The heat hit us as soon as we walked out the door on our second day. Humidity is a strange thing - it hangs on you, weighing you down. Your brain feels a little sluggish, like there's water collecting in there, sloshing around.
Something as unimportant as a little weather could never deter us from breakfast though. As bad as it is in the sun, a lot of the heat dissipates when you walk into the open-aired food shops that cater to the local Penangites. Sometimes fans swirl overhead, moving the air around enough to trick you into thinking you're cool.
Our first meal was a parade of several local dishes. We had our second taste of Hokkein Mee, a delicious but somewhat fishy tasting soup with noodles, prawns, boiled egg, cockles, and a Chinese spoon full of chili paste. Next came our first taste of Char Koay Teow (one of my top three dishes of the trip), and Chee Cheong Fun, small rolls of wide rice noodles served with sweetish and sticky dark sauce and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
We ended breakfast with my very first taste of durian. Durian is a Southeast Asian fruit (although you can get it all over Asia and even in American Asian markets, flash frozen and flown over) that many locals are crazy about. Durian has its own culture, rules to be followed (such as don't eat durian and then drink beer - you're asking for trouble), and varieties to choose from. People are so empassioned about the fruit that they get into arguments over which are best, and even climb into the mountains to collect durians freshly dropped.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into. All I knew up to that point about durian is that foreigners hate the texture, which could be described as custard-like, and the smell, which resembles the sweet putrid smell of a long unwashed floor of your local downtown convenience store.
I'm still not sure how to describe the experience. It was at once good and horrible. You take one of the lobes out of its container and it immediately begins to squish and slide in your fingers. There's a large pit to work your way around. The texture is very creamy, kind of like cream cheese, but not in a bad way. The taste is a little tougher to describe. Some parts of it were kind of sweet and similar to a banana. Then you'd get an unbelievably bitter bit - you'd be eating the sweet stuff and then bam! You'd hit something really more like aspirin. Not the most pleasant experience. I think the worst part of all was the aftertaste. The bitterness of it clung to my mouth for hours after.
But I must press on - we have a lot of ground to cover still. Next we did a little shopping at a local supermarket where we picked up some fruit and snacks for our hotel room (including local fruits like rambutans and mangosteen), and some spices to take back to Taiwan with us. After the shopping we stopped for lunch.
Our second meal of the day was a sampling of nyonya food, a cuisine culturally linked to the descendants of a mix of Chinese and native Malay people (also referred as Peranakan.) Around the 15th or 16th centuries many Chinese were fleeing economic troubles at home and seeking out new lands. They settled all around Southeast Asia, especially in the Malaysia/Indonesia/Singapore region, and many intermarried with the local people resulting in the culturally (and culinarily) different Peranakan.
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| A Peranakan family in traditional dress. Picture from peranakanmuseum.sg |
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore all have nyonya food, but each has a different spin on things because of the local flavors that got incorporated. Our meal was the Penang version of nyonya, which resembled Thai a bit. Fluffy pillows of pastry shrouded delicate ground pork in one appetizer dish. A dish of eggplant covered in a thick and sour red sauce (the sourness coming from plum paste) followed. Then a plate full of tiny strips of cuttlefish, carrot, and some other root vegetable that gets wrapped up in a lettuce leaf, a little like lettuce wraps you might find at P.F. Chang's, but oh so different. We tried so many dishes here that the waitress cut us off and didn't let us order anymore.
Immediately after the nyonya experience, we headed to a roadside coconut vendor. We hopped out of the car while our friend parked down the road. Several others were waiting around for this thin man to whack their coconuts apart and let them drink the sticky sweet liquid out of the husk with a straw. One man pulled up in a van while we waited, blocking traffic behind him. A coconut was cut and drained into a plastic bag and passed to him with a straw. Coconut husks were piled all around, falling out into the streets and littering the ditches with discarded bits. We waited our turn and watched in amazement at the deftness of this man's hands. One false whack and his fingers would be gone. But he's an old pro. I bet he's been doing this for years.
After the coconuts we made our way down to the beach to check into our resort. Our friends got lucky and got a room at the same place even though they hadn't planned on staying. We took some time to rest and walked on the beach a little before dinner.
The beach turned out to be a very unique experience. There were a few of the traditional sunbathers in bikinis and young people playing and flirting in the sand. Then there was the large group of people you might not expect to see at the beach. Women in full black burkas, or the lighter colorful head coverings, riding horses, watching children play, walking along the sand.
After the much needed relaxing, we headed out for a seafood dinner. Being an island full of foodies, Penang has incredible seafood. We went to Bali Hai, a restaurant where you can pick your own fish while it's still swimming if you want. We feasted on many little creatures and had a fantastic time. If you want to know more about it, you can read about the experience on my food blog entitled Going Fishing.
Our night ended at a little bar on the beach. It was our friend's birthday and a few of his friends met us out. One of them had just eaten two or three durians all by himself and said he couldn't have any beer for a while. This sparked an intense discussion about durian, everyone arguing about which varieties were best, filling us in on the rules and how to tell if one is fresh.
After so many meals throughout the day I found it funny that we'd come full circle - back to the king of fruits (one of its nicknames). The aftertaste of the durian I'd eaten was gone, but the experience of being surrounded by so many passionate foodies isn't going to fade any time soon.
The Daily Food Talley:
Meals Previously Eaten: 3
Meals Eaten on Day Two: 5
The Total So Far: 8
Meals not mentioned above: 
(a fruit stand where we sampled local guava and pineapple)
(a fruit stand where we sampled local guava and pineapple)All Posts In This Series:
Nice write up on Penang -especially on the food
May I correct a slight mistake?
"Hokkein Mee, a delicious but somewhat fishy tasting soup with noodles, prawns, boiled egg, cockles, and a Chinese spoon full of chili paste."
In Hokkian Mee = Hokkian Mee Soup = Prawn Mee Soup (in other parts of Malaysia) there is no cockles. You could have mistakenly put in the ingredients of Curry Mee = Curry Laksa in other parts of Malaysia.
A Penangite
@A Penangite - thanks for the correction! You're absolutely right, it was in the Curry Mee, which we had in the same sitting. It's tough to keep all these dishes straight!
Love your food experiences. We'll be heading to India, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in a couple of months and I can't wait to try the foods! I'm also adding your blog to our blogroll. Love all of your food posts!
Kim
www.touncertaintyandbeyond.com
@KimberlyKs - thanks so much for your comments. I'm so jealous that you get to go to India! I've been following (and enjoying) your blog as well and added it to my blogroll. Can't wait to hear about all your adventures!