It’s been exactly a year since we’ve come back from our trip and I STILL haven’t finished the last few posts! I was naive enough to think I’d get round to doing it after we got home but I only gave myself a weekend to recover before going back to work and then ‘normal’ life got in the way and here we are, 12 months later, stuck at home in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, finally giving our blog the much needed attention. But hey, better late than never, right?
So, time travelling back to May 2019, here’s another one in a series of posts with my random observations of a country, this time featuring Malaysia!
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The food. Oh my, the food. I could spend weeks just talking about how great the food is in Malaysia. It beautifully blends various international influences and the result is absolutely delicious. We went to a cooking class in a (rather futile) attempt to learn how to make it. As always, it was great fun and we prepared a couple different dishes but on this occasion we failed at actually learning how to cook them. The class was more like a military operation in a kitchen, the chef was overseeing everything but the individuals didn’t get the whole picture, we were just given instructions, chop this, stir that, grind those into a paste.. after about 15min we completely lost track of what was happening and what it was we were actually supposed to be cooking. Tasted great though!
One day there was a sudden downpour and we were looking for a place to hide when we stumbled upon a chocolate museum. I can imagine worse places where to wait out the rain 🙂 We found out that Malaysia produces 1% of the world’s cacao beans, sampled loads of different products made out of these beans and we got to sit on a chocolate throne. 5 out of 5 stars.
Another time it was raining like crazy, we went to the Islamic Arts Museum in Kuala Lumpur. We played our favourite game of who can find the most bizarre object on display. I won with the royal fly swatter:
We continued our random education on a trip to a place called the mossy forest where they showed us all kinds of funky plants that are native to Malaysia:
- Pitcher plant, also called ‘monkey cup’ – it has a nice smelling sticky liquid in it’s flower that it uses to attract insects. They fly in, start drinking, get stuck and the plant slowly eats them. Then a monkey arrives, checks out if there’s any catch of the day and drinks the ‘cocktail’. Circle of life.
- Cobra lilly flower – it only blooms once a year for about 30 days, then the flower dries and it appears again in exactly the same place next year. And then it blooms again, it dries, it reappears, and so on and so forth. Does it ever stop? Who knows.
- Giant fern tree – apparently this is the oldest tree species in the world.
- Bamboo – bamboo is actually a grass. It can grow up to 30cm a day to a total height of up to 100m! If it doesn’t snap first that is…
One day we were approached on the street by a group of people who asked if they can take two minutes of our time to introduce their religion to us. We were in no particular hurry and a great part of the whole travel experience is expanding your horizons and learning new things so why not (and who knows, maybe we’ll even find ourselves 😀 ). We were regretting our decision instantly, two minutes turned into fifteen and we were sweating buckets as we were standing there in mid-day heat listening to their monologue. But we didn’t have the heart to just leave, they were so enthusiastic and they stuck to their promise of only raising awareness and not trying to convert us so we endured it. In the end they gave us some cookies as a thank you for our time – all forgiven.
I don’t want to bore people to death so I promise this is the last mention of food (for now, in this post…) – when we went to a supermarket, they put a green ‘Thank you’ sticker on every single item we bought. I kid you not, every tomato got one. Waste of plastic? For sure, but it does make one smile.
Coming up next – Southern Thailand!
Lasagne for breakfast 