waiter, there's some wiener in my schnitzel

One thing that struck me while reading Staying On was the whole business of the Smalleys living in a little annexe off a bigger hotel complex and mostly subsisting off the food provided by the hotel, sometimes ferried across to them on trays by hotel staff. This set off an odd echo in my mind of our time living in Bandung, specifically the brief period shortly after our arrival in late 1978 when we stayed in one of the chalets attached to what was colloquially known by everyone in the expatriate community as the Bumi Club (pronounced to rhyme with "roomy"; stop sniggering at the back there), but is apparently more properly called Bumi Sangkuriang. It's a distinctive building in some sort of Dutch colonial style (lots of swoopy roof gables) built in the 1950s, and still there in a slightly modified form today. I say "slightly modified form" on the basis of having compared a photo taken in the outdoor recreation area at the rear of the main buildings in 1978 to one from the TripAdvisor page linked above: as you can see some of the buildings in the background have been expanded somewhat and the sloping grassy banks removed. For reference you can compare the original roof-lines and observe that the bit right in the middle of the newer picture with the distinctive notch at the back is the one in the older picture, with new sections built on top of and in front of it.

I'm reasonably sure that's me in the background in the top picture, standing on the pool steps (my two sisters are in the foreground), probably with some trepidation since as I recall the pool designers had made the bold decision to have the steps lead straight into the deep end. My (possibly flawed) recollection also tells me that the rightmost section of building in the background housed the room where (having evidently exhausted the entertainment options available elsewhere) I watched The Hindenburg twice in an afternoon.

Anyway, the thing that actually twanged my memory synapses was the food thing; I can't remember exactly what the arrangements were at the Bumi Club, including whether we had any facilities for preparing our own, but I do vividly remember some of the stuff we used to get from the club's own kitchens and - presumably - have delivered over to us. Or maybe we went to some communal dining area to eat? I can't remember. Anyway, things that stick in the mind (and probably stuck to the ribs at the time) were the thick crepe-style pancakes that always seemed to be cold (did they start out hot? I have no idea) and smeared with some sort of Nutella-esque chocolate spread, and the two varieties of schnitzel, which were badged as Wiener schnitzel and paprika schnitzel but could have been pretty much anything. You might, for instance, ask yourself what sort of meat it was likely to have been. Pork? Unlikely in a largely Muslim country, I'd have thought. Veal? Maybe. Chicken? Dog? Human flesh? Who knows.

I note that some other less specific Bandung reminiscences were prompted by my reading of Eight Months On Ghazzah Street back in 2010. More can be found here, here, and here.