Food, Religion, and the Bar

So I finally left my hermitic hole this weekend to live life (instead of writing about it from my air-conditioned bedroom—though wearing a sweatshirt in Malaysia is an extremely nice luxury). I had planned to rearrange my Monday classes, take the bus to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday night, and stay through Tuesday (since Tuesday is Merdeka-Independence Day, and a national holiday), but a last minute Saturday morning faculty meeting destroyed all of my traveling aspirations. On Friday, I actually went to work (shocker!! Emily and I usually only show up Monday through Thursday) and did lots of productive grading stuff=) I also went out to lunch with some fellow teachers (for the first time ever) to a hawker court where I tried ais kacang for the first time… if you haven’t gotten the gist of this yet, this was a weekend of ‘firsts’… (Btw, Ais=Ice, Kacang=Bean… it’s a dessert with shaved ice, corn, wheatgrass jelly, red beans, soursop (a fruit) and some sugary syrup. I know it sounds bizarre, but it was divine and cold. I had ais kacang at a nasi kandar place last night and it was horrendous: pink strawberry syrup and sweetened condensed milk (grrr) and there were slivers of onions (outrage…!?!?) and generally heinous.) I went out three nights this weekend, once to the hawker court with some exchange students, after which I ended up having fabulous conversation with John, Milan (Canadians) and Patrick (Aussie) about race, gender and athleticism, national identity, and of course some hitchhiker porn;) They’re wicked cool boys and I wish I hadn’t been stupidly antisocial for the last three months (oops). The rest of the weekend was not so intelligent… Ashley (a very cool Canadian girl), Carly (Aussie) and I went to this bar called Soho House because I heard they had good beer on tap (this is a novelty in Malaysia), and met some guys in the Australian Army. Now, Australians are quite generally hot, and these chaps were quite generally attractive with a few hot ones mixed in… however, I seem to have a newfound problem: if a guy cannot hold up his end of a conversation (except about rugby), I get extremely bored and then develop strange urges to verbally flay his poor, dumb, innocent hide. So, Ashley and Carly had fabulous nights (we hung out with them Saturday night as well) and I, uh, wrote in my journal…at the bar. (Oh, and I got hit on by an extremely gross old Australian man—think sixty years old, minimum—who insisted he’d met me at the Eastern and Oriental hotel (luxury hotel) the previous weekend and generally played that stupid old school “I know you; don’t you remember me?” line. Barf-o-la. Even with the boring conversation angst that I had built up in my system (I resisted the urge to be unkind), I was still so sickened that I couldn’t give the loser a proper piece of my mind. Or maybe he was just so pathetic—pale wrinkly white skin, red-rimmed alcoholic eyes, florid Irish face (ever heard of sunscreen?), giant gut, stupid stupid opening line-- that it would’ve been too much time and energy.) Learning experiences of the weekend: Canadians are cool, the bar scene in Penang is bitterly and heinously awful, and… number 3 (next paragraph) my students are way cool I hung out with some of my upper-level students this weekend, and they’re so cool… they remind me of my UM girls (they’re smart and opinionated and friendly and gorgeously vibrant). One of them, Alison, invited me to a Merdeka day celebration (after the glorious 9am Faculty Meeting on 4 hours sleep—yeecch, and it lasted for nearly 4 hours), and we drove to the mainland with Riena (another student of mine) and Azna (actually one of Emily’s students) and went to a Bah’ai prayer and devotional session. It was really cool, and the first time I’ve really seen Malaysia doing its multiracial mixing thing (people talk about it non-stop, but for the most part, the races—Indian, Malay, and Chinese—are still extremely segregated… by language, religion, social habits, and even a little bit by class). The Bah’ai congregation made NYC look homogenous: there were Chinese from China, Chinese from Malaysia, Nonya (Chinese-Malay mixes), Indians (from India and from Malaysia), two Caucasian Americans, ethnic Malays, and other mixes of the aforementioned. Haha, with all the mixing, it almost felt like home for me:) (Btw, according to Merriam Webster, Bah’ai is a relatively new religion that originated in Iran in the 19th century and emphasizes the spiritual unity of mankind. It bears a similar hereditary relationship to Islam as Buddhism to Hinduism, in that one emerges from the other chronologically, but they’re exceedingly different. How cool does that sound?) It was really interesting to read the words of their prayers; I spent a lot of time wondering whether the scriptures about government were a huge focus of the religion or if they were being highlighted because of the event. Sample: “The unquestioned duty of Bah’ais in every land [is] ‘to demonstrate their unqualified loyalty and obedience… to their respective governments,’ [which] means submission to all of its rules and regulations.” “We must obey and be the well-wishers of the government of the land, regard disloyalty unto a just king as disloyalty unto God himself…” On one level, I wonder how much Bah’ai shares with Confucianism, because it sounds like it strongly advocates unwavering support for the government (authority); yet it specifies that disloyalty against an unjust king is unacceptable. I want to do some research to see if I can find out what position the scriptures/religion/practitioners take toward social protest against an unjust government/leader… Btw, Gramma, I had my journal out and scribbled my thoughts during the service, just like you always did in church—I now understand why=) After the service finished, we drove back to Penang and Azna and I were hungry (she’s like me—hungry and eating all the time!!) so all of us went to a Chinese restaurant which ended up being Nonya (Chinese-Malay mix) and unbelievable. We tried their Curry Capitan (chicken), a spicy soup with fish that was amazing, and a vegetable called ‘kangkong’ that was prepared with oil and belaca (a shrimp-chili paste)… we ended up talking about cooking and food and then heading to the wet (fresh produce/meat) market where they explained all the vegetables and herbs for my future knowledge. (I’m planning to try the belaca dish ASAP. Laura, you eat seafood, don’t you? You have to try this.) I don’t know if I can express how much I love wet markets, and Malaysia’s attitude toward food (all day, every day, all the time, in the middle of the night, spicy in a challenging sort of way, and everywhere). On other religious fronts, I was supposed to go to a Mass Pali chanting at the Burmese Buddhist temple this morning but my weekend had been just a little too full and so I was too exhausted to get up at 8am again:-/ But I had a marvelous run (my grandma sent me running shorts, so I didn’t have to worry about my shorts falling down from the weight of my inhaler in my pocket—imagine the scandal of a naked running Westerner on the streets of a Muslim country), proceeded to spend another day eating (I love life), and working on stuff for classes.