- I ate a whole meal served to me on a banana leaf and with only my right hand in Penang's little India. You would think the primativeness would make this easier to do than using utensils but in fact it was really hard! Anna and I were discussing whether we could open this type of restaurant in the UK but got stuck when we arrived at the problem of how to obtain fresh banana tree leaves.
- Had pancake day in Singapore, and really confused boarder control by crossing over to Thailand for the afternoon only to buy a coconut.
- Had a spontaneous road trip to the Thai boarder and listened mostly to Australian hip hop which I was not well acquainted with beforehand.
- Saw some Buddhist monks hanging up their laundry in their temple accommodation and smoking together, which of course I'm sure is pretty normal but it felt very odd for to see them doing something so mundane.
- Tried to make a sandcastle with Anna's little sister who is four, but she refused on the grounds that it was too dirty, and managed to make me feel very immature for suggesting it.
- Was given an orange by a dragon dancer on the street.
- Have been kept awake most nights by ENDLESS FIREWORKS. Am continually reminded that it is new year in Asia.
In the last week I've managed to visit three new countries, although for two of them the visit was so brief they almost don't count for much more than some stamps on my passport.
The first was Singapore where I spent the day with the lovely Peterson family, who welcomed me into their home at the early hours of the morning, then made me incredible pancakes followed by a rainforest walk before I had to catch my flight, it was awesome!
Followed swiftly by Malaysia and specifically Penang where my Beijing flatmate Anna's family live now, I've spent the week here with a weekend in northern Malaysia and an afternoon across the boarder in Thailand for a drink of coconut. I definitely can't complain, particularly when I know that during my average February I am loaded with work and cold (as many of you may be, I apologise for the contrast!).
I confess to knowing very little about Malaysia at all before I came here, nor had I really heard of Penang, the island that Anna's family lives on, and I can't say that I'm an expert on it now but here are some things I discovered.
- Malaysia is majority Muslim and in some areas such as the north extremely strict, but in Penang the population is mostly Chinese, and the opposition party is in power.
- When we went up to the north for the weekend for a paddleboarding competition almost everyone was Muslim and you had to drive for half an hour to the nearest Chinese restaurant if you wanted to buy a beer.
- Penang has loads of Chinese who have most of the wealth, but also plenty of Malay, Indian and Expats (Brits and Aussies). This unusual demographic results in awesome food and architecture. Mosques, temples, pagodas and churches are all over the place many of them huge and multicoloured. My favourite are the old mansion houses from the 1920s which have been left untouched for years, totally abandoned with vegetation growing in and around them all. They aren't allowed to be demolished because Penang is now unesco world heritage, but everyone wants to live in the new condos rather than convert the old buildings so they are left to look like something out of a Daphne Du Maurier novel. It's so cool.
- City of Georgetown on the east side and beaches on the west side, with rainforest and tropical friut farm in the middle that we drove through today on motorbikes. It's a very hard life!
Cafe des Amis in Hoian, run by an old vietnnamese man who spends half his time teaching cooking in France and the other half running his restaurant on the riverside. He sits at the entrance smoking and welcoming people in, once you arrive he asks where you are from (so far not particularly unusual). Once he knows your nationality he brings out piles of hardback notebooks and pours through them, they are his comment books and he is looking for fellow Brits such as myself to show me their notes. The comment book is signed by everyone who has ever come as far as I can tell and they are all long and personal, with jokes, drawings (many portraits of him, Bethany contributed one while we were there) and praise of the amazing hospitality and cuisine. Once we stumbled on the cafe mid week for breakfast (I had amazing mango pancakes), we ate there for almost all our meals until we left, the food, service and atmosphere was totally unique, and it made me feel like me as comfortable as if I were at home even though the whole experience was new and my home was nothing like the cafe on face value.
The pictures on the walls all contain his favourite french Jazz musicians or himself as a younger man cooking, one massive picture is of the musicians and him together, but we discovered from looking at an older photo of the restaurant in the scrapbooks that he had himself photoshopped into it as one book from a few years back had the same photo of the men without him awkwardly standing behind them. He wanders around the cafe singing along to his favourite lines in short bursts. To me it seemed like Mr Kim is someone totally happy with his current circumstances and desiring nothing more than to delight in the life he already has and share it with people as they pass through. Which is a pretty simple thing in some ways, and yet it's quite rare to find.
Overall highlights of the trip
- cycling to the beach through rice paddies and villages
- the restaurant on top of a hill in Penang which was built around some form of abandoned theme park, in the middle of nowhere and with an amazing view.
- seeing the look of confusion on the Malaysia immigration officer at boarder control when he realised my exit stamp was dated just a few hours earlier.
- going for a walk in the Singapore rainforest with Claire Peterson and dodging the monkeys.
- wandering through the Buddhist caves with sculpted stone buddhas in Marble Mountain.
- Watching the six nations one night then the superbowl the next with lots of passionate fans and not really knowing what was going on in either.
- asking the Chinese people to pose so that we could take a photo of them after they asked us for a photo, and their looks of total confusion.
- attempting to play Mafia on the boat round Ha Long Bay with the other passengers, none of whom were native english speakers and some who could barely speak any at all. Game was interrupted several times by 'Mr Sake' the old Japanese man who would start laughing for no reason and not understand anything that was going on...
- In Malay, the word for water is 'air'.
- earning a free tshirt from hostel owner 'Monkey Jane' for bringing her some more customers we met on a bus.
- Being asked to 'buy something' by the stall owners, and then at Marble Mountain being asked to 'buy something marble' specifically.
