Street Food--It's a Horse, It's a Ship

Tonight we had my colleague and her family over. In preparation, we went and got some terang bulan (moonlight) from a streetside martabak stall. And then tonight after they left...

The food vendors that run their carts through our neighborhood (or any neighborhood here) each have a different sound that they make to let people in the house know: If you want your sate/bakso/soto/roti/eskrim, you need to come out of your house now and get it before I pass you by. We don't go out to see the carts that often because they go by all the time, but we do enjoy listening to the different sounds they make: the tock-tock-tock of the bakso sellers wooden bell, the ting-ting-ting of a soto seller's ceramic bowel, the double-timed Christmas carols of the roti seller, the song that has temporarily slipped our minds of the eskrim seller.

It would seem like we've got the sounds pretty well matched with the wares. But there's one sound that's been a mystery to us, since it happens generally between 10:30 and 11:00 at night, and we're usually winding down at that point, not in the position to go out and see who's selling some type of food we don't even want.

The sound: N says it's sounded to her like a little horse decked out with bells pulling a little food cart. To me, it sounds like crickets when it first comes into ear range. Then closer, it sounds like a rain stick. Then it fades to crickets again. The other evening curiosity to see a horse got the better of N and she went out and peeked through the cracks in our fence. And there she saw it, a ship on wheels. She said it passed quickly and she had a sense that she was seeing something mystical, forbidden.

Tonight, it passed by again and we both rushed out to see the forbidden boat, the ghost ship of the near-midnight hour. It turned out it was selling sate, and it had sailed from the island of Madura.

Here's the martabak stall. This is actually indoors rather than itinerant and on the street like the one we usually buy from. But it still has a lot of streetgeist.

N's got such a good eye. She saw that the neighborhood adjacent to the martabak stall is named Komodo Tiga. Named after either the Komodo Dragon or the island Komodo from which it hails.

This martabak stand makes terang bulan (a folded pancake with cheese, chocolate, and peanuts) in the regular way and then in the "Special Executive Variation" (as noted in the upper right of this sign) that uses European products. 

Neither of us is an executive, so we settled for the normal martabak, which cost half the price of the special executive variation.

Ahoy there! We thought you were a horse.

He was 50 meters down the road before we got out, but we caught up to him. By the time we ran after him and took a picture of his ship, we were obligated to buy some of what he was selling. So that's our sate cooking on the little charcoal grill that the ship is appointed with.