Home and Away

 We're not in Kansas any more Toto...

There are probably two fundamental ways you really establish that you are in a culture very far removed from your own and they are not the obvious visual queues of landmarks, written language and dress (okay the presence of Arabic men in full dishdasha was a fairly strong visual queue at Dubai airport). 

The things that signal clearly that we are 'elsewhere' are the sounds and the tastes.

The soundtrack, the background noise is just different. You clearly hear Malay, Mandarin and probably several other languages being spoken, but that's not all. It's the music caught drifting by, the sounds of TV shows coming through the walls, the hum of the traffic even has a different timbre - probably due to the lack of diesel engines and high powered bikes, two features that were common back home. The wind even seems to sound different, but maybe this is just my imagination. This experience will doubtless intensify once we are in Penang and as life slowly returns to normal (it's still fairly much locked down here). 

The other fundamental difference is in the tastes. We have never travelled to South East Asia before and I'm not sure I've ever encountered Malay food before, but we have now...

I'll start by saying the food at the hotel has been excellent. It's impressive that they can produce good quality food under the conditions that they are working in and deliver it to passengers who are quarantining in the numbers required and with accuracy too - we're vegetarian and there have been no mix ups so far. 

However, that does not stop it being a new and at times very unusual experience! I mean curry and noodles for breakfast?

 

Breakfast curry! A really nice dhal it turned out.

I guess that's much more about us than it is our host nation. 

Breakfast though, is one of the defining features of a culture. We have very weirdly set ideas about the type of food you can eat at certain times of day. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the UK, which is odd given that we have a full cooked platter of cured meats and other proteins actually named after the various countries of the nations - I refer of course to the 'full English/Irish/Scottish/Welsh breakfast. We will eat breakfast at any time, but on no account are non-breakfast items permitted before 11am - we make exceptions at brunch. 

A reasonable go at a 'full-ish English'!

Permitted breakfast items beyond the cooked versions are: any number of cereal and milk (or milk substitute) combinations - including porridge and granola; toast and preserves; continental pastries too have made their way onto our breakfast plates too, but little beyond this. 

Even the continental buffet items of cold meats and cheeses with various bread and salad options slides dangerously close to lunch for us - surely these are the makings of a nice sandwich? 

However - not so here! Curry, salad, curried pasties (they took us by surprise - I thought they were Danish pastries), rice and noodles are more the norm. We have had Western variants such as eggs on toast, hash browns and actual Danish pastries, but these have been outnumbered.

French toast, maple syrup, yoghurt and a Danish pastry! Recognisably breakfast items to the parochial Brit. Oh - yes and a spicy dressed salad, just in case you forgot where you were...

Don't get me wrong, it's not unpleasant, quite the opposite, it's just not what we're used to and that is the point. The food alone tells you that you are a very long way from home.

The hotel does have an in house menu you can order from if you want to supplement your quarantine offer. I noticed it had fish and chips - intrigued, even though I don't eat fish, I looked at item's description. Red Snapper... yep, it really is some whole other where!

so close...

Oh, and by the way - dessert curry with green lentils. That's a no from me I'm afraid!