A Taste of Malaysia

The Wednesday of spring break I took the day off and took Cam to an Indian restaurant - his favorite ethnic food. It was pretty good, although he enjoyed it more than I did. We then went to downtown to a large Asian market on E 36th (called Tink Holl), and looked around for a couple of hours. We had a nice time browsing through things, and telling each other stories. We met some nice people, and bought several bags of Asian groceries, including a durian, which is the stinky smelling but good tasting fruit that Cam wrote about months ago. Actually, only one of the descriptors is correct. It does stink. It was still fun to try it. Cam about laughed his head off looking at my face as I spit the first bite in the sink. It was overripe, and I thought I had perhaps bit into a rotten portion. I hadn’t. It only tasted like it. Cam thought it was extremely funny. I tried a few more bites, and I did get more used to it, but it was like…imagine biting into something with the texture of an avocado, the flavor of an avocado mixed with a bit of papaya, and then permeated throughout with garlic. Now you are getting close. After he ate a bit more, we threw it out and by the next day it was MUCH smellier than the cat droppings cleaned from the kitty litter (used by three cats).

Cam also brought back some sarongs and other cultural souvenirs. One thing that surprised me was a Singaporean sitcom DVD. He would often talk about how he was worried about his broken English, and frankly I thought he was maybe exaggerating the level of difference a little. However, upon watching this sitcom, I found that I only understood about half of it the first time through, and that my eyes kept dropping down to the Malay and Chinese subtitles for help (which actually helped not at all of course). In speaking, he only has one or two habits that are hard for him to break - mostly having to do with ubiquitous use of the word “can” in unusual contexts.