Tonight for dinner, I walked down the street to a Padang restaurant with our translator husband-wife team & Sandrea (from the embassy),,, and ate with my fingers again! ha ha. Nina would be proud. (=

Padang food runs on the spicy side… and since this was my first time eating Padang, we ate dim-sum style… with little plates of all sorts of things brought out, and we all sampled around,,, mixing with rice.

Padang is the capital city of West Sumatra, by the way. Consider it near San Francisco, if you imposed the Indonesian map over the U.S. map. From the number of Padang restaurants, with their distinctive pointed roof, I’d say food is an important part of their culture.