This website is my personal
tribute to the city of Medan, my favorite place in the world.
I am a European travel author, and I have visited
Medan many times during the last 10 years. I am not of retirement
age yet, but if I were, Medan, or the province of North Sumatra,
would be my first choice.
While residence permits for foreigners are hard
to come by (and expensive) anywhere in Indonesia, I am serious
with my choice of Medan. So serious that I am prepared to give
up my original citizenship, and become Indonesian instead.
If ever I had a love relationship with a city,
than this is it. And I sincerely do hope that it will be a love
relationship ‘til death do us part, and never turn into scorn
and hate as love relationships among humans sometimes do.
Some parts of the city of Medan are beautiful, and
Medan has repeatedly won Indonesian prices for a well-maintained
city, but it’s not really the architecture that has captured
me. Neither is it the landscape (“medan” is the Indonesian
word for “field”, and indeed, the city is built on flat
ground).
From the perspective of architecture, there are
anyway few large cities in Indonesia or Asia that are beautiful
in the sense that Rome, Bern, or Heidelberg are beautiful cities.
While Medan is, by Asian
standards, an old city, reaching back more than
500 years, it’s appearance (as that of all large Asian cities)
is marked by rapid growth and development over the last 50 years.
There are beautiful houses in Medan, for example
in the upper-class part of town near the Polonia airport, but
it’s not the architecture that makes for the charm of the
city. It’s the people.
Medan is a multi-ethnic city. Bataks who traditionally
inhabit the inland areas of North Sumatra make up the majority.
Until about a 100 years ago, the Bataks were active headhunters,
which of course is commonly known in Indonesia and beyond. Maybe
not everybody’s idea of a nice people, but rest assured that
your head will remain attached to your neck if you visit Medan
this time around.
There are two groups of Bataks in Medan, the southern
Bataks (Mandailing) who are Muslims, and the Northern Batak (Toba,
Karo) who are predominantly Protestant Christians (due to the
influence of a very successful German missionary, Ludwig Nommensen,
1834-1918).
Other large ethnic groups are the Melayu (traditionally
inhabiting the Eastern coast of Sumatra), the Minang (from central
Western Sumatra), and Javanese transmigrants. While Medan transmigrants
(most are second-generation) usually do identify their ethnic
background, I have always found that their identity is much more
Medanese than, for example, Javanese, or Sundanese, or Minang.
To be more specific, I find Medan Javanese people more similar
to other Medan inhabitants than they would be to the Javanese
on Java. Medan has its own character.
The people of Medan are more outgoing and less self-restricted
than those in other parts of Indonesia. This makes for a particular
brand of chaos, as well as of freedom. You have to live here for
some time to capture this atmosphere. It expresses itself in some
aspects of public everyday life, but is most evident in personal
communication.
To give an example of Medan’s public chaos
(and freedom): Medan is the only Indonesian or Asian city I know
off where you could routinely cross by car any red traffic light
in front of a policeman without ever being stopped. I don’t
want to defend this habit, and when I am stuck in traffic because
of this lack of discipline, I do get annoyed. But I also know
that it is an expression of the headstrongness and outgoing character
of the Medanese.
Talking about traffic: Medan is a wide, sprawling
city, and it is well-managed even though red-light stopping is
not enforced. Traffic congestion normally is not a problem. Medan
has more than two million inhabitants, but because it covers so
much area, it does not feel as congested as much smaller cities
on Java.
Medan probably is the city I now know best in the
world, and it is and will remain a primary topic of my writing,
whether I will be able or not, to push through with my plan to
become not just a permanent resident but an Indonesian resident
of the city.
I could talk for hours about Medan, and I do so
on other websites dedicated to Medan, North Sumatra, and Indonesia,
covering topics from travel to foreign investment, but this site
primarily is intended as pictorial. They say that a picture tells
more than 1000 words, and with more than 1000 photos on this site,
this should make for a lot of information.
Enjoy Medan and North Sumatra.
