A Kid at Heart

23 Apr

You can tell a lot about a country by the way they shop. Some people meander, wandering through open markets to sample a dozen things before buying one. Others go straight for the bargains, or elbow their neighbors out of the way to get a chance at the latest hot ticket item. Sometimes the shops are small, family-run, ramshackle affairs with a selection of merchandise that probably fell off the back of a truck. Other times, you get Walmart. Sometimes its all in the open, with displays spilling out into the street, and other times climate control rules.

Malaysia has malls. Left and right. I’ve been here a month and I’ve visited a dozen of them without even meaning to. Somehow, it’s unavoidable. Walk through any midsize to major city, and you run up against one, and given that it’s usually 90 to 100 degrees, and the malls all have air-conditioning, I usually go through them rather than around. I get my cold where I can, and I was in one the other day, retreating from the heat of Malacca and searching for malaria medication, when I saw a sign for a Toys ‘R’ Us.

Now, I don’t know where today’s kids – or rather their parents – shop for toys. Probably online. If they had the Internet when I was ten, my parents never would have had to search for the one particular play set I wanted each Christmas. I wouldn’t have dragged them to the toy store over and over to let me peer in desperation at toys I wanted but would never save up enough of my allowance to buy. In short, it would have been a sad and dreary state of affairs.

I hadn’t been in a Toys ‘R’ Us for at least ten years. A rectangular track had been set up on the mall floor in front of the store, and small girls in headscarves raced around it as fast as their electric go-carts would go – which wasn’t more than three miles an hour, just enough for their mothers to keep pace and keep them from running over the dotted line and into a clothing boutique.

Inside the store, Barbies, Legos, Transformers, Power Rangers, remote-controlled cars and Star Wars action figures filled shelves under brilliant florescent lights. Nostalgia washed over me, and it felt like a dream as I wandered up and down the aisles. I had played with some variation of almost every toy here, though Barbie was a notable exception. This was home to me, as true a home as I have ever known. Ten thousand miles and ten years away, I remembered the words to the old song: “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid…” I guess once a Toys ‘R’ Us kid, always a Toys ‘R’ Us kid.

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Trying the Local Food…

12 Apr

I missed part of the night market when I first stumbled into Kota Bharu, sick with aches and fever. What I saw, the stalls selling fruit drinks, the fried chicken and clothing stalls, was just the part along the main road, and didn’t include the real food, tucked away in an empty lot behind an alley. Larger stalls surrounded a tent where someone had put out a television and a few tables for the people who wandered in, picking and choosing spicy dishes from the women who ran the stalls.

My friend Minh had offered to show me one of the local delicacies, and he stopped in front of a stall, peering over the dozens of small pans filled with a rainbow of reds, browns, yellows, and greens. He ordered two helpings of nasi kerabu, and the woman began scooping things into a piece of brown paper, filling it with sea-blue rice, fish sauce, hot peppers, barbecued beef, an entire sprig of garlic, bean sprouts, shredded coconut, fish crackers, hard-boiled eggs, and a green pepper stuffed to bursting with fish and coconut.

Minh smacked his lips as we sat down, unfolding the paper and mixing the ingredients together until it was an unruly mess spread over the drowning paper. Everything tasted delicious, the beef tender, the rice soft, the garlic strong and the peppers burning. Soon I had to stop, leaving Minh to exclaim that I should have gotten something else if I didn’t like spicy food.

“I wanted to try,” I croaked, emptying a bottle of water down my fiery throat. “But maybe next time I will try a different dish.” New things are good, new things are why I travel. But sometimes new things burned like hell.

And the rice was dyed blue.

Very, very blue.

Very, very blue.

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Thoughts on Pizza

9 Apr

On Sunday, I finally gave in and went to Pizza Hut. The Chinese restaurant where I planned to eat dinner had closed for the day, I was hungry, and the bright lights shone so temptingly, like stars in an enchanted city. Anyone who mocks the image has never been a sick traveler in a faraway land, and has probably never seen the Pizza Hut in Kota Bharu. It was the classiest joint in town that wasn’t along the expensive waterfront, a glistening collection of glass, tile, metal and plastic, all spotless – which was something I couldn’t say about most places I ate, with the exception of Kota Bharu’s McDonald’s.

The clientele was like McDonald’s too: a few Westerners, lots of women in tudongs, families with children as eager for junk food as I had been I was a kid. I couldn’t remember the last time I was in a Pizza Hut. Hell, I couldn’t remember if I’d actually ever been in one, come to think of it. Pizza Hut is much more of a delivery business in America, and we usually ordered Domino’s anyway. Or else we ordered from the greasy little local pizzeria run by two Italian brothers, one of whom was named Tony, the other Sal.

If, god forbid, we went out for pizza, which defeated the purpose of pizza to my mind, the purpose being to stay in and have a heart attack in the comfort of your own home… If, god forbid, we went out for pizza, it was always someplace fancy with a brick oven and real tomato bits strewn all over the pizza. I did not ask for these, they just added them. One trip to these places was usually enough, and I refused to revisit after that. I couldn’t stand the tomato bits, which looked like something someone had previously eaten, and I learned that the more people turned their noses up at the pizza at a place, the more I would enjoy it. It would be greasy, cheesy, and the tomato sauce would know its place, plain and simple.

I wasn’t a gourmet, I was a gourmand, the difference being the gourmet sticks his nose up, while the gourmand just wants the food to taste good and go in his mouth. I would prefer to avoid salmonella, but as my current predicament indicated, I was clearly flexible about the risk.

Most of the menu in Kota Bharu’s Pizza Hut featured things that were not pizza. None of the specials mentioned pizza. They were things like herb-roasted chicken, but I was here for a reason and I flipped ahead until I found what I wanted, quietly ordering a pepperoni pizza. I hoped the Muslims at the next table wouldn’t hear me and decide to institute Sharia law to punish me for eating pork. Muslims can’t eat pork, and I think this explains a lot of the tension in the Middle East. Say all you want about anti-Zionism, the lack of available women for angry young men, American foreign policy and oil, but try and take bacon away from most Americans and you’ll see what holy war is all about.

But I digress. The pizza came, covered in grease and cheese. It tasted delicious, exactly what I hoped for, a real American thick-crust pizza, enough to fill me up and send me burping out into the night, perfectly content and happy.

It was totally worth the impending heart attack.

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Over the Border and Far Away

3 Apr

Say hello to Malaysia. Or I’ll do it for you (sound of Andrew shouting “Hello Malaysia” out the window). There. Now that’s done, let me backtrack. A month ago (dear lord, how time flies) I was in Thailand, enjoying life on the beach before plunging into the madness of the Full Moon Party, the hedonistic, monthly rave on the beach in Koh Phangan, universally known in Thailand as “the party island.” I was one of perhaps thirty thousand backpackers who descended on the small town of Haad Rin for the party, and I do not recommend the party if you value your beauty sleep. However, if the prospect of six drunken roommates, high on mushrooms and amphetamines at six in the morning appeals to you… well, seek help.

For me, it was less than ideal. At one point my friend Mike and I went to a Muay Thai boxing match, because it was quieter there. But I digress. A few days after the party Mike left for home, and I went north, to sit and write by the Gulf of Thailand for two weeks before a friend said she would be in Bangkok, and I rushed up there to see her. That was a week ago, give or take, and I stuck around for a few days, until I could catch the overnight train to Butterworth, south of the Malaysian border. Butterworth is the jumping-off point for the island of Penang and the town of Georgetown, with its colonial buildings and neighborhoods full of Indian and Chinese food. I took the train and then the ferry out to Penang , settling into an old building in Little China, where the signs on the walls sometimes display Chinese characters a century old.

It’s rained a dozen times since I’ve arrived. The brief showers keep the air cool for a while, and as long as they block the brutal sun – which burns the moment the clouds clear – I’m more than okay with continued precipitation. The most interesting thing so far – aside from the fact that Georgetown, and Malaya in general, has been a mixing point for Indian and Chinese culture for centuries, which shows in the buildings, the menus and the faces that you see on the street – the most interesting thing so far was getting an offer from a prostitute in a tudong, the traditional Muslim head wrap worn by women here. She was without doubt the most covered-up prostitute I’ve ever seen. Malaysia is going to be interesting.

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The Bay on the Gulf of Thailand

16 Mar

Say hello to Prachuap Khiri Khan. This small town on the coast south of Bangkok has everything I need to spend two weeks, relaxing in the warm Thai sun: a temple on a hill, a beautiful bay, fishing boats at sunset, and best of all, cheap rooms and food.

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Here’s the room I checked into when I arrived, after coming up the coast from Chumphon, where I said goodbye to my friend Mike. We’d been traveling together since Shanghai, and now that he’s gone back to the States, I wanted to catch up on work (the beach does not make that easier) and relax (the beach definitely helps with that part). The walls in the room were thin, and it was right above the road, so every time a motorcycle roared past, it woke me up. But what can you expect for $5 a night?

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The only downside to the town is that half of the streets smell like open sewers. I guess we can’t have everything. I’m heading to Bangkok tomorrow to see a friend, and then, it’s on to Malaysia.

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Another Thai Sunset

19 Feb

It’s easy to relax in Thailand, and I thought I’d spread some of that chillness around. So here are some pictures of sunsets on the islands off the eastern coast.

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Something Fishy Going On

17 Feb

On the last day in Hua Hin, I broke down and went to get some fish therapy. This did not, sadly, involve a fish with a goatee and a notepad setting me on a couch and saying “Zo, tell me about your mozzer.” Nor did it involve getting the fish on the couch, because then they would suffocate. In fact there was no couch, just a lot of fish giving me a pedicure.

The fish that do this go by many names – doctor fish, physio fish, kangal fish – but in the scientific community they are called Garra rufa, or the reddish log sucker (I can see why nobody calls them this in the common parlance). The fish breed naturally in the rivers of the Middle East, and have long been used in Turkish hot springs, where they act like combfish, eating the dead skin off patients who suffer from psoriasis. I’d seen the fish tanks and heard touts advertising the therapy in other places, like Chiang Mai and Siem Reap, but never taken the time to stop. The last ten years has seen a surge of fish spa openings around the world, and my feet had grown nasty walking in sandals all day, so I went looking for a fishy cure.

It wasn’t hard to find. The street behind our hotel was a mass of massage parlors, offering Thai massages, hot stone massages, oil rubs, manicures, pedicures, and a few other things that weren’t on the menu. Some of them may have been brothels, judging by their darkened fronts and the fact that no one frequented them during daylight hours.

The women at the parlor laughed when I said I wanted a fish pedicure, and I wondered briefly if I’d chosen one of the brothels by mistake. But they had a fish tank out front, full of two-inch-long fish, silver on the bottom and green on top, built like little leeches, and a sign listing the price of sticking your feet in for half an hour or more. The sign said “No need for alarm when the little flesh eaters come nibbling at you!” Right.

Get 'em off! Get 'em off!

Get ‘em off! Get ‘em off!

Seriously. Help.

Seriously. Help.

Certainly it was no Turkish hot spring, but it would do in a pinch. One of the woman hosed down my feet, dirty from spending all day at the beach, and told me to sit on the edge of the tank. The fish attacked the moment I put my legs in, wriggling around my toes and nibbling at layers of dead skin, taking tiny, tickling bites out of my feet. It was a strange sensation, like mild pins and needles, as if my feet had been asleep and were now waking up. It also felt like a mild electrical current ran through the soles of my feet, as dozens of small things crowded around to take a bite. Those poor doctor fish, having to dine on my feet, slathered in sunscreen and calloused from months of long walks. I felt sorry for them, but I’d paid for thirty minutes, and I wasn’t about to stop until I got my money’s worth.

So the tickling went on, and on, and on, until one of the women said the time was up, and rubbed my feet down as I took them out, leaving the fish swimming idly in the tank and leaving my skin with a smooth shine. The doctors had done their work well, and I felt like a new man. Or at least, a man with new feet.

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