Culinary Disappointments

3/15/2010

Street Food in Penang

I left KL today to travel to Penang, an island off the coast of Malaysia that's famous for their street food.  I got a bus from KL from the main bus station, just around the corner from my crap hostel.  RM36 for a five hour bus ride.  The bus looked like any other bus from the outside but the inside was bizarre.  Instead of the narrow blue and gray seats we'd normally find were what could best be described as rows of lazy boy recliners.  Two together on the right side of the bus, and one on the left.  They were wonderfully comfortable, as long as you didn't look at them because the awful green-blue '70s style pattern would make your eyes bleed, and that would be painful.

Five hours on the bus, nothing of note except the gas station we stopped it.  It is worthy of note because of how wildly normal it was.  Some of the brands were different, and the bathroom was Islamic squat style, and the cashier wore a hijab, but otherwise it was exactly the same as any gas station you'd find in the U.S.  Florescent lights, food to clog your arteries just from looking at it prepackaged in oversized individual servings, a sterile store with a disgusting bathroom, ever present Coca-Cola- it was all so strangely normal that it was bizarre. 

The bus went over a long bridge that connected the island to the mainland, and we were there, well, almost.  After a short cab ride, during which time the driver told me several times which bus I had to take to get the the beach (101), I was in Georgetown.  Found a hostel and went out to try some of the culinary delights.

Apom Manis

My tour book and all the Malaysians I've met agree that it's the gourmet capital of Malaysia, but I was not impressed.  There was no teriyaki bacon for one thing, but it was also nearly all stuff I'd seen before in KL, and none of it really tasted much better here.  I tried some random things I hadn't tried before, including jellyfish, which I hadn't realized what it was until I'd finished eating it and someone told me so.  It wasn't particularly good- it tasted pretty much the way it looks: squishy.  The one thing I had that was pretty incredible was coconut Apom Mani- mini pancakes with coconut inside them, though oddly, the coconut looked like the wooden hairs on the outside of coconuts but tasted normal and wonderful.