Well, we had that dinner of filet mignon last night, Sunday night. Actually Tom had the sirloin tips and Janet had the charbroiled tenderloin. Luana had the single filet, and I had the double-stack (2 filets) order I’d enjoyed two years ago. The beef was delicious, as good as any we’ve had Stateside.
We arrived at The Only Place at 6 only to be told that they didn’t open until 7. With an hour to kill we went…you guessed it, shopping. At the same store Mark Carlton and I visited two years ago Luana and I purchased a top for her, a kurta for me (shirt), a set of pearl earrings for daughter Amy, and a gift for each of our granddaughters, all for the equivalent of about $65.
Then we returned to the steakhouse.
While our meals were being prepared, we asked for the history of The Place. The owner came to our table, sat down, and explained how his father had begun to provide housing for westerners visiting this city back in the 1950s. While they were in his house, he cooked western food for them, taking lessons from different ones of them on how to do it.
In the course of time, our host’s father decided to open a restaurant that catered to western appetites. On the menu we found steaks, burgers, pastas, fish, and lamb. No pork – our host’s family is Muslim.
The Only Place has been in operation since 1965, and our host’s father worked there until four days ago. He quit working because he died, and the memorial had been held in the restaurant just before it opened to let us in.
We consoled the businessman on his loss, and told him we’d pray that he’d find comfort. We trust he saw Jesus in us as we visited for about 20 minutes.
This afternoon we all took a walk down the same pathway I’d utilized two years ago when I was here with Mark Carlton to teach. This time as we stepped across that cement drainage ditch, however, it was not a pile of human excrement or a dead rat that caught my attention in the bottom of the gutter. It was a live rat the size of a tomcat. It scurried quickly among the refuse and exited the ditch through a hole half its size in the concrete sidewall. It had only about a fourth of its tail.
I stopped to talk with them a bit. Plugged up? I said. Ya ya, a jam, one of them said. I got an interesting couple of photos out of that encounter.
We then ate with our brides – all of us. Tom, Luana, and I all used our hands and fingers as utensils, just as the folks here do. It worked quite well too. The rice dish was delicious, with some green chile heat, and the small bits of chicken in whatever flavor of sauce that was were quite tasty. (I should tell you that one chicken is made to go a long ways here. It’s whacked into unidentifiable pieces, bones included; and the pieces are not large.)
The hotel here is hard by the ocean, actually by the bay that is named after a type of tiger. The grounds are beautiful, and the foliage, along with the temperature and setting, are reminiscent of parts of Maui or Penang. It’s almost surreal after the sights we saw on the way from the airport through the city of 6-10 million souls. The aforementioned (last post) refuse lay in heaps along the sides of the streets, but this place is immaculate.
