2 March 2025 – Long ago, I lived for a while in Peru. Only slightly less long ago, I lived for a while in Indonesia. And now, on this one afternoon here in Vancouver, I revisit each — in new physical experience, and in old memories as well.

1 – Bike to Baik

First, courtesy of the VPL (Vancouver Public Library) Staircase Sounds series of noon-hour musical events: a program of Indonesian gamelan music, performed by the Vancouver group Gamelan Bike Bike.

The name Bike Bike is a double, and bilingual, play on words.

In English, it nods to the fact that the musicians complement traditional gamelan instruments with ones they build themselves from old bicycle parts.

See? On the red table-tops: segments of old bike frames (left & far right) and bike sprockets (second from right).

Even their shirts, custom-designed and created in Indonesia, continue the theme, with bike chains and sprockets in amongst more traditional design elements.

The group of musicians is very good — and that is the second, bilingual, part of the play on words. In the Indonesian language, baik baik (virtually the same pronunciation) means exactly that: “very good!” (Literally, good-good.)

I sit for an hour, awash in the intricate beauty of the music as it pulses and swirls through this Vancouver space. Awash, also, in memories of another time and that other place.

Baik baik sekali. Saya senung sekali.

2 – to ¡Bueno!

And then, my head full of glorious music, I leave the glorious Central Library building (thank you, Moishe Safdie) and walk five blocks north to Silvestre (“gusto latino”) on Water Street in Gastown.

More precisely, this deli-bistro offers “gusto peruano,” for it was founded by Peruvian immigrants and is dedicated to Peruvian cuisine and ambiente. I’ve never been here before, but I’ve checked the menu online, and I know what I want: an alfajor dessert (two shortbread rounds, filled with dulce de leche and topped with icing sugar) and a mug of chicha morada (a purple corn drink, slightly tart and refreshing).

The young server treats me to widened eyes and a dimpled smile when I speak with her in Spanish. And I smile — oh, how I smile — when she delivers my order.

Odd thing, memory.

Tracking down alfajores in Vancouver had become an obsession; chicha morada was an afterthought. But now, as I sit with the physical reality again before me and in my mouth… the power is in the drink.

The alfajor is delicious, but it is not tied to any one moment or place we’d visit while in Lima. The chicha morada, however… It is absolutely tied to the one very small café in the High Selva village where we lived, and to the people with whom we conversed in that café, all those people who deepened our knowledge of the language and the place and how best for us to be there with them.

All these decades later, that taste is again fresh in my mouth — and old memories are again fresh in my mind. ¡Qué bueno!

Bike-baik-bueno.