How to Handle Getting Caught in a Monsoon, Malaysia Edition

I’m in Kuala Lumpur! I type this from the 22^nd floor of a lovely, air-conditioned hotel, overlooking a city where cars stay in their lanes and motorcycles stay off the sidewalks (yes, there are sidewalks!), where trees and gardens evince conscious attention to the importance of aesthetic and enhancing general human experience, where the air is breathable and the sky clear enough to see mountains in the distance. It’s no Singapore, to be sure, but it’s certainly no Jakarta either. As an editor friend said the other day, on the spectrum of cities, with Jakarta at one end and Singapore at the other, KL is about two-thirds of the way toward the Singapore end. Having above listed many of the elements that differentiate KL from Jakarta, I’ll use the rest of this post to recount a story that illustrates the two cities’ similarities.

Having heard from multiple sources that Malaysian street food is even more epically awesome than its Indonesian equivalent, we set out yesterday afternoon to try it for ourselves. We wandered down Bukit Bintang for a bit, bypassing tourist-y looking restaurants and Western chains, turning our noses up at places with only one or two customers or too-nice furniture—we wanted to find the real thing, not some bule-friendly approximation. Just as the mist in the air turned into rain, we came across a spot filled with native-looking customers, a little street food restaurant with tables under a row of big blue tents. Bingo.

We sat down and, after some quasi-successful menu-deciphering, ordered our food (bee hoon soup for me, lamb martabak and a coconut juice for M). The rain was picking up, and we congratulated ourselves on finding a perfect restaurant, sheltered from the precipitation, at exactly the right moment. By the time M’s coconut juice arrived (awesomely simple—just a coconut with the top cut off and a straw stuck inside), the rain was coming down so hard that it was splashing up from underneath the tarp-wall next to us, and water was spraying in from the open sides, enough that we were both getting pretty heavily misted. When my soup came, peals of thunder were threatening to tear the sky open, and we could see puddles of water rapidly forming on the tent overhead. But the other customers were still eating, smiling, talking, barely remarking upon the sudden deluge, and so we shrugged it off, laughing a little. Laughter of mutually unacknowledged nervousness, in retrospect.

My soup looked and smelled incredible, and it seemed clear that I would need to eat it rather quickly so that it didn’t accumulate too much rainwater—which by now was leaking in big fat droplets through holes in the tarp as well as blowing in more violently from the open sides. In the twenty-six seconds it took me to cut up some of the noodles with my spoon and pour a little chili sauce in the bowl, just as I was about to take my first bite, the storm went from very bad to Biblical. All of the waiters—about eight men—dropped what they were doing and ran to their (seemingly very familiar) stations throughout the tent, gripping the metal supports and pushing them up. They were all yelling to each other, shouting directions and shifting positions. But still they were smiling, and I could see that at least one other customer was still eating his food, so I figured this was all still okay. I told myself that my definitively drenched shirt was just damp, disregarded the fat raindrops splashing into my soup, and resolved not to be the stereotypical panicked white tourist. Just a little rain, not a big deal.

A waiter moved M’s chair inward, presumably so that he would get less of the spray from outside, which was a fallacious strategy given the fact that every seat in the restaurant was getting indiscriminately soaked.  And just then, with the waiters’ shouts crescendoing and blending into the relentless roar of the storm, the tent came crashing down, its thickest metal crossbar landing squarely on M’s right side, bashing his ear and scraping his arm.

Lunchtime battle wound

About half the waiters ran toward the collapsed-and-still-collapsing section of tent, struggling to lift it, while the other half ran to the new emergency they’d suddenly noticed: two white Westerners in a now-potentially-injurious situation.

“Go inside! Go inside” a chorus of voices yelled at us, pointing toward a tiny entrance with cement steps leading to the kitchen. Feeling that pride was no longer the highest priority, we obeyed.

We stood in a narrow hallway watching the rain pummel the world outside and the waiters battle the flailing tent. After several minutes of dumbfounded paralysis, we assessed our situation. It was clear that the rain would not be letting up anytime soon, and that even if it did, the chairs and tables would still be soaked, the ground a small lake; it was also clear that—after watching torrents of water slide down the dirty tarp and into both my soup and M’s coconut—our lunch would not be edible if and when the rain let up; clear, too, was the fact that there was no escape route out the back of the little corridor. We needed to make a run for it. A brief debate about whether or not we owed any money ensued (verdict: no, the deciding factor being M’s bleeding arm), and we steeled ourselves for the escape.

We charged out of the corridor and back into the tent just as the waiters, abandoning the battle, began to disassemble the collapsed shelter, almost trapping us underneath the descending tarp.

“Go inside! Go inside!” they shouted, lowering the metal bars toward our heads even as we crouched to run through, emerging onto the sodden street seconds before they brought the whole structure to the ground.

And go inside we did, heading just across the street to a restaurant whose shelter consisted of material more robust than vinyl. Sitting down, we realized that this new place was actually the same restaurant as the one we’d just left—same name, same menus, same waitstaff uniforms—just in a building instead of on the sidewalk. And so, in a perversely satisfying instance of symmetry, we ordered exactly what we had twenty minutes before, and ate our food from the comfort of a rain-free roof-covered terrace as we watched Lunch Attempt #1 dissolve across the street.

Related articles

• How to Handle Getting Caught in a Monsoon (journalsandjackfruit.wordpress.com)