in which a nation turns 52

hoo, boy. there’s been so much going on these two weeks – something interesting happening, or some utterly delicious food to eat. i don’t even know where to begin. i mean, there’s so much i want to tell you,

like how we received a lovely package the other day from my US-based sister containing, among other things, Trader Joe’s peanut butter, Pia Jane Bijkerk’s book on Paris’ handmade boutiques, some of my favourite sea-salted milk chocolate, and bacon jam. skillet. bacon. jam. i’ve been saving it for some occasion where i’ll rip it open and slather it on a slice of toast and gorge myself on it. or maybe not, but you know. hot damn.

or like how the sky sometimes looks like this from where i live, gloriously ablaze with evening sunshine and intensely sculptural clouds, the kind Renaissance painters have in their works, glowing pinkly towards the east at sunset.

or how i spent half an hour post-thunderstorm trying to photograph the jolts of lightning that would streak across the skies like sharp white-blue talons, flashing like cameras, and deleted the only shot i had,

or how the city is at 4.30am: rippling fingers of cool wind curling around your neck, the occasional car trundling across the roads, a sea of golden lights, empty streets, the sound of sleep and an amazing feeling of peace.

i could tell you about how we messed around with my sister’s underwater camera, and how Apple likes this picture of me that she took very much. i suppose i could tell you about my faux pas this week, like how i ranted on about press freedom in malaysia in front of 600 people and had the principal edge up towards me gesturing for the mic and causing me to, uh, fuck it up in the most embarrassing way possible, or how we transported my 5.5ft x 3.5ft painting home by gripping on to it for dear life from inside the car, because it was too big to fit inside. or maybe about dinner at a seriously transcendental bak kut teh place somewhere in KL, where there are shiao hsing enoki mushrooms and constant refills of soup.

then again, there’s a Japanese “bistro” in the Mandarin Oriental, where prices are kind of ridiculous but so is the food. ridiculously good, i mean. they serve a gorgeous miso-goma dip with cucumber and carrot sticks as a prelude of sorts, and the wasabi sampler served up the best dragon roll i’ve ever had – a perfect balance of slightly creamy and perfect sushi rice and fresh ingredients – and sublime ahi poke tossed in clean, tangy dressing and chopped spring onions, among other things. i could tell you about watching Up, which has the most beautiful 20-minute sequence at the beginning of the film of Carl and Ellie, despite it being a “morally trite” film. (“I do not like the Cone of Shame.”)

but, y’know. the country i live in celebrates its birthday in about 15 minutes. so i’d rather tell you about Ramadhan instead, and the mind-boggling array of food at any post-Maghrib bazaar you go to – this one in Section 17, at the flats nearby. under circus-like umbrellas there are mostly Malay vendors selling vats of curries,

heaps of fried fish, rainbow-coloured iced drinks from chrysanthemum tea to asam boi,

most stalls selling different styles of chicken from fried to percik, briyani, a huge rack of lamb on a spit,

really fabulous murtabak – a spiced meat mixture wrapped in roti jala batter -

to say nothing of little infants cute enough to eat.

but the point i’m trying to get across is that in a racially divided country like Malaysia (but it’s improving, methinks, with no thanks to Najib and his idiotic 1Malaysia campaign), food tends to be the great uniter, and you see that at bazaars where all kinds of people come just to buy good food. it’s one of the best ways to get to know an alien culture – eat its food

there is a self-deprecating joke i’ve heard Malaysians make, namely that the best thing about Malaysia is its food. (some say this is the only thing, since there are no more rainforests in Borneo, and the politics as you well know are total shit) that’s only true to the second degree: the people who make its food are the best thing about Malaysia. and i am eternally glad for the murtabak, thosai, Ipoh hor fun, nasi kandar, mutton Roghan Josh, xing gua tau fu, pork noodles, lemang, steamed egg, stir-fried ferns, herbal chicken, all kinds of amazing food and the places they’re in,

and for sugarcane uncles like him who have Playboy stickers on their machines. (good things come for those who wait!) happy birthday, Malaysia.

it never rains but pours

i like rainy days. they are gloomy, dark and gorgeous (this sounds like a description of Lestat), entirely different creatures from your normal tropical weather. what’s not hot (or rather, is) is an overcast tropical day, where it’s oppressively hot and fuggy, humid without the relief of rain and wind, and the air is so thick that the blood seems to congeal in your veins. not exactly conducive baking weather, though i managed to bake up a little storm for the weekend.

it was Z’s last weekend in KL and A., Z. and i would be spending it – of all things – at a workshop and a talk – but we met some incredible people there, and i’m just about certain i want to spend the next four years after A-Levels at a liberal arts college. hopefully with an oven and an electric mixer. they don’t tell you whether they have these things at college.

so off to the workshop we went, me carting along a paper bag with Amai’s Tea Sweets, Chocolate Chip Cookies and Green Tea Madeleines, offering them to anyone we talked to. it’s amusing how many people won’t accept cookies from a stranger – someone even declined with a “i’m allergic to peanuts”. even more amusing (and humiliating) was the very, very public rejection of cookies in the spirit of mock interviews for college:

CC: what is your greatest strength?
F: uh…being nice to people.
CC: okay. you have 15 seconds to prove that you’re nice. /points at random girl in audience

in short, the girl proved to be a damn good actress (or maybe she liked being mean) and responded to an offer of Tea Sweets with “i don’t like cookies”, and more. i still cringe when i think about it, and wonder if i should have gone the Higgins route of “if i wasn’t being nice, i would have rammed them down your ungrateful throat, you presumptuous insect.”

i wouldn’t really have said that.

but more to the point: would anyone refuse Tea Sweets if they knew what they were? tender, almost cake-like cookies, their mild sweetness tempered by the bright, bitter matcha. no confectioners’ sugar had i, so caster sugar it would be, though i think following the original would work a treat. a repeat recipe if there’s one, a Chinese New Year cookie if any. i mean, these things won a Best Bakery Recipe Award. all these bloggers know what they’re talking about.

that episode made me wonder why i bake, really, and why i bother trying to share these things with people – i was already struggling to explain to my seemingly-increasingly-bored group members why i’m this obssessed with food for the applications essay (lazy answer: i will bake for you let me in to your uni plzkthnxbai) – but then Hobart, total stranger and nice guy, gave the chocolate chip cookies the thumbs up, and it was all much better. and so did Z. and A., who finished the last of the madeleines at A.’s place after the workshop, before watching My Fair Lady and Mulan.

and yeah, these chocolate chip cookies are the shit, figuratively speaking. other bloggers have raved and shared the recipe, so i won’t, but i swear that these are the best chocolate chip cookies that you’ll ever taste. mindblowingly good, chewy and fudgy at the centre, crispy towards the edges, the sweetness counterbalanced by an undercurrent of savoury saltiness - which sounds weird, but i assure you that the salt here is a desirable thing – and chock-a-block full of chocolate. i used three types of sugar, sure, and organic flour and everything, but the real secret is letting it rest in the fridge for at least 36 hours. 24 at the minimum. like fine wine but in a shorter time frame, the flavours develop and meld together, becoming deeper and more layered and somehow just better, especially at room temperature. (they’re far too rich straight out of the oven.)

just be warned: the original David Leite recipe makes a billion cookies, far too many for one person to eat, and 5 straight from the oven is just pushing it, and you will have to share. but it’s okay, because sharing them is great: everyone loves these cookies. even people who claim not to like chocolate. usually. 

a brief interlude: it’s true that i don’t make a habit of posting people-photos on this food blog, and especially not photos of myself, which made it much harder for these two stalkers to figure out who i was.

Zhi Wei: you know how hard it is to find a picture of you? i googled “Florentyna Leow” with quote marks and all i could find was that twitter picture of you, and do you have any idea how small the dimensions of that picture are? (at Andrew) yeah hers is the blog with all the pictures of food.

i do not like photos of myself much, and one-way stalking/lurking kind of amuses me. but in all seriousness, these are just two of the many awesome people there those two days. i’d met Zhi Wei two years ago at the WSDC preliminary rounds and forgot about him till i found his blog, and emailed him about his music. seems that he remembered me and my name, so i made a new friend (again). and he’s such a nice guy. but more to the point, his song 28 Days is one of my favourites, and that’s no joke. it’s an astonishingly sexy song, kind of like Jack Johnson’s Rodeo Clowns, channeling Jason Mraz and a little Craig David, with clever lyrics and an irresistible melody. this is what you call shameless advertising, but 28 Days is honestly that good.

as for Andrew…well, he likes stalkers. he also wears cool scarves, and has an inhuman CV. (US apps 2009 can be summed up by: “Andrew’s CV”)

the Youth to Youth forum started badly and sleepily, and ended really well – all manner of speakers were there from Nik Nazmi, Hannah Yeoh and Wan Firdaus to Mark Teh, Wong Chin Huat and Edmund Bon. i had high hopes for the Arts talk: it was entertaining but lacked substance, and it wasn’t as cohesive as i would’ve liked. the Politics talk with NN, HY and WF was incredible fun to listen to, and since they couldn’t get an UMNO people to come for the last talk, the sole rep – 25 year old Wan Firdaus, ex-Marxist-turned-UMNO-Youth-member – had to man the fort for his party.

listening to Wan Firdaus’s surprisingly progressive (for UMNO) stand is hilarious when you consider his stringently anti-establishment past (R: progressive?! he used to be a Marxist, and then the Sultan of Johor picked him up and now he’s all guai and talking about reform from within…), and Hannah Yeoh really grilled him at one point for it – i wish i’d taken notes. but i really liked the forum mainly because i love listening to people’s stories, and these outlets just humanise them that much more – outside the manifestos and policies and electoral statistics, they’re just people who happen to do good things for the community, and that’s more important than anything else. so i am a total sucker for grassroots politics.

right, but i really wanted to talk about the madeleines.

no Proustian memories have i associated with this little cake-cookie, but good lord, i love the madeleine. i have a feeling there might be a little too much matcha powder in this for most non-Asians, but it is absolutely lovely. there’s a burst of sweetness from the icing sugar which gives way to the green tea, a tight, tender crumb with a whisper of citrus. perfect for contemplative Proustian tea-eating or just snacking on.

Green Tea Madeleines
adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets

105 grams all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp double-acting baking powder
2 large eggs, at room temperature
70 grams sugar
2 tbsp honey
grated zest of 1 lemon
2 tsp vanilla extract
70 grams unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 tbsp matcha powder (or less, to taste)

sift together the flour and baking powder and keep close at hand. after melting the butter, whisk in the matcha powder, ensuring there are no lumps, and set aside. beat the eggs and sugar together in an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment until they thicken and lighten in colour, about 2 – 4 minutes. beat in the honey, lemon zest and vanilla. switch to a large rubber spatula and gently fold in the dry ingredients, followed by the melted butter. cover the batter with plastic wrap, pressing the wrap against the surface to create an airtight seal, and chill for at least 3 hours, preferably overnight.

center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 200C. if your madeleine pan is not nonstick, generously butter it, dust the insides with flour, and tap out the excess. if the pan is nonstick, you still might want to give it an insurance coating of butter and flour. if it is silicone, do nothing. no matter what kind of pan you have, place it on a baking sheet for easy transportability.

divide the batter among the moulds, filling them almost to the top. don’t worry about smoothing the batter – it will even out as it bakes.

bake large madeleines for 11 to 13 minutes, small ones for 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are puffed and golden and spring back when touched. pull the pan from the oven and remove the cookies by either rapping the pan against the counter (they fall out in a shower of madeleines) or gently running a butter knife around the edges of the cookies. allow them to cool on a cooling rack. they can be served ever so slightly warm or at room temperature, and they should be eaten on the same day, because that’s when they’re at their peak.

stormy weather

AS results came out today, and applying to college is going to be a little harder. let’s hope i have plenty of spunk somewhere in reserve to make up for the goddamned B for math, the one b-lemish on the record. y’all knew i suck at math anyway. but i’m waffling.

today brought one of those tropical thunderstorms i love, the ones where the skies are whitewashed misty cloud-pale, and torrents of rain pour forth from the heavens. howling, strong, soothing, chilly winds, raindrops billowing and buffeted at crazy angles in the rain. water needles striking the tar road over and over again, tidal waves surging down monsoon drains and spilling over the sides. and the thunder-drumming, relentless and hypnotic. it’s a waffle kind of day.

waffles are entirely lovely on overcast, cold-ish days, during or post-rain – piping hot, crisp, buttery, like glorified toast or a matrix-looking pizza base. it’s not perfect, but it’s close: i forgot to melt the butter, and the batter was thick, but it may have been better for it. try it either way. because it’s not noticeably sweet, this particular waffle is extremely versatile, amenable to a generous glug of honey or syrup and butter, a scoop of ice cream, all manner of sweet sauces or savoury toppings like tuna, scrambled eggs and chilli con carne. a chilli con carne waffle! that might be the next rainy day snack.

Basic Waffle Batter, adapted from the Sunbeam Waffle Maker recipe book
we served this with butter and Arabic honey from Indonesia, all winey and dark and sweet, but anything goes here. if  you choose not to melt the butter, the batter will be thicker, but the waffles will still be good. for a lighter waffle, reduce the butter to 90g or add milk to achieve a more liquid consistency.

2 cups / 8 oz / 240g self-raising flour, sifted
2 eggs, separated
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup water
140g butter, melted (or not)
1/4 cup / 30g sugar

In a large bowl, combine flour, egg yolks, milk, water and butter. Mix with electric mixer till smooth.

Using clean beaters, beat egg whites till stiff peaks form. Gradually add sugar, mixing well between additions. Fold egg whites into batter. Let batter stand for half an hour.

Brush the waffle maker generously with melted butter or margarine. Place approximately 1/2 cup of batter at a time onto the base of the waffle maker, spreading evenly over plate with a spatula.  (but as a general rule of thumb, the first waffle is always the ugliest) Close the lid and cook until waffles are golden brown, 2-3 minutes. Serve as desired.

Variations

it’s a nice template to play around with – you could fold all manner of things in, and add all manner of flavourings – cinnamon, blueberries and orange juice/zest come to mind.

Chocolate Waffles: Add 3 tbsp of sifted cocoa along with the flour, and proceed as before.
Cheese Waffles: Fold 1/2 cup of grated cheese in with the egg whites.
Ham Waffles: Fold 1/2 cup finely chopped ham and 1/4 cup grated cheese in with the egg whites.

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P.S. a friend, Y, is selling some of her shoes here for college cash. trust me when i say she has impeccable taste in shoes.

Kuching, I’m in ur citteh/eating ur foodz

in the last post, i may have given the impression that we toured and traveled extensively. this is true. but when all is said and done, what really filled up the time was eating – touring was done in between. the first day alone saw our tour guide taking us hungry hobbitses for a second lunch right after our flight at a series of stalls on Jalan Tan Sri Datuk William Tan, near the civic centre and right next door to a school. after-school students huddled together in cliques at small tables, giggling and gossiping over bowls of kolo mee and laksa, with the occasional group of clearly underage lads smoking cigarettes.

the laksa was nothing to shout about, though generously heaped with chicken and prawn – the soup is slightly watery and peppery, rather than curry-like. the char kuey teow was surprisingly good, full of wok hei – i’d imagine would muster at least a B+ or an A- on any discerning Penang char kuey teow lover, though the substitution of “English sausage” for lap cheong was somewhat disconcerting. kolo mee? like a fancier, more wholesome Maggi Mee, if you like the triple pork whammy: char siu, minced pork and noodles coated with pork oil.   on the main road of Chinatown, there’s Hong Kong Noodle House, which seems to be consistently full and serves extremely decent food at hawker stall prices. even less, actually. the duck noodles and the char siu noodles were about RM3.50 each. that’s US$0.88 to you folks, and for char siu noodles or char kuey teow like that it’s the very definition of cheap, good food. so far, not a single crap char kuey teow have we found in Sarawak – a good thing for the Pie, since it’s all she ate when she was in Penang…

though seaside restaurants are a great idea, the Beach Seafood Restaurant wasn’t – really decent food, but lousy seafood. oversalted prawns, for instance, overcooked not-very-fresh fish – never oversteam a fish, and always steam a fresh fish – and an apparently lousy not-very-fresh sweet and sour crap crab.

Sarawak’s best dish is, i think, the local specialty above: stir-fried ferns, a gorgeous tangle of sunny green tendrils, brightly flavoured, grassy and crisp-tender.

young coconuts are best had ice-cold, its sleepy sweet juice brightened with a squeeze of lemon juice.

there was dinner at a food court specialising in mostly seafood, but more compelling than the endless platters of cooked food being brought to the table were the endless rows of dead flesh in all shapes, sizes and hues – how gorgeously these carcasses were arranged, like still lifes in Fauvist colours; how mind-boggling the array of seafood! (i did seafood) but also, how sweet the locals are – some like being in photographs – and grinned at me behind shelves of food as i snapped away.

we ate, and then some.

first class ee foo noodles at Food Comes First Sdn. Bhd., Jalan Travers

tapioca cookies at the Cultural Village – tapioca and sugar, deep-fried and drained, hot, chewy and mildly sweet.a kek lapis (layer cake) house somewhere across the Kuching River to the North, ridiculously intricate layers and all manner of flavours spanning honeycomb, spice, blueberry cheese, Cadbury and watermelon. mee jawa at a restaurant right opposite the Kuching River, down from the Hilton and on the same road as Ramsay Ong’s Artrageous, which tasted more like Hakka mee.

ask any local and they’ll tell you where the Pasar Tani is – a market running from Saturday to Sunday, a huge labyrinth of rainbow-coloured umbrellas and fresh produce, chillis apportioned and sold by the plate, mountains of fruit and sacks of dried fish, heaps of Sarawakian pepper and stalls selling cold drinks for the weary tourist. there was Sarawakian pineapple, also known as pineapple nirvana. a Chinaman manning the stall sliced three pineapples for us, taking his own sweet time choosing them for us, flicking each one with his fingers, listening to the sound to determine whether it was ripe enough or not. his knife skills would have rivalled those of a Cordon Bleu chef, i am sure – this guy is a real pro.

in any case, the pineapple was everything a pineapple should be, the Platonic ideal of a pineapple: immensely fragrant, not nasty, hard or underripe but tender, overwhelming the senses with an explosion of sweetness and juice. you know it’s right when you bite into it, and the juices spurt out and dribble down your chin. there will be no other but the Sarawak pineapple. it’s one reason to go back.

Sarawak, I’m in ur citteh

i’ve never been fond of guided tours, especially those that cater to large groups of attention-deficit people who want to shop and are peppered with 5 minute photo stops and bang, you’re on the bus again. they show you the most stuff in as little time as possible, ie. all of the face and none of the heart, though it’s true that all of Kuching is difficult to explore unless you have a local or car with you (preferably both). it’s the kind of city you walk around and chill out in, and then drive around to the coastal villages. apart from the heat and seasonal haze, it’s a wonderful place to slow down and relax.

Kuching is the capital of Sarawak, East Malaysia. it’s unusually clean, almost Singaporean, with none of the litter usually associated with Malaysian streets. the Kuching River divides North and South Kuching (almost Korean!): to the South, the predominantly Chinese population; to the North, the Malay majority. our guide tells us that there are therefore two mayors – one Chinese, one Malay for each side of the city. this mayor may not be necessary.

our hoary ol’ tour guide Mr S is quite the storyteller, deadpan, very un-PC and full of amusing anecdotes:

many years ago, i wanted my son to go to this school in town, a good school, but Christian, so i studied the Bible and went to church. then i asked the priest, and said, “Father, are you sure my son…” then he said, “sir, i’m a priest, not a principal. whether your son goes to that school is up to the principal.” so i stood up and said bye-bye, and went back to being a Taoist. i thought, they cannot help me. God cannot help me. before that i thought he was supreme power… haiiih, i was very kecewa (disappointed).

he claims to have a harder time taking Westerners on tours, since they don’t seem to get his jokes.

since “Kuching” is phonetically similar to kucing, the Malay word for cat, you see statues of cats all over the place (which makes for convenient tourist photography), and cat memorabilia sold in various souvenir shops in the city. there’s even a Cat Museum, through which we are herded through like sheep at breakneck pace (“only 15 minutes here”), catching glimpses of all kinds of feline displays like Hello Kitty, paintings, Satoru Tsuda cat photography and an original Les Aristochats poster from the 1960s.

Sarawak is 70% undeveloped land, with just 2.7 million people. it gets pretty quiet in the suburbs. the outskirts of South Kuching are kind of dusty and dilapidated, weathered old buildings and kampung houses neighbouring newer, tasteless concrete ones. the inner city is more interesting, full of poky alleys and shops with funny names (bla bla bla restaurant, Iron-Nique Sdn.Bhd.) the Federal Government hasn’t completely wiped out Kuching’s colonial heritage yet, so the city retains much of the original road names. i’d like to live on a street like Lorong Crookshanks or Jalan Were (Were-road: turns into a highway during the full moon), and we couldn’t help thinking of Spongebob when we saw Jalan Nanas (Pineapple Road).

Kuching by day is intensely sunny, hot and humid, and the Hilton hotel pool will be absolutely infested with sunbathers and noisy kids. Kuching by night is also lovely, the bars being busy at night, but if you can, ride through town on the back of a truck, the wind in your face as you sing all kinds of trashy songs (Pie and i did Spice Girls, BBS, Britney, etc). wave to locals, and most will wave back with smiles.

in between touring and eating

“you book the courts, i’ll book the flights. F, you take photos for everyone.”

parents 31st anniversary, and several more birthdays

guided tours are all about the gawking: all manner of beasties did we gawk at like the good tourists we were, still-as-stone open-jawed crocodiles, orangutan nests, rainforest, “Totally Wild” Rose and her little kid. i gawked at the hordes of Homo Touristus like us snapping away with their cameras, and took a photo of them. but that idea is already old; do people practice this to the third, fourth, fifth degree? taking a photo of the tourist taking a photo of the tourist taking a photo of the tourist? in any case, i thought the appropriate soundtrack to the Orangutan Sanctuary might be the sussurus of cameras clicking away, and the refrain “take a picture of me…”

we are rushed through a pottery factory of sorts, half an hour – the old man is clearly an old hand at this game, while the rest of us who tried ended up with Dali-esque floppy bits of clay. by this time, everyone’s already enamoured with the cowboy hats available in the factory store – in fact, it’s where the ladies all gravitate to after about 3 minutes of gawking and photo taking. we met Dato’ Karl Bendlin there, a German artist living in Malaysia. he’s adorable – reminds us of Asparagus in Cats.

we visit a temple in fishing village, where the locals stare at us as we walk past them, and no wonder – we’re too clearly tourists, all cameras and sunglasses and city clothes. the kids cycle, play rough and tumble, the adults sit on the porch or in the kopitiams and look at us suspiciously. it’s RM15 to park a bus in the village – guess it’s pretty annoying, having a tour bus – so the bus driver decides to drive off, and return later.

one of the main highlights must be the Sarawakian Cultural Village, Singapore-clean, filled with replicas of relics and houses of the various Sarawakian indigenous tribes, as well as some historical houses here and there. it is beautiful, well-groomed, fascinating and depressing. i couldn’t help but think of all this history and culture being sanitised and heaped together in this space for touristy convenience, for those who want to Experience Culture so we can say “oh how quaint this is, this is how they live, this is what they do, my, isn’t this just fascinating?” there are even overnight rooms in the longhouse available for the – actual phrase, i kid thee not – “Ethnic Experience”, Complete With Running Electricity.

it’s precisely the sort of thing that awakens some sepia-toned maudlin in my parents generation – “this is how we used to live, you don’t know how lucky you are, we used to cook like this, we used to listen to radios like this. they don’t make them like they used to.” there are old gadgets like rice mills and sugar cane crushes placed all over, and there’ll be people taking photos of themselves pretending to use them.

there was a Malay woman playing the kompang (drum) who had a wonderful voice, a little raspy, like Edith Piaf and real soulful, and it felt like we were in a P. Ramlee film. it was around this point while taking photos of people i started to wonder how they were so willing to let me take photographs, and how they could actually stand having hundreds of cameras pointed at them as many times a day, clicking and flashing, and performing the same thing over and over again to hordes of indifferent tourists there for The Experience.

there is no such thing as an ugly kid

the dancers above look quite interested in what they’re doing, but many of them looked as though they were going through the motions (“…walking through the part/nothing seems to penetrate my heaaaart”) and simply didn’t want to be there at all. one girl in particular looked extremely bored. we were told that these were actual native people dancing for us, wow, actual ones; The Second One agreed that cultural villages were horrible. and i continued taking photos, like the good guilty tourist i am.

we were herded from one end of Kuching to the other – the Muzium Etymologi, the Market (everyone knows it), more villages, beautiful scenery, food, the seaside, etc. the last day was spent strolling around, eating and shopping – gotta stock up on that Sarawakian black pepper, y’know. it’s one of their main exports, fragrant and spicy and delicious.

Sarawak, i’m not done with you yet. i couldn’t live in Kuching for very long – no decent bookstores – but i’ll be back in Borneo to see more of it (probably next summer, if Z manages to drag me along to a school for deaf kids).

(of course there’ll be a post on Eating Sarawak. did you really think there’d be a holiday without the food?)

one of the main highlights must be the Sarawakian Cultural Village, Singapore-clean, filled with replicas of relics and houses of the various Sarawakian indigenous tribes. it is beautiful, fascinating and depressing.