Motorcycle!

So walking around town was fun, but RIDING AROUND TOWN is AWESOME! Josh keeps making fun of me because I like to act like this awesome bike is some sort of bad ass chopper, instead of what I think is considered a "non-licensed vehicle" at home, meaning the engine is so small not only do you not need a driver's license to operate it, but that it doesn't even need tags in most states. Plus, it costs $90 a month to rent it, and a dollar to fill the gas tank.

But, the Honda X5 Dream is the first step towards the middle class for millions of Asians, so I am justified in renting this motorbike because it can be considered research. That's right. Justification is fun.

Whheeeeeeee!!

PS. Mine does not have that retarded basket on the front. That is for total losers.

Langkawi

Just north of Penang Island is another island chain, called Langkawi, which means eagles butt or something in Malay. We went there for two reasons: need more beach time, and it's a duty free port. Which means that a can of beer is 50 cents. Also, this happened on Langkawi: met cute Dutch boys who turned out to be 18, met Finnish girls who were drinking buckets of vodka (no really, buckets- the bar was serving booze in buckets), and went midnight swimming under the southern cross. A very good weekend, all in all.

Nasi Lemak

*Note to self: taking pictures of food under florescent light does no favors to the food.

Remember, from before, that thing that I ate? Yeah, well I learned how to cook it. At last we have a kitchen. Nasi lemak consists of three parts- the rice, the sambal, and the garnishes. The rice is cooked with coconut milk and lightly spiced. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the traditional spice is Pandan, or Screwpine Leaves (yeah, I have no idea where that name came from, as the plant itself looks like broad grass). If you can't find that, a bay leaf will work nicely. The sambal is the spice paste that is garlic, shallots, onion, fresh chilies, dried chilies, shrimp paste, and sometimes lemon grass, fried until fragrant in oil and then cooked with tamarind juice to give it some tartness. The garnishes are traditionally fried peanuts, chopped cucumber and maybe some cilantro or mint leaves.

Nasi lemak actually refers to just the rice, but it is normally served with a protein as well. I decided to go crazy traditional Malay: dried tiny anchovies. Yeah, I know, sounds gross. But really, they came out excellent. You can easily substitute peeled shrimp or pieces of fish or chicken. The tiny anchovies are friend until they are golden brown and crunchy, and really, they sort of remind me of bacon. Fish bacon.

Just a note on getting all this to come together, I put the rice on and then fried the fish and the peanuts, and then made the sambal. It was all done about the right time.

The How To:

Coconut Rice

240 ml / 1 c rice

240 ml / 1 c coconut milk

80 ml / 1/3 c water

2 pantan leaves or 1 bay leaf

¼ stick cinnamon

1 whole clove

pinch of salt

Put everything into a saucepan with a tightly fitting lid. Bring to a boil and then reduce to the lowest flame possible (just barely simmering). Let cook undisturbed for 20 minutes.

Sambal

1 small red onion (really, should be ¼ small red American onion- we seem to have gargantuan produce in North America)

4 small shallots or 2 large

2 cloves garlic

10 whole dried red chilies

5 fresh hot red chilies

1 t shrimp paste (substitute anchovy paste, normally sold in the Italian section of the supermarket in a tube, if you can't find it at an Asian shop)

¼ t salt

1 T sugar

4 T tamarind paste, dissolved in 1 c water for 30 min, then strained

You can do this by hand, like I did (because I don't have anything else to do it with, not because I am better than you), or use a food processor. I wholeheartedly approve of the food processor. Basically, grind the onion, shallots, garlic, dried chilies, fresh chilies, shrimp paste, salt, and sugar until they become a chunky paste. You might have to add a bit of water to the mixture to get it to blend smooth, but try to add as little as possible. When you have a paste, heat four tablespoons of oil in a wok. When the oil is shimmering, add the spice paste and fry about two minutes, or until the garlic smells fragrant and the chilies start to smell toasted. Add half of the tamarind water, and mix well. Continue cooking over high heat until the oil begins to separate out from the sambal. That is your signal that it is done. Reserve the sambal and the remaining tamarind water.

Garnishes

60 ml/ ¼ c raw shelled peanuts, fried in 2 T oil for few minutes, until golden

½ English cucumber, sliced into small pieces

Protien

2 oz dried ikan bilis (small whole anchovies)

-or-

4 oz shrimp, peeled and cleaned

-or-

4 oz boneless chicken meat, chopped into small cubes

If using the dried anchovies, fry them in a ¼ c of oil until golden brown. Strain.

If using chicken or shirmp, sear in a hot wok with a spoonful of oil until nicely seared but not done.

Add the protein and 2/3 of the sambal mixture to the wok, and add the remaining tamarind water. Bring to a boil and cook until the meat is done and the sauce has thickened (you want the sauce to be like thick chili, basically).

To Serve:

Mound the rice and top with the protien in sambal sauce. Serve the remaining sambal on the side as a condiment, along with the cucumbers and peanuts. Eat, and be mad you never had this before.

The Servants are Stealing Sugar

Part of this trip has been travel, and the other part practice. Josh is practising having a real job, and I am practising being a diplomatic wife. A diplomatic wife, you ask? Yes, the partner of a diplomat who, because diplomats' wives are not allowed to work, becomes more paranoid and cooped up, eventually falling into a pool of drink and abusing the household servants. I mean, at the very least, it's a romantic ideal.

So on Monday, Josh went off to a conference at the Eastern and Oriental Hotel to meet and greet, and I started searching for an apartment to rent, holding a gin and tonic and yelling at the maid the entire time. If you used to read my other blog, then you remember the multitude of apartments that we went through to get our current place. I vowed not to repeat that experience.

Armed with the Malaysian version of craigslist (craigslist does actually exist here, but no one uses it, ever), the newspaper, and my mobile phone, I discovered the following things about myself: (1) I am not a Muslim. (2) I am not Chinese. (3) I do not wish to rent an apartment for two years. Granted, none of this was new information, but apparently my love of bacon disqualifies me from furnished apartments owned by Halal-keeping Muslims. Halal is the Islamic equivalent to Jews who keep Kosher (there is a statement designed to get you beat up in both Tel Aviv and Cairo). I didn't realize this, but cooking bacon while smooching my boyfriend and drinking a beer at the same time basically means that the apartment owners have to burn it down and start over. Seems drastic, but there you go.

In America, if you state in your apartment listing “Chinese Only” or “Black Only” or whatever, it's basically an invitation to go to court, twice. First as guests of the federal government, and second as a class action defendant. I like that system. It's cruel but fair. In Malaysia, it's totally ok to be all “Chinese Only, peeps, Whiteys Smell Like Butter and Can't Trust Indians, so Later Skaters”. I called a couple “Chinese Only” apartments just to see if they were serious. The sound of getting hung up on indicates that they were.

Short-term apartments are not really that common in the US, but normally you can find a student's place or something to sub-let. I could not, here. Everyone wanted me to sign a two year contract, and asking for a shorter contract involved a lot of teeth sucking and hand waving on the part of the agent, only to be offered a one year contract. Asking for two months caused the sky to rip and frogs to rain from heaven.

But, persistence wins. (Persistence and cheating. They both win.) I found an agent that was familiar with the concept of short-term rental, and who didn't care if we were Chinese Muslims, and now we live in a three bedroom apartment on the twenty-first floor next to the ocean.

Totally didn't see that coming.

View from the room where the washing machine is kept, because, obviously, laundry enjoys a nice view.The Sultan of Kedah (the state next to Penang) has a house right across the street. Not much seems to happen here, but I like to imagine it is a den of inequity.
This is the view of the Straits of Malacca from our balcony. Just across the water you can see mainland Malaysia.

More Satay, and What I Wouldn't Do for It

I promise I will figure out how to make this. The meat itself is fantastic, but the satay sauce is where the real magic is. I'd lick it off the floor. Off the floor of a slaughterhouse.

Carniverous.

Out of Order Miscellanea #1

This krazy kute kancil (Malaysian Mousedeer) was housed in this amazing park that surrounds the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur. I like things that replace C with K. These are terrible pictures, but they really do prance like deer, but are the size of guinea pigs.

Which make me think they would be excellent roasted.

Uhhhh, this is food?

Food FAAAAAAAAAAAAAIL.

If you are ever in a hawker center in Kuala Lumpur and you look up and as sign that says “Economy Rice. Cooked Meat Vegetable” turn around and run away. I haven't a picture of the bowl of noodles, which I decided to call “Used Chicken Soup”, but it was this: one shred of chicken meat, a meager fist full of noodles, a broth with the full rich flavor of salty water. The owner of the stall was eating something that looked totally delicious, some sort of huge dumpling, almost like a Chinese perogie. I pointed to it and tried to order two, and he swatted my hand away and said “MY FOOD!”

Indeed.

So we got what was not his food, a bowl of nothing served with noodles. His cooking skills are almost as good as his English skills.

Nasi Lemak

Breakfast is really where a people show their true colors. Do they want a sweetened fried bun? Do the like toast spread with jam? Do they like rice spread with sweetened fish paste, chili sauce, peanuts, and coconut milk? I thought that I would be two of those three types of people. I mean really, donuts and marmalade are pretty easy to get behind. But fish paste?

I was wrong. Spicy, salty, crunchy, and satisfyingly rice-centric, it goes great with a cup of iced coffee as the sun starts to come up.

Melacca, Malaysia

Melacca was kind of ridden hard and put away wet by the colonial powers: founded by the Portuguese, it later became part of Dutch East India before finally bedding down with the British. All that confusion has left a mix of Malays, Straits Chinese, and Tamils, and decades later, a quiet port town filled with the smell of frying chiles and noodles.

Hindus Make the Best Alarm Clocks

Malaysia, and South East Asia, in general, is not a land of sleeping in. When the temperature can reach 95 F/35 C or more by noon, it makes sense that you would get the heavy lifting done before lunch. I, however, am not normally one of those people who rises early. I'm not one of those people who can sleep till 2pm, either, but rousing me from bed before nine am is normally a re-creation of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

Not so in Malaysia, thanks to organized religion.

The Muslims tried their best. They start their call to prayer around 5:45 am this time of year. Yesterday's morning guy was considerably better than today's, the call to prayer starting slow and sweet, but he got some vibrato into it towards the end. Today's guy was either very ill, or maybe had lost his vocal cords in a freak washing machine accident. It sounded like he did the chanting thorough one of those electronic voice boxes. But for either of them, it was simply too short. What, three minutes of amplified warbling is going to wake me up pre-six am? Come on Mohammed.

Yesterday being Sunday, the Catholics tried their best, chiming in with some serious bell work at 6 am, probably just to remind their flock that if they didn't get out of the house while the Muslims were chanting then they were going to be late. But it was pretty weak.

But the Hindus: well now, that was something spectacular. Yesterday they started with some chanting around six thirty, and then about five minutes later a bell joined in. It doesn't sound like much yet, but this 'chanting' could be described as 'yelling', and the 'bell' would be better called a 'gong'. After five more minutes of that, we started in with the drumming. This was not one guy with a bongo- it sounded like the entire drum corps of a NCAA Championship Football Team- back beat, syncopation, a cymbal. This is actually when I woke up the first day. And I blamed it on the Catholics, assuming that because it was a Sunday, they had decided to assemble an actual marching band as a piece de resistance to show the other denominations in town what was the what.

At about the twenty minute mark, this little wake up call has the force of a jet engine and the excitement of a snake charmer, and this is when the horn comes in. The horn doesn't really play a tune, it justs sort of chimes in to underscore that sleeping is over. Hindu scholars might argue that the horn represents Vishnu, or maybe Amber, the destroyer, but for all intents and purposes, Horn says Get On With Your Day.

And that's how I woke up yesterday, and this morning. And because I got up so early, I got to eat this, Masala Thosai (also spelled Masala Dosa in some places). It's like a crispy crepe filled with curried potatoes and served with three separate and delicious sauces. So, in the new world order, the Hindus of South India are invited to be in charge of waking and breakfasting.

Yet another picture of me looking rather odd in a public eating place. Note to self: quitting looking weird on film. PS, to All the Stick People (prior travelling partners extrodinaire), it breaks my heart to be eating this without you. Get your shoes on and meet me here.

One of us! One of us!

Know what is not fun? Being labled as diseased. I can see why lepers hate that so much, what with the jeering and the name calling and all. It's a nasty business.

J and I just crossed the Straits of Johor, between Singapore and Malaysia, over the new Tuas Causeway on a bus. You leave downtown Singapore and then traverse through this strange part of city in the West, full of shops that sell tranmissions for oil dereks, gigantic flywheels, transformers, and other industrial errata that doesn't really fit in with the trim-ladies-walking-around-shopping-for-Hermes-bags part of the city we had been staying in. Ending a sentance with a preposition? Love to. For those of us who grace the Potomac with our presence, it's Singapore's PG County: used cars and grumpy men until the sun sets. I digress.

We got stamped out of Singapore with adrimable efficiency and then drove acorss the Straits, duly presenting perfectly filled out paperwork to a Malaysian official. Now, I've travelled a fair bit, and, as much as I do not like carrying a US passport (too much explaining about how you are not a huge asshole intent on killing your hosts' top officials and then taking their natural resources), the great advantage is that normally just waving it around in the air gets you thorough immigration. Holding that thin blue folio usually allows you to skip the visas, skip proving you have enough money to not die in a ditch in this new country, skip providing finger prints and police reports and dental records or whatever else is asked of people who have less privledged passports. Even paperwork has a pecking order.

But this time, all the immigration officials could see were invisible Swine Flu viruses crawling around on the pages. Because clearly Americans use their passports to clean their noses when ill. Love that paper cut feeling from the stiff card stock. We were shunted off into a separate line, everyone eyeing us, just waiting for one of us to drop dead or explode, spreading the disease all around Malaysia. This must be what the Chinese feel like, as it seems like everywhere they go people are looking at them suspiciously, as if thinking “I know you sleep with a chicken under your pillow- what fresh death are you bringing today?”. Actually, we were the only non-Chinese in the health inspection line.

But luckily, due to the diligance of the Malaysian Immigration service, we were deemed “NOT WALKING DEATH” by having a fourteen year old take our temperature with a peice of tape and a coat hanger. Maybe incubation period doesn't translate well, but still, it's nice that someone is paying attention. I'm glad to know that my temperature is a healthy 38.6 C.