Tom Pepinsky

Category: Travel

  • Time, Food, Language

    The worst thing about flying across the world is how much your body fights it.  The other night we slept from 7 until 7, which was great.  Last night we slept from 9 until 4:15 AM, by which time we were fully awake.  So we flipped on the TV and caught the end of the Italy-Ukraine game, and then tried to go back to sleep; didn’t work.  The other problem here is that it really doesn’t get light out until 7:30 AM, which just messes with you.  So we’ve been up already for about six hours, and it’s not even lunch time yet.  We’ll have to really try hard to stay up late enough tonight…we have a date to watch the England-Portugal match at 9:00 this evening.

    Food here is still good.  We went to our favorite bread place last night and had idli (sourdough steamed rice buns), masala dosai (fried bread wrapped around potato curry), paper dosai (fried bread just served with curry, and roti telur (pulled flaky wheat bread with egg).  Yum.  We’ve been having long discussions this morning about where to go for dinner tonight: it’s a fight between our favorite Chinese fast food and our favorite Chinese hawker stalls.

    Last night we had a fun cab ride with a Malay guy who lamented how the Chinese and Indians never want to speak Malay.  We had forgotten the delicate dance of languages here.  Most everyone speaks some sort of Malay and English, but Malay people love it if you try to speak Malay.  Chinese and Indian Malaysians prefer English to Malay, and you can look like a fool if you try to speak Malay to them–they probably can respond, but they’d prefer not to.  Of course, if we spoke Cantonese/Hokkien or Tamil we’d do better, but we definitely cannot.  Just another part of the constant barrage of race, ethnicity, religion, and "multiculturalism" that is part of every aspect of life here in Malaysia.

  • Back in Malaysia Again

    JM and I are back in Kuala Lumpur for three weeks.  It’s weird to be back; first off, things are all a bit surreal since we’ve been up for 50 hours straight or something like that.  It’s also weird to be back as more of a tourist than as someone who has lived here for some time and who actually understands the country.  We’re doing all the old tourist things such as getting our bearings and figuring out the closest subway stop and buying breakfast foods.  Nonetheless, everything has been successful so far, so that’s good news.  We even managed to each have a nice big bowl of Malaysian curry noodles (I had a fishy kind, JM had a kind with shrimp and chicken), so the food is so far just the same.  Phew.

    Before we drift off to sleep, here is an interesting observation.  In the six months that we lived here last year, we only saw one Malay woman with a fully covered face.  Many Malay women cover their hair, but almost none take the next step to cover their nose and mouth.  But in just the first twelve hours of being here, we’ve seen three.  It strikes us as very unusual.  We wonder if this is just random, or if this might signify some trend in Malaysian society towards ever stronger Islamic symbolism in things like dress.  We’ll see how many more we see, and we’ll keep you posted.