Indonesia was once a Dutch colony so its cuisine has now become part of Dutch culture. We saw a nice restaurant during our perambulations and decided to return for dinner.
Our waiter told us we were lucky to get in without a reservation since the restaurant is very popular. We ordered rijstafel which is rice with a lot of different vegetables and meats to eat on top. It came as prixe fixe or a al carte. We were talked into the prixe fixe although it looked like too much food. There were two types of rice, a salad of mostly cucumbers, fried tofu, various roasted and stewed chicken, pork, beef, green beans in sauce, bean sprouts, toasted coconut, fried thread of sweet potato, meat balls of some sort, a puffy bread like thing, roasted peanuts, cucumber apple and pineapple in a spice sauce, fried bananas and two hot sauces that added some serious kick.
We couldn’t believe we ate the whole thing — except for the fried banana which was not to my liking.
After all that food, we decided to walk in Vondel Park, a large urban park rather like Central Park in NYC. This evening it was full of young people waiting for a concert to start, part of a series of concerts going on around Amsterdam this weekend. Others were there picnicking, playing with balls or just socializing. And a considerable smell of weed was noticed. There seemed to be people everywhere.
LHWatson's Travel Blog 
