Tom Pepinsky

Category: Malaysia

  • 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.

  • My Goodness

    We don’t think we’ve mentioned this yet, but guess what?  We leave Malaysia on Tuesday afternoon, local time.  It’s almost beyond our comprehension that we have been in Southeast Asia for almost 11 months.  It seems like just the other day we got to Malaysia, and just a couple days before that that we first get to Indonesia.  We travel to Singapore for a night, then on to Tokyo, then we split up to visit our families on the two coasts before heading back to New Haven at the end of August.

    What does this mean for you, readers?  Well, there may only be a few of you, but unfortunately we do not plan on continuing to blog when we return home.  It’s been fun, but we feel that it’s something unique to our time abroad.  We will of course leave the blog online for at least a month or so, but we don’t expect to do any more posts after we leave from Singapore.  So, you’ll have to find another time waster, and so will we.  It also means that you Indonesian and Malaysian teenie-boppers who google the lyrics to "Ada Apa Denganmu" and leave snotty comments about how crappy our translation is will just have to find someone else to bother.  Note to children: translating crappy poetry is hard.

    What it means for us is, we are in the process of getting ready to pack, finishing up research, doing last minute souvenir shopping, re-confirming tickets on United (which, to our pleasant surprise, has not gone under since we left), and deciding where our last meals will be.  We think that we’ll need to get at least one more roti canai from the Central Market, one more order of masala thosai and appam from the roti man in Bangsar after some sate and popiah from the night market, one more gluttonous feast of Lebanese food at the Islamic Arts Museum, one more stroll through the Malay wet market around Masjid India for sweets and nasi lemak, and one more trip to Jalan Alor for Chinese grilled fish and fried kangkong.