Malaysia Days #4-5

So not much to report in the past couple of days - lots of sitting around trying to stay cool, playing mahjong, and of course, eating! I thought I would just share a few of the things we've eaten in the past couple of days. I didn't even take pictures of all of the things - I need to get better about getting my camera out even at the house when we are eating desserts and snacks!

On Sunday night for dinner, we went to this restaurant in Ipoh to get chicken and noodle soup with Derren's entire family. Here is a picture of the restaurant that we ate at. You can see that their restaurants are open to the outside with chairs and tables outside of the restaurant.

Here is the chicken that they chop up for you - it is served family style, so everyone at the table picks pieces to eat with their soup. This picture is a half of a chicken.

And the only other thing that this restaurant serves is bean sprouts. So each person gets noodle soup, and then the chicken and bean sprouts are served family style. This are just stir-fried with a soy sauce.

And here is a picture of the soup - it is just a chicken broth with noodles in it. And hot chili sauce for Derren of course!

And here was my option - noodles (no soup because it's chicken) and soy sauce. Pretty boring, but it was hot and tasty with the bean sprouts!

And during dinner, Derren and I shared a Sarsi. This is a soft drink that is tough to find in the US. I've seen it at some Asian markets before though. It tastes like a cross between root beer and Dr. Pepper. It's VERY yummy!

In the morning, Derren's mom and aunt ran out to get us all breakfast, and then we ate at the house. This was Derren's breakfast - it's a curry noodle soup with chicken.

And I had chee chong fun again. You might remember from the last post that this is just a thick chewy rice noodle. This time I poured that entire bowl of sauce over the top for more flavor - it's like a slighty spicy hoisin (which is typically sweet) sauce. We also ate some fruit to balance out the meal. :)

And then the majority of the days have been spent playing mahjong. It's an Asian rummy game played with these tiles. You can see the cheat sheet that his aunt had to make for Derren and I so that we could read the Chinese characters on the tiles. It only took about a day before we had them all down.

And just another shot of the table where we've spent many hours playing with his family.

This is what the set-up looks like when you start a game:

And here is one game that I sat out on - Derren played with his uncle, dad, and aunt. She was sitting in my place, winning some more points for me! (Typically this game is played with money, but we use "points" instead of money.)

Then for dinner last night we went to a place with many different "stalls" to eat at. Here's a picture of Derren and his dad looking at the options for a cold drink to accompany dinner:

And this is a picture I took from where we were sitting of the eating area - all of the stalls are on the right hand side, and the parking is on the left.

Here's a picture from before our food arrived. Derren's aunt is doing the ritual cleaning of the chopsticks and spoons. When you go anywhere to eat in Malaysia (except the expensive sit down places) you have to bring a box (or small packets) of tissues. They don't give you napkins anywhere. And they use the tissues to clean all the utensils and the table. You can also see the drinks that we got. Derren's yellow drink is passionfruit juice, Monique's light green drink is guava juice, and my orange one is carrot juice (although I suspect they added condensed milk because it was so creamy and sweet).

And again I ate stir fried noodle in soy sauce - this time with a little bit of vegetable. This noodle was more like a thin chow mein noodle.

And Derren had the same noodles but with barbeque pork and prawns, accompanied by wonton noodle soup.

And right after he ate that, he tried this small version of nasi lemak. This is a Malay food that we are planning on eating for real in the next couple of days. I will tell you more about it when we actually eat it. After dinner we went home for more mahjong, and I had a sticky rice dessert (but forgot to take a pic!)

And this morning for breakfast it was sticky rice and fruit for me, more noodle soup for Derren!

I will keep posting every few days to show you some more of the food we are eating and things we are doing...hopefully besides just playing mahjong all day long!

Ashley & Derren