SATAY paris VS indonesia

The price of satay at Paris is 5 euros. About SGD 10.50 or RM 24. And we're talking about 3 sticks, plus or minus cucumbers, sauce and choice of ketupat or nasi / mee goreng.
Three Saturdays ago, we went to an Indonesian festival. The flyers promised exotic dances and handcrafted items but our main goal was to gorge on authentic Indonesian food cooked by the Indonesian community.

The crowds jammed the satay stall and the ever-cheerful ladies could hardly keep up. But even more enak were their dishes such as beef rendang, grilled fish in rojak spice and chicken pepes, all highly nuanced with aromatic herbs which may have been specially flown in. They certainly tasted nothing like the lame stuff we've been fobbed off at in Singapore so many times over, what we ate here literally jumped with new and exciting flavours, just a glimpse of what real Indonesian food tastes like. Too bad they only hold these events once a year!

The following Saturday I received news of a charity bazaar organised by the diplomatic spouses of the Malaysian embassy. Other than satay, there was nasi lemak with beef rendang, kuih-muihs, roti murtabak and even a teh-tarik man. The food was generally not as good as the Indonesian contingents' but we were certainly not complaining since to get even so close to frozen roti canai is a small miracle in these parts.