Judy even took Indonesian cooking lessons. Everywhere we went in Holland, there was a Chinese-Indonesian Restaurant on the block. This was like a second culture in the whole country. Farming villages in the north had a "Chinees" restaurant on the main street. Take away was big business. Sunday dinner at the local Indonesian was a massive family affair. One restaurant in The Hague was Tampat Senang, very famous and quite fancy and expensive. An up-market restaurant. The story goes that Queen Juliana visited Jakarta during her reign and asked the Dutch ambassador there, "I would like to eat a good rijstafel (rice table) tonight. Can you tell me the name of the best rijstafel restaurant?" His answer, "Your Majesty, the best rijstafel is at the Tampat Senang in The Hague."
Oom Jan, the owner of Mirasa, had told us many stories of his adventures in Indonesia.
He had been a taxi driver in The Hague and, during his twenties, had decided to go to Indonesia to become a Buddhist. So, he did. He returned to The Hague with an Indonesian wife and opened Mirasa. His wife died sadly a few years later, but he remarried, again an Indonesian woman and a very good cook. In the restaurant, there is a shrine to his first wife, with a Buddhist statue and candles and flowers and a photo of her. You can see the shrine over Oom Jan's shoulder above the doorway to the outdoor section of Mirasa.
In 1974, Judy bought the Klein Indonesisch Kookboek by Raden Suwondo Sudewo. This "Little Indonesian Cookbook" has been the staple Indonesian cookbook in our kitchen library since then. It was our introduction to this staple of the Dutch culture. After World War II, there was an independence struggle by the Indonesians from their Dutch overlords. Many people from the islands came to Holland, bringing their families and their traditional ways with them. They were welcomed by the Dutch and many of them opened restaurants. This was our American introduction to Indonesia.
The most famous of Indonesian dishes is the HUGE rijstafel, or rice table. Here is a list of the common ingredients in a rijstafel.
I would sometimes get brave and ask Oom Jan's wife, Fanny, to serve me a piece of baked fish with hot sambal peppers. I no longer have the ability to eat really hot peppers, like our sons, but a small piece of fish wouldn't hurt, I always thought. And I always thought wrong. No matter what cooling agent I used, my body would react strongly to the spicy fish. I should have learned my lesson. But, in any case, the food was delicious and Oom Jan was a great host, and Fanny a great, honest cook.
For these reasons alone, we dreamed of traveling to Indonesia to try the "real" food in the "real" local restaurants.
When we first landed in the Netherlands in 1968, we enrolled in a Dutch language and culture class. This was taught by Mrs. van Vliet, the mother of one of the teachers at the American School. Mrs. van Vliet and her daughter, Maya, were both prisoners in Japanese prison camps in Indonesia during the war. She told us stories of their containment. Food had been a big problem and the women had lost a lot of weight. Mrs. van Vliet told us, "We used to peel bananas and eat the fruit. Then we would let the skins ferment in the sun and eat the mold that would grow." She was a taskmaster as a teacher and gave cooking lessons also. We prepared an Indonesian meal with her supervision and wrote poems. Mrs. van Vliet had had a rough life in the camp, but still loved the Indonesian culture and her stories about the people and the landscape were enthralling. I remember writing her a poem with a line: "Mevrouw (Mrs.) van Vliet loopt op de street." Frightful Dutch, but she laughed.
During our 39 years in The Netherlands, many of our Dutch friends took vacations to Indonesia. It was almost a religious need for them to go there. Special cheap trips were announced on TV and the newspapers. The Indonesian culture in Holland is very strong. There were many inter-racial marriages between the Dutch and the Indonesians living in The Netherlands. And, there was a sympathetic bond between the two groups because of their shared experiences during World War II under Japanese occupation of Indonesia. Of course, the war for Indonesian independence left emotional and political scars between the two nations, but these have since been healed.
There is a beautiful park in The Hague dedicated to the Workers of the World. A sort of Socialist natural garden to be used for relaxation in a green environment, especially people who may have lived in crowded neighborhoods and didn't get much chance to enjoy nature. At one corner of the park is the Indies Monument (in Dutch: Indische Monument) which is a memorial to all Dutch citizens who died during the occupation between 1941-1945. The inscription says: "A place where you can pass on to your children the part of your childhood spent in the Dutch East Indies." Special urns with dirt from the seven war cemeteries in Indonesia are placed there. And, each year, the Dutch ambassador in Indonesia lays a wreath at the Menteng Pulo war cemetery on Java. What makes this monument so special is that the funeral directors in The Hague have elected to place all the left-over flowers from funerals at the monument, so it is always decorated with beautiful, colorful flowers.
