ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: trip

so yes, it was hot in melbourne, but it never got too hot for pizza. one day in january, after a short spell at luna park —

[ the kid is still too short for most of the rides, but we did qualify for the ghost train (a dud), and then the mini-roller coaster in the shape of a large green dragon (rollicking god fun for the 105cm-tall set). after which she procured for herself the largest fairy floss in the world. it was roughly half her height, and weighed enough that it eventually pulled itself off the stick. she kept calm and carried on, slipped her arm through the mass of spun sugar, and fashioned herself a fine edible bracelet. ]

– and a large amount of gelato that melted before we even made it down the street, and a good bout of digging in the sand beneath the promenade, and the merry side-stepping of washed-up jellyfish on the shore, we stumbled, somewhat sundazed, into il fornaio, which hangs off the prince hotel on ackland street. i’ve always come by at the wrong time, too late for lunch service, and this time, alas, we were once again told we could have drinks only, or anything from the display case.

fortunately, the display case still held a handful of small pizze. i picked the prosciutto. the waitress was kind enough to put it in the oven for a spell, and it was just the salty, crunchy-edged kind of mid-afternoon snack you might wish for, just in from the beach with your legs all sandy.

some days later, we took shelter at the NGV international. for a while, we pretended to look at art, though really we were more interested in standing over the impossibly sleek airconditioning vents in the floor of the gallery. and then also, lunch. the gallery kitchen beckoned, from its hiding place behind the ground floor escalators. and you will see this picture, and yawn and say, ho hum. i couldn’t help it! i am completely powerless against the lure of a prosciutto pizza, but look! this one was also decked out with fat slices of field mushrooms and a smattering of olives and fetta.

ahh… such pleasurable little discs of modestly puffy, barely charred dough, their sharp flavours uncompromised by just a scant amount of cheese. it’s a rarity around these parts i tells ya. if they had been just three bites larger, they would’ve been perfect.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 February 2010 at 2:46 pm

permalink | filed under around town, lunch, trip

what a long, terribly hot summer it’s been. our fault, i suppose, for spending most of it in sunny melbourne. on the most horrible day, we took shelter in the airconditioning of the arts centre; my plan was to see as much of the AC/DC exhibition as the kid would allow. except that we found ourselves drowning in a deluge of pink tulle. turns out it was fifteen minutes away from the lunchtime matinee of the angelina ballerina show, and hundreds of little girls in ballet dress-ups swarmed the lobby. the kid turned her large limpid eyes my way; the temperature in the street was the wrong side of 40; i handed over my credit card, and spent the next hour or so sitting in a sea of battery-operated glowsticks, watching lithe, human-sized mice dance across the stage.

but the temperature kept climbing, and at 1.40 in the wee hours of the morning, i woke up stifled. i poured myself down the hallway, and had a cold shower, and eventually got back to sleep. later we were to find out it was hovering in the lower-mid-40s all night, and when the temperature finally dropped at about 8am, it was to a refreshing 34°C.

ugh.

so we went out in search of icy treats, often. the lemon-lime and bitters sorbet at trampoline was truly delightful. a very fetching shade of palest pink which dissolved gracefully into a gentle citrusy tang on my tongue. i liked it so much i went back for more.

there was the emergency slurpee from a hole-in-the-wall 7-eleven one afternoon in the melty city, and a golden gaytime krusher at KFC one sunday when nothing else was open in shimmery rural victoria. it was a most unappetising shade of… bilge, a pale and lumpy yellow in the plastic tumbler, that tasted better than it looked, until it warmed up to room temperature.

and then, holy moley, there was the organic cinnamon donut gelato from fritz gelato at the souf melbourne markets. lush and milky with a streak of sticky red jam all the way through. behold its majestic crest sitting atop an enormous scoop of caramelised fig and roasted almond yoghurt gelato, equally lush and milky, and filled with crunchy little fun bits of seeds and nuts and burnt sugar. good times…

and then we came back to sydney, and the holidays galloped to a close, and the kid grew up and went off to school. no tears were shed from anyone involved.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 25 February 2010 at 10:50 am

permalink | filed under around town, ice cream, kid, trip

it’s the morning after the night we poured ourselves through the chinatown new year night market. every year we go, and every year we say how insane it all is, and then a year passes and we forget, and we do it all again. the kid spent two hours in someone’s arms, buffeted, or on someone’s shoulders, above the crowd, so she basically did ok. the rest of us stopped when the crowd did, moved when it moved, and if we were sweaty enough at a certain point in time, we slimed past whoever was in the way.

me, i seemed to be sweatier than most, because we had thought it prudent earlier in the evening to dine on bowls of bakut teh and steamed buns; my body temperature was already up by a couple of degrees. eventually, when we tired of seeing the same exotic delicacies being peddled by every third shop (this year’s new inclusions appeared to be a range of flavoured taiwanese rice cakes, and fig jelly), we insinuated ourselves into a quiet crevice between two stalls, and replenished our sweat glands with icy cold sour plum drinks.

“will we go again next year?” i asked my mother.

“no,” she said, most decisively. “except maybe to buy mushrooms.”

right now i am fortifying myself with a mug of almond-flavoured soy milk. i had seen an ad for it on the back of a bus on the way home from the airport a week ago, and had rushed out and bought a carton the very next morning. see how effective an 8-ft high photograph of a carton of soy milk can be?

but i am particularly susceptible to soy beans this week. so far i have acquired:
• enormous rice crackers embedded with whole roasted black soy beans
• black soybean hot cocoa mix
• some sort of roasted soybean snack, which i really bought for the carton
• soft serve soymilk ice cream

the last of which i would be quite overjoyed to eat every day, but which would leave little room for the bakkwa-on-white-bread sandwiches, or the sambal prawn rolls, or the mangosteens/duku langsat/jackfruit trinity.

if only this could be my only quandry, rather than the pathological fear the kid has developed, of public toilets which flush automatically. in this city, that is the most tiresome thing of all.

- – -
this was originally posted to the ragingyoghurt facebook page,
while the blog lay dormant.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 January 2009 at 11:40 am

permalink | filed under around town, kid, snacks, trip

aloha! bet you didn’t even know that i was gone… but i was! it was my birthday last week, and my father shouted us a trip to hawaii. funny, my mum brought with her three fat novels and just a couple of hundred US dollars, because she thought there’d be nothing to do but sit on the beach and feel bored.

me, i did my research beforehand, and noted that there was a gap close to the hotel. what did end up being a surprise was that our hotel was a stroll away from the rodeo drive of waikiki, and a brisk walk in the other direction took us straight to macy’s.

but of course, it was all about how much american junk food i could eat in a week. my first move was to take up the two-for-a-dollar offer on pop tarts at the enormous drugstore at the local mall.

i also got myself a slice of the famous ted’s bakery chocolate haupia pie. this one i actually procured from the deli section of a supermarket in the mall (yes, yes, i spent a lot of time at the mall, eight hours in one day if you must know, and my mother and i returned to the hotel to discover that my father had already tried to notify the police); there were two kinds available — one which was merely labelled, haupia chocolate pie, and the one i ended up with, ted’s pie chocolate haupia. i asked a store employee what the difference was, and he replied that the former was made instore, and that they were trying to copy ted. so i asked him which one he liked better, and he paused, and his eyes darted, and he said, “well. the ted’s one is pretty good.” so thank you, shop boy, it was pretty good, with a rich, dark layer of chocolate pudding below, and a light, fragrant layer of coconut pudding above, and a cloud of whipped cream above that.

the kid and i split it, and a blueberry pop tart for breakfast the next morning.

we also ate a lot of japanese food, natch, the highlight of which was probably a tuna and shiso leaf inside-out maki on our last night. and then unexpectedly, i ate quite a bit of mexican food. more, anyway, than you’d think, for hawaii.

behold: the tamale platter from the foodcourt (in the mall) on our second day there. two tamales from a choice of cheese, pork and chicken, and three sides from a choice of… plenty. already wilting from the lack of fresh vegetable accompaniments to american meals, i picked pineapple salsa, macerated oranges, and spicy black beans. and three kinds of salsa. and a flowery drink called, “jamaica”. the corn chips were complimentary. i did not get through it all.

i had not had tamales before, and now i know that they are like chinese zhongzi, except made from cornmeal, and thus possibly stodgier. the cheese one was pretty good until it cooled down and congealed, and the pork one was pretty good fullstop, but i would not necessarily have them again.

on my birthday, we were away from civilisation, walking on ancient volcanos on the big island, and sustenance came from the cafeteria dining hall at the lone, appropriately named hotel on the edge of the national park — volcano house. it was not hot and burny up the volcano, as you might imagine, but cold and drizzly, and tinged with sulfurous gasses. the one hot food option was a tub of chili and rice, so i had that, and because it was my birthday, i also picked a blueberry pie from the glass cabinet. the pie was flown in from spokane, WA… it was nice and all, but i kinda wish it had been trucked up from ted’s.

as i write this, i’m realising that i didn’t actually get around to that much american junk food after all. i must have finally realised my limits, or all those lectures from my good mother about trans fats finally found a receptor in my brain, because all those encyclopedic lists of ingredients on the packaging made every second thing look a little unappealing. only every second thing though, and only a little unappealing. and anyway, you can get peanut butter cups at the newsagents at broadway shoping center here in sydney.

what you probably can’t get are these amakara mochi, fat, sticky rice cakes in a beguiling bath made primarily of soy sauce and sugar. they were definitely intriguing, and somewhat moreish, but somehow i could not give them away. not that i really wanted to; they were not the worst things i ate in hawaii.

this was. the “market fresh” sante fe salad from arby’s, in a surprisingly upmarket stripmall surrounded by lava rocks on the big island. i don’t know if it was the icy cold chicken nuggets, or the leathery kernels of corn. perhaps it was the raspberry vinaigrette the consistency of a blood bank donation (perhaps i should have gone with the default ranch dressing, the consistency of an arterial blockage). i’d already come to terms with the standard, shredded iceberg lettuce served everywhere, so it couldn’t have been that. overall it was inedible, so i didn’t. the one saving grace of this miserable lunch was the curly fries. it was my fault, i suppose: who asked me to eat at a fast food chain outlet? it’s just, i didn’t think it was possible to do such vile things to a salad.

and the best things i ate in hawaii? just outside the hotel grounds was what i’ve since discovered is a local institution, wailana coffee house and cocktail lounge. truly the diner of my dreams, with its roster of waitstaff straight out of “ghost world” and its all-day, all-you-can-eat pancake special.

i did not get to eat the triple-layer cubes of rainbow jell-o from the all-you-can-eat salad bar, nor the giant belgian waffles i’d had my eye on from our first visit. i might’ve had a sandwich or something on that early, bleary night, but then i returned the morning after for the old fashioned french toast — each massive eggy, bready slice concealed a secret pocket of guava jam.

i knew it would be futile trying to squeeze a final breakfast in before our 7am departure to the airport on the last day, so i put in a request for lunch the day before. and this is what i had: the chuck wagon. a smoked pork chop with apple sauce, two eggs (i chose googy sunny side up), two macadamia hotcakes with whipped butter (so large they came on their own plate) and all the syrup i could eat. yes, three pitchers of maple, coconut and boysenberry syrups, jest fer me.

does it not make you weep with joy? the meat — a ham steak, really — was lean and tender, singed just right. the pancakes were soft and fluffy, with crunchy edges round the sides, and chopped macadamias all the way through. i’d already tried the trio of syrups on the french toast earlier in the week, and was happy to go with just an endless stream of maple. happy!

but i still had unfinished business. from my research i knew there was a cupcake shop in the vicinity, and so after lunch, while the kid went for a last hurrah in the swimming pool with her grandpa, i steered my mum’s afternoon coffee expedition in the direction of satura cakes. look — they really do come in cups!

i didn’t actually eat anything then… well, i couldn’t — this is my mum’s konamisu cupcake, a pretty convincing alcohol-free tiramisu with creamy, chocolatey mascarpone and light sponge and locally grown coffee.

because i hoped i might be able to eat again later, i came away with the store’s signature strawberry shortcake for the kid (a light as air confection of sponge cake and whipped cream), and the red velvet cupcake for me. the rich, moist, red cake was topped with a dreamy dollop of white chocolate and mascarpone. i only wish i could’ve been more awake as i scarfed it the next morning before the cab came to whisk us away.

but look. a week in hawaii is more than enough time to eat, even if it seems like you’re eating nonstop. aside from the chuck wagon, the highlight of the trip was probably walking through the 500-year-old lava tube in the middle of the lush rainforest on the edge of the kilauea volcano crater.

because you think hawaii and you think hula, and soft, sandy beaches, and swaying palm trees (and out-of-towners with leathery skin and far less (and more colourful) clothing than they probably should be wearing), but there we were, down from the volcano, on a beach of black sand created by centuries of broken down lava rocks, surrounded by… nothing.

coolness.

i was still eating at the end, of course. i considered revisiting the pumpkin spice cream frappucino i’d had at another airport starbucks a couple days earlier, but decided that the one not unpleasantly pumpkin-flavoured beverage topped with whipped cream and a dusting of cinnamon was enough. instead, i cracked open my final container of pineapple slices. i’d probably already eaten three or four local pineapples cumulatively over the week, but i couldn’t get enough. they were so juicy you’d be sticky all down your chin, and sweet, like they’d come out of a tin. and so, there i was, in the lounge waiting for the boarding call, savouring my last three slices. they went all too quickly.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 November 2008 at 3:31 pm

permalink | filed under cake, dinner, lunch, snacks, trip

we are flying south for winter, just for a week, to melbourne.

these birds, on the other hand, have journeyed halfway across the world to rest on my walls. i was only recently introduced to geninne’s art blog, and by chance, right as she finished the last of a series of 20 birds in watercolour and collage.

i am thrilled to own a couple of the limited edition prints she sells in her etsy shop. one greets me each time i enter my green bedroom. and the other, because house-painting is so addictive and compelling, farewells me when i leave the apartment through my freshly painted scarlet vestibule.

see you in a bit.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 July 2008 at 7:55 am

permalink | filed under art, trip

the tourist cafe in cooma is quite an institution. above the main counter, above the decades-old kitschy souvenirs that no-one ever buys, there is a lurid painted frieze depicting a range of traditional greek delicaies. but that olde time menu is now somewhat surpassed by a range of hearty australian dishes, all of which come with chips. even breakfast! this is where i had a mushroom omelette a couple years ago — a large, rubbery omelette riddled with small, rubbery mushrooms.

so this time, i thought i’d play it safe and order the toasted cheese and tomato open sandwich. look how it glstens! and look at those chips, fried up just how i like — overcooked and dessicated, with a whiff of stale oil. i like chips cooked in many, many ways.

the kid had an order of cinnamon toast: cheap and nasty white bread, well-buttered and generously dusted with cinnamon sugar — the cook had used the edge of the plate as his boundary, rather than the edge of the toast. (and what a plate! much better than the trendy square of white china on which my cheese-on-toast arrived.)

but the very best thing about tourist cafe is the iced chocolate. a comically large glass of milk and ice cream doused in chocolate syrup, and topped with a cloud of whipped cream as big as your head. if you have a small head.

i ate a lot of meat that week away: meat pie followed by meat pie followed by pastie. a home-cooked roast beef in rutherglen with all the fixin’s, and then another one at the ex-services club in cooma, with an endless bar of serve-yourself condiments. one of those meltaway supermarket tandoori chickens in a bag. a good portion of a salami marked down for quick sale. it was a pattern broken only when we returned to the civilisation that is the harmonie german club along one of canberra’s indistinguishable arteries: some slabs of fat, roasted pork, practically quivering in the shadow of a great mountain of red cabbage.

after i arrived back in sydney, i spent the first two days eating bowls of noodle soups for almost every meal.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 29 April 2008 at 9:01 pm

permalink | filed under breakfast, trip

we got to changi airport early, because nellicent had to buy a computer, and i had to buy a soft-serve soy milk ice cream. five or so weeks ago, in transit on the way between london and sydney, i had popped out into the non-business side of the painfully gleaming new terminal three, to have a crystal jade shanghai dinner with the olds. our post-dinner explorations unearthed, on basement two, a mr bean outlet, offering not just a range of traditional chinese soy milk products, but also new-fangled curiosities like roasted hickory-smoke-flavoured soy beans and soft-serve soy milk ice cream.

well!

i was extremely curious at the time, but had eaten too much dinner, and so with great regret i had to walk on by. but now, here we were, three hours before flight time, dinner long gone, in need of a quick sugar burst for a modest bout of duty-free shoping.

i must tell you that soft-serve soy milk ice cream is amazing! it is not that awful, chalky western soy milk, mind, but the light, refreshing and, above all, beany asian soy milk. you know tauhu fa? the wobbly pudding version of soy milk? this is the frozen version, in a wafer cone, with a topping of finely chopped peanuts or chocolate sprinkles, if you so desire. at SG$1.20, an absolute bargain, and immediately after fighting off the kid and finishing off the last, pointy bit of the cone (the ice cream went all the way to the bottom), i considered — quite seriously — getting another.

but i did not. so i was able, in the departure transit mall, to sample one of these ice cream mochis. at the mochi creamery stand, they were set out like jewels in the display case, a selection of pretty pastels in flavours like green tea, or chocolate-vanilla, or passionfruit. i picked azuki bean and warmed it in my hands for a few minutes before splitting it three ways with nellie and the kid. the mochi skin, evenly dusted, was soft and chewy, and not sweet; the ice cream within was. the dainty confection was perfect all ’round: small and pink, for starters, and grainy with red bean.

an hour earlier, the pure white soy milk ice cream had made me almost buy a shiny white computer at the duty free apple shop, although sanity and bank balance prevailed and i finally settled for a dazzling mighty mouse. kids, i am scrolling with my fingertip!

after relinquishing the last melty bit of pale pink mochi to the kid, on the way to the departure gate, i bought myself some fancy paul smith perfume, which smells of roses and green tea.

and then the beef pastrami croissant served up by the tardy flight crew at 2.30 in the morning, and the fitful slumber crammed into the economy class seat, and the rude old bags pushing their luggage trolleys into our persons… and once more we find ourselves in sydney.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 24 February 2008 at 11:39 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream, trip

let’s call this the holy grail. i’d been trying to visit icekimo for the last two or three years, ever since my sister thrust a slightly dog-eared business card of theirs into my hand. and perhaps i didn’t try hard enough. i mean, this is an ice cream cafe pretty much in the next suburb from the family home, but it was never the right time, or there was just no time (no time for ice cream! whoulda thunk!), or… see, there’s just no excuse.

but we finally made it. saturday night after korean bbq, we circled the block twice looking for parking, ran across the big street in the path of fast cars, ducked beneath the scaffolding that armoured the building, and finally stepped into pink, corrugated, c u t e icekimo.

there were more flavours that i wanted to try than i could reasonably expect to consume after korean bbq, but fortuitously, nellie and the kid sorted themselves out in a most agreeable manner.

maeve had an enormous “small” scoop of bandung, a rich and rosey concoction in a most fetching shade of pink. my sister intoned “dino milo” at the counter for some time before picking cempedak, which was just as i had hoped. it was a sunny orb of yellow, and the perfume of the fruit filled my mouth when i licked a proffered bit off the little plastic paddle. they’d been generous with the chunks of cempedak all the way through.

me? i had a scoop of teh tarik, and a scoop of jasmine. both were light and milky, and comforting in the way of a cup of tea. there was wistfulness as i scraped away the last dregs at the bottom of the paper cup.

singapore has been good to us… except for that moment on friday morning when my permanent residence visa was revoked, finally, after almost thirty years. “um. our records show that you are not employed in singapore,” said the auntie behind the counter at the immigration department. “yes,” i said, and she was almost apologetic. “try and come back to work before may,” she suggested, “and if you stay for a year or so, we may reinstate your status.” so that’s it then.

tomorrow night we leave, our bags packed with such treats as apple kitkats, strawberry marshmallow oreo chocolate pies, a muji shirt, moomin candy. several bags of quality german xmas gingerbread just to keep the japanese contingent in check. when i next return, way, way after may, i will have a bedroom here, and a bank account, good times and treats, a mother and a father… and an unsettling feeling that i won’t be able to stay for as long as i’d like.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 19 February 2008 at 11:34 pm

permalink | filed under ice cream, trip

this is how the holiday goes: you arrive, and the three weeks are spread out before you, full of promise and possibilities. your life slows down, a little. an early morning trip to the wet market with your mother, a meal at a little pink cafe… this could be your everyday life. and then suddenly you’re three days away from the plane trip out, and there won’t be a return visit to the little pink cafe, and — even worse! — you have not had a single dosai, nor a bowl of meepok, and the opportunities to slot these meals in are diminishing fast.

[ takes a deep breath. ]

so this morning — noon, really — even though we had scheduled leftover popiah at home for lunch, we called halftime from our mustafa excursion and froggered across the street to a shiny indian vegetarian cafeteria, gleaming with anticipation.

a dosai makes any day a good day; a rava dosai is even better, crunchy with semolina, and embedded with a festive mix of sliced green chilli, mustard seeds, minced onion, ginger and whatever else the house mix might be. a ghee rava dosai is a magnificent and superior being, surrounded in a golden halo that comes from being fried in clarified butter.

one ghee rava dosai and a cup of syrupy masala chai later, i laid my head on my mother’s shoulder. oh! such contentment. we would have come to little india sooner, but my mother had been gravely concerned about the chikugunya-riddled mosquitoes that had colonised the area recently. fresh out of the car, she brandished a tube of mosquito repellant at us. but we live on the edge, dammit! look at us, choosing bindis with not a care in the world, trying on amusing shoes in the basement.

so today, we snuck in two lunches. but here’s what i snuck in last week.

on our first morning in port dickson, a roti bom. breakfast of champions: an extra buttery paratha, sprinkled in sugar. it came with a puddle of dhal and a slurp of fish curry gravy. unwrinkle you nose; the tangy, peppery curry is a most suitable companion for the crunchy, sweet bread. the kid drank half my teh tarik and then ate enough of the roti that i felt i needed to order another. i didn’t right then, but i couldn’t wait until the next day so that i could have it again.

as it turned out, i did not, because a murtabak presented itself, stuffed with dry chicken curry, with extra chicken curry gravy for sloshing around in. it was big enough to feed five, i believe, but i ate it all. the kid did not eat any of it, naturally, or any of her sardine murtabak (which i’d persuaded upon her in the guise of something a cat might enjoy), but she did drain most of my beaker of teh ais.

T minus three days and counting, i’ve finally learnt my lesson. my masala chai today was all mine, because the kid had her own golden column: mango lassi, which she drank in a single slurp. and then we did get home — late — for popiah. i had the best intentions to wrap modest little rolls, but they took on a life of their own. you start spartan, with a lettuce leaf, but then the turnip-carrot-tofu-beans, and the sprouts, the shredded cucumber, fat baby sauce, minced garlic, crushed peanuts, sprigs of coriander, fried shallots, crabmeat, prawns, an extra drizzle of sauce… and you are sunk.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 18 February 2008 at 11:55 pm

permalink | filed under around town, breakfast, kid, lunch, trip

port dickson (say it, now, in the malaysian way: poddick son). it’s a hell of a town. at the tail end of the development boom of a decade ago, my father bought a holiday flat here, which swiftly went to seed. a corner on the tenth floor of cell block c — that’s us.

but once you look past the mildewed exterior walls, and the eerie green tint of the swimming pool, it is possible to live it up. the two hours of traffic jammed down the highway from kuala lumpur — fully explained when we passed by a rainbow bus in the ditch — became mere hiccups of the past the moment we set foot in billion pasar raya, a behemoth in the middle of PD town, crammed full of cheap everything: children’s clothing fashioned from lurid nylon; brown-paper-covered notebooks; small aluminium curry pots; big, ugly shirts for big, ugly men; that primary school paste of my childhood, in little tubs of primary hues, with matching applicator paddles (i had to buy a pack, just for the smell. if they’d had those lotus-scented erasers, i would’ve bought those too.) and let’s not even get started on the grocery section on the ground floor. i lingered too long at the self-service bins, a wall of familiar savoury crackers and sweet biscuits, and left, eventually, with nothing.

but there was no shortage of food of course — two nights brought us two slap-up seafood dinners for not very much money at all. the first night, in the fabulously faded restaurant of the terribly nostalgic hotel merlin, the classic cantonese dishes competed against a backdrop of pink and green.

the next night, at a much newer establishment — built to an exact match of the adjacent chinese temple — we were serenaded by the karaoke caterwaul from upstairs, and the operatic new year salute to the gods next door. we had a dish of mean little crabs in chilli sauce, but we got them back by chomping right through their brittle belly shells. there was a steamed pomfret, in the teochew style, all strips of salted vegetable and chunks of tomato — and a piece of lard, we were assured by our mother — but the kid ate her share, and mine, and quite a bit more. there was squid in crunchy batter, and the lightheartedness and glee you get from fried food, until we discovered a tiny, inquisitive snail making its way across the lettuce garnish.

i’d like to tell you that all our prior reservations about port dickson were vanquished during our short time there, and for the most part, in a purely superficial way, they were. late on the second day, we overcame our misgivings about the glowing green water in the swimming pool — a man languidly walked the perimeter that afternoon, flinging ladles of what i took, trustingly, to be chlorine from a bucket hanging off the crook of his elbow — and splashed about to no ill effect. we made sure to keep our heads above the water at all times, and this is how we did not miss a tabby cat by the pool’s edge, thrown back by violent convulsions before vomiting up a disagreeable something or other.

we walked uphill through the rainforest of cape rachado to a historic lighthouse, talking all the way of monkeys, and coming across none. we got caught up in banking hijinx. we bought cake boxes at billion! we stayed clear of the beach, fearful of the blinding sun and the warnings from concerned relatives about the high levels of e coli in the surrounding waters. so we took long naps in the afternoons, and that always makes things better.

we had driven past the fixtures of a military history on the way into town, but on the way out, it was villages and dusty brown all the way to the highway. the schoolkids walked along the road to get home, the chinese and indian girls in bright blue pinafores, the malay girls in baju kurung and headscarves, the harsh afternoon all around. we were heading home too.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 17 February 2008 at 10:11 am

permalink | filed under around town, dinner, shoping, trip

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