Night at the Medan Tiara

For some reason, describing hotels really tickles me. In a few years, when I end up writing about places to stay in Leland, NC (‘The Gateway to Brunswick County’) for the ‘Excursions’ section of the Youngstown Buckeye Review, it should prove easy enough to see where I went wrong. Into the abyss-


Medan is the quintessential Indonesian working city: congested, polluted, and busy. It is the third largest city in Indonesia, with 2.5 million inhabitants. Situated in the North of Sumatra, with good proximity to the Strait of Malacca (and thereby international markets), Medan serves as an entrepot for much of the province’s natural resource driven (oil, gas, mining, forestry) development as well as its manufacturing industries. The Medanese are an interesting lot, a mixture of Chinese (who control the business community), Batak (an ethnicity from highland Sumatra known for their ferocity), and Tamils. Indonesians can always be counted on to refer to the people of Medan as ‘orang keras,’ or ‘intense people’ and Medan is the same way.

The crown jewel of the Medan hotel hierarchy is the Hotel Medan Tiara (and Conference Center), the preferred choice of all my colleagues in Medan. I think we even have a special rate. The hotel, by consensus the nicest in the city, is in the first tower of a two tower complex, while the second tower (conceivably the Convention Center) straddles the line between uncompleted/bombed out with uncanny aplomb. I had no idea what awaited me inside.

The lobby of the Tiara is, naturally, still feted with cheap themed Chinese New Year Decorations more than a month after the holiday. On the left lies the Kutaraja Restaurant, featuring a menu where the nightly buffet is cheaper than everything on the menu, and to the right the Tor Tor Lounge, where you can redeem your free ‘welcome drink’ voucher received during check-in. Speaking of check-in, this is a protracted process, for me involving a long argument of whether I have to leave a US $40 deposit on the mini-bar (contents of the mini-bar: peanuts, bottled water, beer, coke lite, sweet tea, pocari sweat, and, inexplicably, twelve Toblerone). Eventually winning out on the grounds that there is no way they make a humanitarian organization put money down on the mini-bar, I bask in my victory as the young associate named ‘Trainee’ is chastised by management.

My room (the Tiara has an ambiguous room hierarchy: executive and quality) has the largest bed I have ever seen, a TV, an electronic safe, one shoe, a cellophane encased plate of cantaloupe slices that have shrunken so substantially that I spend my night playing ‘giant’ with them, and a bedside command post unit with buttons for everything in the room. Realizing the window is a sliding door that opens onto space, I resist the urge to explore further.

The lobby, by day a pacific respite decked with red firecracker garlands, becomes by night the scene of full contact prostitute derby. Heels and sequins lay in wait for the unassuming guest returning from dinner. Realizing the infinite wisdom of my decision to eschew the Tor Tor’s ‘welcome drink’ (suspiciously only valid after 9pm) in favor of TV, I strove to avoid eye contact of any kind, a strategy I quickly abandoned a few steps inside the front door. With my arms simultaneously pulled in three different directions, and verging dangerously close to being swept into a slipstream (terminating, temporarily, no doubt in the karaoke-belching Tor Tor) of halter tops and Chanel No. 5, I stiff armed my way across the rest of the tile between me and the elevator bank.

Back in my room, and after some devoted hand washing, I finally settled into bed. 'Shakespeare in Love' was on the Tiara’s movie network, a movie that, in its Indonesian incarnation, is surprisingly manageable to watch, like the digest version, clocking in at around 50 minutes. Thank you, censorship.

The next morning, happily, I got out of Medan and on to Simeulue.