Jamie O’Neill
In 2018, I decided to take a year away from school, there was one place I was lucky enough to be able to go to purely because of curiosity, Malaysia. I signed up for a gap year program that would include living in Malaysian Borneo to volunteer with time to explore the unique area. Looking back, I know now it was the same voice that told me to convince my friends from home to visit the hole-in-the-wall Somalian restaurant instead of our normal take out place. If I am choosing a restaurant, I like to choose one that has a culture that I have never tried before. This appears to be a meaningless trait for everyday life, but I think of it as a way that I choose to live.
Most of our meals came from the cooks who served us traditional Malaysian food at our camp which was great but many of my friends at the camp were not accustomed to eating rice every day, so when they had the opportunity to eat at a western-style fast food restaurant the group was ecstatic. At our first opportunity to eat a Malaysian restaurant, we chose to eat at the Colonel’s own Kentucky Fried Chicken house. I still had reason to be excited, Malaysian KFC was different. I had the opportunity to try the Malay truffle parmesan fried chicken overlooking a jungle..
I could not lie to myself the chicken was disappointing. I should have seen that putting a dry layer of parmesan and truffle oil on fried chicken would not be the satisfying cultural experience I had hoped it would be.
As my time in Malaysia was near its end, we had one more opportunity to go to an outside restaurant and I knew I needed to get unique Malaysian food in a restaurant before I left. My companions were satisfied with the Malaysian KFC and opted to go there but I had to stand up. I asked our Malay program leader if there were any other places he would recommend and he told me about Indian restaurants that served food like “roti canai” which is a doughy flatbread that is inspired by both Malaysia and India..
When we got off our bus we flew past the KFC in search for our Pan-Asian flatbread. The area was crowded and full of cash and fabric stores we asked around but even though the area had many English speakers we did not know how to describe what we were looking for. We were about to give up and take a three-piece of shame before we found it. On the side of the road were Arabic lettering giving showing us that we had found our El Malay-Indian Dorado.
I wish I could tell you the food was where it all paid off but I had to wait. I was given a meal with beef that was cold because it had clearly been sitting outside the entire day. This was served on top of an undercooked egg and the flatbread. I stopped eating when my friend found a large bug in his food after he had eaten most of it. I felt incredibly sorry I had roped my friends into this but that didn’t matter. When I looked around, I found my friends laughing and talking about everything they saw when we were finding this place..
Two days later it was my time to leave but only half of my friends were there to wish me goodbye. The rest were in the hospital for food poisoning on an IV drip and those that ate KFC and were still at the hostel had serious diarrhea. None of the people who ate roti canai with me were sick. As I took my 23-hour journey back to LaGuardia Airport I thought about how lucky I was by sticking with my instinct to explore new things by traveling to beautiful Malaysia and trying a shitty Malay-Indian restaurant on the side of the road.
E110 FA19 Class Blog 