes I forget.



Friday, May 9. As usual, I woke up at 5 AM. I spent the hours before breakfast preparing for the lecture and doing schoolwork. Before breakfast, I took this picture of the pool outside my window and of people cleaning the sheets of glass cantilering over the sunbathing areas.

I ate breakfast--lots of fruit, because it's so healthy and good. This is the Snakeskin Fruit (Salak), which is starchy, faintly sweet and sour. Not the best fruit in the world, but it's good in an Indonesian fruit soup as it adds a firm texture when other fruit such as bananas turn soft.

I also ate this Indonesian Passion Fruit, which is not as intensely flavored as the passion fruit we're used to in the U.S., but which has a pleasant, mild flavor with a delicate sweetness.



The morning lecture was held in this room. I arrived at 8:30 AM, and Dani's employees were setting everything up. Here's a picture of the room that I gave the talk in.




Chef Oke, who runs the Prambana test kitchen in Medan, is shown here unpacking all the samples that he baked for the occasion.



While I was waiting for attendees to arrive, I enjoyed one of each of these beautiful rice cakes. The long ones in plastic are filled with shredded coconut and a sugar similar to jaggary.

The morning lecture was attended by about 60 people, most of them from large companies producing wafers and cookies. Dan started with the usual overview of the whey industry in English and translated into Indonesian by Ferry, Dani gave a talk in Indonesian, and then I gave my 1 hour talk. This was followed by a question and answer period and then lunch at noon.

We took a break until 2 PM and repeated the experience, except that my talk focused more toward small business and was less technical. This talk was attended by close to 80 people. Dani was very happy with the outcome, because he didn't believe that Medanese would come in such numbers. A common belief is that people from Medan and Surabaya are less likely to come to such a talk than Jakartans.


The afternoon talk and question and answer session was over by 4:30 PM, and we checked out of the hotel and were on the road by 5 PM. We drove for 2.5 hours, through heavy rain and difficult traffic (small road, many trucks and motorcycles) to Sibayak hotel, located in Berastagi. We arrived at about 8:30 PM, ate dinner, and retired.