How to Pack as Much Stress as Possible Into One Morning

Ironic that what inspired this post was actually my reflecting on how unstressful a recent morning had been, given all of the stressors conspiring to give either me or M or both of us premature heart attacks. Which is weird, because neither of us is particularly patient or tolerant. But somehow, we managed to float through this day without dying or killing someone/each other/ourselves.

Putting that aside, I still would like to offer you instructions on how to orchestrate a similarly stress-crammed experience:

• Be in Asia. Or in a different developing country. The most important thing is to be somewhere that is a) unfamiliar; b) filled with people who speak a language you don’t know; c) crowded.
• Fly AirAsia. Nuff said.
• The night before the morning you are supposed to take a flight (in our case, from Kuala Lumpur back to Jakarta), don’t pack anything or think about the timing of the next morning.
• Make sure you don’t have internet on your iPhone so you can’t use the mobile check-in feature that allows you to bring up your boarding pass on your phone.
• When you get internet on your iPhone from the gracious front desk guy who gives you a wireless hookup free of charge, make sure that the mobile check-in feature on the AirAsia app isn’t functioning (I know, you really don’t have control over this part, but don’t worry, AirAsia will take care of it for you). When the app is eventually back up, make sure that it is by then within an hour of your boarding time, so you are (very, very logically) no longer allowed to check in online.
• Realize you have no cash for a cab. Go on a quest, luggage in hand, for an ATM. Bonus points if one or several of the first ATM’s you find don’t work.
• Tell you cab driver you’re going to the airport. When he asks which one, say “international”, because Jakarta is in a different country, so that means we’re flying internationally. Right? Right. When you pull up to the airport, over an hour later, tell him “AirAsia, please”, and listen as he says indignantly, “AirAsia?? That’s the other airport!” Realize that he’s right, that apparently “international” means something different here, and that apparently the “Terminal” on your ticket actually refers to a whole different airport. Buckle up for a hair-raising tear from Airport #1 to Airport #2 as your cab driver huffily conveys you to the accurate destination.
• Make sure none of the signs at the airport make any sense and are too far away to read, and that the announcements over the intercom are unintelligible (again, this is beyond your control but will be taken care of for you, don’t worry).
• Observe an enormous room filled with an insane mob of people in check-in “lines”; realize that you can’t get to that room without going through a security checkpoint. Realize only after you’ve waited for a mass of people with luggage carts to jam up the conveyer belt that this is not a real checkpoint and you can just walk through. Look again at the “lines,” and see that almost everyone appears to be in already-checked-in-dropping-off-bags lines, and that only one screen says “conventional check-in,” and that there is one person at that desk and about 100 times that many waiting, and that they’re saying something, who knows what, about your flight over the intercom (which should be boarding in five minutes now, by the way).
• Decide that, as we’ve learned from so many horror movies, the best plan is to “split up.” Stand aimlessly alone for a minute, wandering from line to line, elbowing through people and kicking over luggage carts. Make a game time decision. Walk past the waiting crowd, through the families and backpackers and strollers and boxes, and up to the front desk, where you toss a token apologetic glance at the man in the middle of checking in, thrust your passport at the AirAsia attendant, and say “Jakarta.”
• When she immediately begins checking you in, realize that your partner in crime is lost, and though you can see him through the crowd (Spy the 6’7” White Man in the Asian Airport is not a hard game, friends), he has no idea where you are and cannot hear you screaming his name. Yell it louder. Yell it until a wave of people turn toward him and someone finally taps him and he sees you and comes up. Finish check-in in ten seconds.
• Race through security. Tap your feet through the interminable immigration checkpoint. Make split-second decisions in the duty-free store (if this seems like a disposable luxury to you, you clearly have never lived in Indonesia), deciding on one bottle of Jim, one of Don.
• Arrive at your gate winded, triumph ready to supplant the frenzied anxiety in your belly.
• Ask a gate attendant if boarding has begun (as it should technically have done some ten or fifteen minutes before). Listen as she casually says, as if you should have known all along (despite the screens around the airport saying nothing of it) that, of course, the flight has been delayed. Again, don’t worry about that last part. AirAsia will take care of it for you.

How to do Malaysian Street Food Right

“You have to try the street food,” –Every single person we talked to before visiting Kuala Lumpur

Given the high bar set for street food in Jakarta, we were intrigued. If native Indonesians and longtime JKT residents were waxing poetic about Malaysian street food, there had to be something there.

Of course, finding the right street food in a new city isn’t easy. You’re up against a lot of challenges—for one thing, most large cities assume that tourists, mainly Westerners, don’t want street food, that we would prefer sit-down restaurants with familiar menu items, generic Malaysian bistros with Italian names and a vast pasta selection, or just straight-up Western chains (Outback Steakhouse, anyone?). If you ask for recommendations, this is likely what you’ll get, and you might raise some eyebrows if you say you want to try street food.

For another thing, yelp-ing hasn’t become a full-time profession over here, as it has in the States. Very few people, if anyone, are putting up crowd-sourced restaurant reviews here, and if they are, it’s very unlikely that they’re writing about a street food stall. Remember that a lot of these places don’t have addresses or even names (the signs just say what kinds of food they serve), adding an extra challenge to the small population who might want to post a review (on a forum that doesn’t really exist anyway).

Once you find the right spot, there’s always confusion—do I order at the counter and point to things, or is this a place where there’s a menu? Whatever relief comes with seeing the menu is dashed when you realize that you don’t know any of the words and the wireless is too slow to look them up on Google translate. If you’re a vegetarian or have food allergies, this can be a major point of stress (I was effectively a vegetarian/pescatarian before I came to Jakarta. Didn’t take long before I threw that out the window). About 80% of the time when we order from a street food vendor, neither M nor I know what we’re getting.

But believe me, these challenges are worth overcoming. The deliciousness-to-cost-ratio is just too astronomically high to let obstacles like that thwart your efforts.

As I probably-not-necessary disclaimer, let me just explicitly state that we only spent three and a half days in KL, and that this is by no means an exhaustive survey of its street food offerings, but rather a celebration of the abundance we experienced while there.

With no further ado, here are some hot tips and yummy-as-all-heck finds:

Bee Hoon Mee. Despite the debacle that ensued while trying to eat this for the first time, the soup itself was amazing. Malaysian food uses some more complex and subtle spices that you don’t get in Indonesian food, and this one had a sweetness to it, some cinnamon or cloves that added an incredible richness to the chicken. $2US.

Indian food. There is a large Indian population in Kuala Lumpur, and the city reaps the culinary benefits of that fact. Using the limited customer reviews online, M found Bahkti Woodlands vegetarian Indian restaurant in what appeared to be KL’s Little India. Despite the less-than-friendly service we received (it is clearly not a place that receives many non-natives, and doesn’t really know what to do with them; our questions were met with quizzical stares and shrugs, and when we ordered, basically pointing to exactly what the waiter had told us to order, he looked at us as if we had ordered the most absurd meal imaginable—the way you would look at a single person who ordered fourteen hamburgers, or a family or eight who ordered one hot dog. Needless to say, this led to some insecurity and stress on our part as we waited for the mystery food to arrive), this experience was perhaps the trip’s culinary highlight. I could not even begin to try to identify what it was that we ate, but every little metal bowl in our respective thalis held a different and unexpected taste. Some things I can identify: red fried cauliflower; pickled beets; creamy spinach; a liquid-y raita; and perhaps the best naan I’ve ever eaten.

Laksa. This basically just means noodle soup, and comes in various forms. M got a sweet curry laksa, with pork and various other meats and vegetables and spices in it, while I chose a sort of spicy-sour laksa, a vegetarian version with thicker noodles. Both were at sinus-clearing levels of spiciness, but not to the point where the flavor was masked by heat. You can find this all over, but we got ours at a place in Lot 10.

NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM

Lot 10 Hutong. This is not a type of food, but a location. It’s a massive food court underneath a shopping mall off of Bukit Bintang. And before you turn your nose up at “food court” and “shopping mall,” know that this is something entirely different than a circle filled with Chick-fil-A and Subway. This food court exists because citywide laws required all street food vendors to vacate the sidewalk some years ago, and the Lot 10 food court is where the best of the best of them migrated. Just take a look around during lunch hour, and the lack of tourists and abundance of locals will give you all the confidence you need that you’re in the right spot.

Es kelapa. A few hours before we ordered this, I saw a picture of it on a billboard and I believe my reaction was: “What the hell do you think that’s supposed to be? Ew.” But finishing up a spicy lunch in Lot 10, and seeing the array of crazy-ass es kelapa at the Asian Dessert stand behind us, we had to give it a try. Basically, it’s just shaved ice covered in sugars and syrups and whatever toppings. There are specific kinds—mango, chocolate, etc.—but M and I just decided to go for the one in the middle of the menu, with the biggest picture, that looked as if it was a mix of everything. “This looks like what a 6-year old girl and her sister would make when they decided to try and ‘cook’”, M aptly described. Here is an incomplete list of the things that we encountered in our es kelapa: peanuts, brown sugar, strawberry syrup, black beans, grass jelly, corn, vanilla syrup. I’m still not sure whether I enjoyed it or not, but I am positive that if you see it, you should try it. It’s like Doctor Fish—too weird not to experience. Again, available all over, but we got ours in Lot 10.

Some space shit, right?

Jalan Alor. This is another location rather than a specific food. It’s a major street off of Bukit Bintang, the Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, at least as far as food is concerned. Walking down Jalan Alor even without eating anything is a visual feast, to use a horrible but irresistibly fitting cliché. Restaurants and food stands line the street, their tables spilling out onto the pavement under the hot night air. Seeing the pictures of menu items, reading the signs of each restaurant boasting its wares (“Frog Porridge,” “Whole Squid”), ogling the overflowing fruit stands filled with unidentifiable orbs. It can certainly be overwhelming, especially given that if you slow at all you’ll be accosted by a waiter trying to coax you into his establishment, so we were very happy that a wonderful bartender we’d befriended earlier that night had told us of his favorite place along Alor.  We dutifully went there (a popular seafood place called Beh Brothers), but I imagine that the experience at the other restaurants is somewhat similar. The menus are very long and very poorly organized (one dim sum menu, one random page of dishes that were special for an unidentifiable reason, two big booklets that at first glance appeared to be different but upon further inspection turned out to be the same thing, just with pages in a different order), and it’s likely that you’ll experience the I-don’t-know-what-I’m-ordering panic, but don’t be scared. There’s really no way to do this wrong. M and I got a whole fried tilapia, some little dumplings with a filling that I believe had shrimp and pumpkin, among other things, and a big ol’ pot of some bubbling seafood that we poured over rice. Take these facts as indications of how good it all was: we literally sucked the last remnants of tilapia meat off of the bone; we ate seafood-free spoonfuls of sauce once all the solids in our pot had been consumed; we got our hands and faces so deep into the whole process that I’m pretty sure I still smell like fish.

Durian ice cream. Durian, as I’ve mentioned, is a controversial fruit, and yet I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it in all of it’s various non-fruit forms. You can get durian ice cream in Jakarta, to be sure, but I experienced it for the first time in KL, and highly recommend it. I won’t deny that it has a strange just-past-the-expiration-date ripeness to it, but it’s more diluted in its sweet, smooth ice cream form, and the complexity of flavor makes it a rewarding and interesting dessert. Plus you get the taste of a durian without having a house that smells like it for days after. Because let’s be honest, if you’re gonna smell like fish and your house smells like durian, you’re not doing yourself any favors socially.

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)