We get to Kuala Lumpur airport at 10pm, and by the time we got our luggage, it was too late to take public transport (or so they told us.). There's free, strong wifi at the Airport. How is it that there's free wifi at "third world" airports but none in the United States? Bullshit.
Our cabbie is knowledgeable and speaks the best English we've heard from a cabbie in a long time. We get to Tune Hotel, a boutique budget hotel where we've booked individual rooms. You know those ikea rooms that say "live in 100 square feet?" That's what it was like. A narrow room that fits one bed, a fold-down table, a flat screen, and a toilet/shower combo. Very well laid out, totally comfortable, and had the coldest aircon I've ever felt.
It's past midnight when we check in, and I am so fucking excited to eat Malaysian hawker food. That's really all I came to Malaysia for. My favorite restaurant in NY closed down; it was Malaysian. I wanted to eat beef rendang, which is beef slow-cooked in a rich, spicy coconut gravy. I wanted Laksa, seafood and noodles in a rich, thick fish-coconut gravy. And char Kway teou, stif-fried noodles in a charred, thick sweet soy sauce.
We tell the guy at the front desk that we want food and want to know where we can get some. He says, "mmmm. Not really anything open now. Unless you want Malaysian food."
In retrospect, this was an omen of poor things to come.
After assuring him that YES, we want Malaysian food, he directs us to a place about a block away, but we get intrigued by the umbrellas and carts that are lined up across the street from the hotel. Not only is it karaoke, it's MALAYSIAN ROCK KARAOKE, and guy after guy (no women) are screeching and belting out Malaysian rock songs. Amazing. Amazingly bad, but fantastic.
EVERYONE IS STARING AT US. There are no foreigners there, and the few women that are there are wearing head scarves. They stare at us get up, they stare at us eat.
I order the char Kway teow. Delicious and perfect. Timeka was blown away as to how good it was. Lisa gets a sad rendition of chicken rice. Timeka got tandoori chicken, and it was very spicy and perfectly tender, and the best damned chicken I think I have ever eaten. There was also garlic buttered naan that was completely addictive. We tell the tandoori guy that the food is delicious. He looks at us like we are nuts. We go to sleep excited and ready to pack a serious amount of sightseeing (and for me, eating) in the one short day we have here.
We get up early and take the hop-on, hop-off tourist bus that goes to all of the sights. Lisa and Timeka opt for the KL tower, I get off at the next stop, one of many malls in KL, and we make plans to meet up at my bus stop. The bus tour tells me that this part of town is the hot spot for partying, and I make a note of it for later. KL is a big shopping and party town, and with Timeka's knee all better and only a day here, we were ready to go.
Lisa and Timeka were later than expected, and I made friends with the young tour operator at the bus stop. Every Malaysian we have come in contact with speaks good english, is really warm, nice, and friendly. He asks me if I've already eaten, and if it was rice and chicken I had. I said "do you mean Nasi lemak?" And he cracks the fuck up. He was really surprised I knew what he was talking about. Nasi lemak is the Malaysian national breakfast: coconut rice, fried anchovies, peanuts, meat, sauce. The other tour operator evidently rode back to the next stop and found Timeka and Lisa to tell them I was waiting. So sweet.
We ask the guy at the bus stop where we can get good Malaysian food. He tells us to go to the food court at the mall. really? A food court?
This mall, like the others here and in Singapore, is HUGE and jam-packed with all the stores you'd find on 5 avenue. The food court is huge. Timeka is pissed because she's got her heart set on Indian food (Malaysian food is heavily influenced by its Chinese, Malay, and Indian roots) and there is none. I go to get nasi lemak from one place, and there's a green, triangular, coconut flake-covered something. Lisa wants to know what it is, and I tell her it's probably a pandan (a fragrant leaf) flavored rice flour dessert. I ask the lady what it is.
"Sweet," she says.
"I know, but is it pandan in there?" She doesn't understand me.
"Made of rice."
"I know, but is there pandan in there?"
"Pandan!! YES!!!" And also cracks the fuck up. I wink at her.
My Filipino ex-boyfriend said that when we was growing up, he was ashamed of his family's traditional food and when he was growing up it was a little weird for his white friends to come over and eat it. I love Filipino food, and when I would go to family events, he had an uncle who would follow me around and say "you know what that is?" And I would tell him what it was. Then he would say, "you eat that?" And when I said yes, he would laugh, dish after dish after dish. His dad once tried to convince me we were eating banana leaves for dinner. I told him I knew they were for cooking food INSIDE. He laughed at me. I have a feeling that Malaysians have a feeling that foreigners just won't be interested or knowledgable about their food, either.
We spent a long time at that mall, mostly at a coffee place that made the most beautiful donuts, not making a dent in the "regular" 20 ounce cappuccino that cost more than my meal. I swear they saw Americans and thought I needed my cappuccino super sized.
We try on some crazy shoes at the mall, timeka buys a slamming shade of red anna sui lipstick that is so perfect for her skin tone that it completely transformed her look. As we leave, and I swear it was the lipstick, Timeka runs up to a really attractive, very tall, Malaysian guy with really long, kinky hair. She tells him he's gorgeous and asks if he'll take a picture with him. He agrees, and she asks him if she can touch him. We're in a Muslim country and she wanted to be respectful. He says ok and puts his arm around her and draws her in tightly. American black folk are really hard to come by in these parts... There was the girl on the subway who said hi to her, the girl from Chicago who needed to have a conversation with Timeka, and now Timeka is running up to the Malaysian guy who really looks like he is a mix of black and Asian.
Timeka is a hot commodity here. Everyone is smiling at her and at least two men have walked up to her and said "are you married? No? Why not? Will you marry me?"
BTW, Nobody has asked to marry MY skinny white ass. And while I'm on the topic, I feel the need to say that Timeka and I are finding Malaysian men pretty damned attractive. I think the jury's out on Lisa.
We rest up a little and get ready to go out. It's 8 pm, and we're already hungry. I want to try a different and bigger hawker center, but I am afraid that if we venture out trying to look for something we don't know, we might be wandering around cranky and famished. I say that maybe we should get a snack first, at our friends across the street, and then head out. Timeka says that if she's gonna eat, she Wants to actually eat dinner. So we ask the guy at the desk for a recommendation for a close, Malaysian hawker center. He sends us to a place about a block away. Timeka is still hankering for Indian food.
The center had about 10 -15 stalls all selling the same thing- Ikan siniggang. From the pictures and having eaten Filipino siniggang, a sour soup, I gathered it was similar. No one wanted fish soup.
We decide to go to the bar area and risk it, I am dubious that we're going to find what we're looking for, and this last meal in Malaysia was of the utmost importance to me. We get to the mall, and it's so damned big that I can't figure out in which direction the bars are. I ask a taxi driver where there is Malaysian food. There is none nearby.
This is where I have my first mini-meltdown of the trip. We don't know where we're going, we're hungry, and all I want to do is eat some fucking laksa. I turn to Lisa and Timeka and loudly proclaim "I AM REALLY FRUSTRATED. Not at you but this is the only reason I came to Malaysia and I really just want to eat some good fucking Malaysian food." All I'm thinking is that Lisa and Timeka are probably going to kick my fucking ass right now, but I just felt like I needed to express what i wanted, and if they wanted to go somewhere without me that was ok. Instead, Lisa calmly suggests we get into a cab, and we get a great cabbie who speaks a lot of English, and says he knows the perfect place.
"Is it Malaysian?" I ask.
"YES."
"Is there Indian food."
"YES."
"Is there going to be someone there to tell you what the food is?"
"I know what everything is," I arrogantly reply.
We get to a very large, bright, populated street called Jalen aloo. There's people everywhere, and the first stall is a smelly one that only sells durian and people are going at it with plastic baggies on their hands to protect them from the potent and lingering scent.
I AM SO HAPPY. I feel vindicated. Especially since down the street, walking distance, is another bar area that local people go to. The original one that the tour bus recommended is only attended by tourists. I should have known better.
We walk up and down. There's char kway teo, satay, and laksa strewn about, but place after place is Chinese. CHINESE. I really do not like Chinese food. Not one Indian place. Now I'm laughing, but in the way crazy people laugh at themselves.
I go up to a girl working at the bar. I ask her where there are food stalls, good Malaysian food. She sends us to a restaurant attached to a hotel. Another fail. Timeka slips in a hole in the ground that is filled with nasty, sludgy funk. "I have had it with Malaysia." We echo her sentiment.
We get in a cab. The guy says 15 ringgit (Malaysian currency). The cab CLEARLY states on the outside that it is a metered cab, not for haggling or fixed price. I shoo him away. I am livid. Another cab, same thing. Fuck it. We get in and tell him to take us back to Tune hotel. Get some more karaoke tandoori chicken and call it a night.
The guy takes us through all these back lots in hotels, driving fast. He must know some shortcut. He stops. This is not our hotel. He says "Zune hotel." "No!! TUNE HOTEL" We're now giddy with frustration and hunger,
And the taxi driver says "Tune hotel? SHIT!!!"
We are all now hysterical. Somehow, an English expletive from a Malaysian driver made everything all right.
We go back to our karaoke joint, and I'm just ordering everything I saw that I wanted to try, That laksa from my noodle lady, a huge plate of grilled cockles (the man nicely taught me hope to open them!) and roti canai (a flaky, thin, crepe-like dough with a dipping sauce) from the tandoori guy. All of that cost about $4. I really needed a drink, but this was a Muslim place and there wasn't even beer on offer, so I got a huge jug of watermelon juice to wash it all down. Timeka and Lisa ordered a nice amount of food, too, and three of us tore into that food like we've never eaten before. The locals were too busy watching a young, flamboyant guy with a comb-over dance like a sweaty, maimed, and mentally-challenged Britney Spears to notice us... At some point he booty-popped, but with his sizable gut instead of his ass. If I had recorded this guy, it certainly would've gone viral. Amazing. But the tandoori guy and his friends are staring at us, laughing. We told him that we couldn't find ANY good Malaysian food at all, and again told him that his chicken was the best chicken, and that it was the the Thing we liked best in Malaysia.
"But this isn't Malaysian. It's Pakistani."
"Are you Malaysian?"
"No, I'm Pakistani, too."
"Isn't roti canai Malaysian?"
"It is, but this one is Pakistani."
We're of course, dying. We never made it to the bar, we never had a drink, and we never really got to eat a lot of what I considered Malaysian. And at the end of the night, I was covered in cockle juice.
I woke up the next morning with a clear perspective. Once, traveling in Switzerland, I met a couple from Australia who were country-hopping really quickly. they wanted to make sure they ate traditional food at each place they went, They went to a store and asked for "Swiss cheese." The cheesemonger looks at her like she was crazy, and says, "Miss, all of our cheese is Swiss." What Americans refer to as "Swiss cheese" is called emmenthaler cheese in Switzerland. I have been telling the silly Swiss cheese story for years since.
We did to the Malaysians exactly what the Australian couple did. Malay cuisine is a confluence of a number of foods, but all of it, whether it is coconut curried, stir fried with soy, or just a couple of samosas, IS Malaysian food. That's what they eat. We're the morons.
KL was a disappointment, but a cool city that I'd give a second chance to, with a little more guidance, if I had to. But I also have to apologize to my Singaporean friend Michelle. Singapore kicks KL's ass, and I'm sorry I suggested otherwise.
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