Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • NZ, Pics, WFU, UKM

    Can we take a moment to recognize that Wake Forest is the worst tournament team in history?  I (TP) have been welded in a sort of sad alliance to the Demon Deacons since at least 1993, the year that Wake went to the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl in sunny New Orleans.  Before that I’m not so sure.  But basketball, not football, is the real name of the game for WFU, which is why every season I get my heart set on Wake Forest making a run in March.  They were pre-season #1 this year even.  Our friend has described the losing game against WVU as one of the most exciting basketball games he has ever seen, which makes it even more upsetting that we had to watch it slowly update on over the internet on the ESPN web page.  Why, sports gods, why must you tease me?

    In other news, I have been admitted as a non-degree student at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.  Isn’t that nice?  What that means is that I have to waste a whole half day tomorrow (at least) taking the commuter rail down to Bangi, on the far southern end of the metro area, to see about filling in some more paperwork, which will supposedly give me official status to be allowed to use the library at Universiti Malaya, something that I’ve been doing for one month already anyway.

    Also, we haven’t mentioned this yet, but we will be taking about 10 days off starting this Friday.  We are going to meet JM’s parents in a nice compromise location: New Zealand.  It’s a 10-hour flight from here to Auckland, and Malaysia Airlines has a nonstop every day.  That makes it just about equidistant from LA and KL, which is convenient for JM’s parents.  Technically, the middle point is Wake Island, but there’s not much to do there.  We’ll take lots of pictures on our trip.  We’ve heard that Auckland and Wellington have reputations as gastronomic centers, and we have been scoping out internet reviews of good places to eat.  We saw a menu that listed the following as an entree: “Furikake crusted hapuka, braised witlof.”  Anyone know what that means?

    Speaking of pictures, you can check out the latest pictures from some of our voyages around KL starting here.  If you hit “next” in the series, you will see more new pictures.  Clicking “previous” takes you to other KL pictures that we posted awhile ago.

  • It Finally Happened

    We’ve been away from the United States now for a little over six months.  We left September 16, and it’s now March 19.  So that’s close to 170 days–no small amount of time.  Until last night, we had held out.  Well, it’s not even really fair to call it holding out.  We just didn’t even think about it.  It was natural.  But something seems to have changed yesterday.  It was different, and we acted upon it, and it was fine.  Yes, last night, for the first time since leaving the States, we cooked a non-Asian meal.

    That’s not to say that we haven’t eaten non-Malaysian/Indonesian food since we’ve gone.  We had pizza one time in Jakarta, and we had Indian food a couple times in Jakarta.  We also went out once every other week or so to a bar in Jakarta that served good salads and soup.  And we’ve gone out for German food twice, once in KL (excellent), once in Jakarta (not so bad).  And we can’t forget the two times we went out to a giant multicultural buffet in Jakarta.

    What we haven’t done is actually cook a meal involving all Western ingredients.  In Indonesia, we ate nothing but noodle stir fries and vegetable dishes, Javanese and Sumatran curries, and deep fried tofu and tempe at home.  Since we’ve arrived here, we have eaten salads made at home, since we now trust fresh vegetables enough to eat them raw.  But we always construct an Asian dressing full of kecap manis and coriander, and we always add tempe, tofu, and/or Chinese noodles.  Last night, though, we both wanted spaghetti.  What we really wanted was spaghetti with Italian pork sausage, but that’s not an option here.  But we were able to find fresh thyme and olive oil, so we made a simple Molto Mario tomato sauce with ground beef, spooned it over linguine, and served it with a salad with balsamic vinaigrette, a loaf of Italian bread, and a bottle of red wine.  Oh yeah, and two beers (for TP).  It totally hit the spot.

    As an example of how unprepared we were, we had to buy the following things: thyme, onions, linguine, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, canned tomatoes, wine, and bread.  We always have these readily available in the States.  The only thing that we already had was garlic.  Never fear, though.  Tonight we are thinking about going to a Chinese hawker center for some fried fish.