Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Packing, Shopping, Eating

    We are now pretty sure that our driver screwed us yesterday by driving us to Kota Damansara the long way, via highway, when it could have been done much faster.  Kota Damansara is right next to Damansara Heights.  Argh.  This is one thing that we will not miss–not knowing what’s going on.

    Besides that, we can only think of one other thing that we will actually not miss.  The smog and diesel fumes, maybe?  Nope, that’s part of the fun.  Negotiating in bureaucrats in strange languages?  No again, that’s part of the fun.  The one thing that we will really not miss is line behavior.  Let us explain.  We are unabashedly culturally relativistic in our view that standing in line is a fundamental social convention.  When we are in line, we demand that people who arrive in the line after us stand behind us.  Here, that convention is broken on a fairly regular basis.  JM gets it worse than I do.  The other day she was standing in line at the bank, the next up for the teller.  When the person in front of her walked away, she was plowed over by some guy who just walked right through her to get to the free teller.  JM heroically pushed back and maintained her place in line, but the whole premise of the interaction is almost unthinkable to us.  In the US, that would have raised stares.  As George Costanza said once, "we’re living in a society here!"  We are like intrepid Danes travelling to the Italian Riviera, wondering why everyone insists on waving their hands when they talk; or like Asians visiting the US, perplexed that someone would wear shoes inside somebody’s private residence.  We have gotten used to a lot of things, but we are too American to have lost this.

    These are the things that go through our heads as we spend these days packing, shopping, and eating.  Besides, of course, simple incredulity that we managed to accumulate so much junk in the space of 11 months.

    Any last requests for Asian packaged goods?  Our last day at the grocery store is tomorrow, so let us know.

  • FedEx, Far Away

    Today we went to find the FedEx outlet nearest to us.  We have a local DHL outlet that we use, but DHL’s prices for shipping packages (as opposed to paperwork) are terrible here.  And DHL has already lost one of our packages, so we are not going to let them have a chance with our very important souvenirs and things.  So we found that the address is in Kota Damansara, a place that we had never actually visited before, but which we figured would probably be near Damansara Heights, which we have visited.  It turns out that Kota Damansara is far away, about 30 minutes from here by highway, and not near Damansara Heights.  (Note: We are not absolutely sure that our driver did not just royally screw us, but we are pretty sure.)  We got very lost, and stopped to ask directions a couple of times, the first time ending up talking to a Burmese Muslim immigrant whom even our driver could not understand.  The second time we stopped at a gas station and enlisted a couple of petrol-heads who showed us the way.  All in all, it was quite an adventure.  We believe that we will call for FedEx to do a pickup on Monday instead of exploring the outer reaches of metro KL again.

    We then set about doing some more shopping for gifts for our friends and ourselves.  On the way, we got what will be probably our final roti canai at Hameed’s, our favorite roti place.  We then stopped by our favorite Malay wet market and snapped a bunch of pictures, which we will post tomorrow or Monday.  There, we got our final nasi lemak and our final unidentified kuih-muih (assorted cakes), which included this time a yellow sweet-corn gelatin treat which was surprisingly good.

    During these long excursions, JM and I discussed what we think the smells of Southeast Asia are.  While your eyes and ears tell you a lot, we think that probably the smells are what really tell you where you are.  So what are the smells of Indonesia and Malaysia?  Well, they are some combination of the following:

    • the cloying sweet smell of local fruits–mangosteen, mango, snakefruit, rambutan, longan, melons, soursop, jackfruit, bananas, pineapple
    • the smell of crowds of people everywhere, body odors and babies
    • cigarettes and kretek (clove cigarettes)
    • charred grilled fish and chicken and lamb, fried peanuts, coriander and cloves and nutmeg and black pepper
    • the rotten sweet smell of durian and ripe knobly jackfruit
    • boiling palm oil–a surprisingly good smell, with soybean products and bananas bubbling away
    • sweet soy sauce
    • exhaust–diesel, leaded gasoline, two-stroke engines
    • coconut in all its forms–oil, candies, milk, sugar, and freshly cut open with a machete
    • sewage and commingled human and animal waste
    • chilies and scallions and garlic, raw and mashing into paste, or fried and crispy

    That’s the best we can do, and there’s a couple other undescribable smells that we can’t even begin to capture.  As you can see, not all of them are good smells, but they are part of the experience, and their combination is unmistakably part of island Southeast Asia.