Hey Penang Malaysia … sorry I ate all your food

I had 5 meals yesterday. Ok, let’s call it closer to 6. I consumed nearly 6 meals of food. Breakfast had a pre-meal baby of dim sum. A lovely basket of vegetable dumplings, a pork Bao fresh from the steam drawer, and some fluffy little shrimp balls … whatever those were?

Then I ate real breakfast. A poppy seed bagel, cleaved and carrying a slab of grilled bacon thicker than a Dickens’ novel, topped with a poached egg and the perfect amount of spicy, drippy dijon mustard. It was a taste of home, so perfectly executed, it might as well have been slathered in nostalgia.

At 1pm, I decided a full lunch of prawn mee was in order. I shared it with this street cat … though I could make a second Dickens reference here. She got a lone half shrimp. I polished off the remaining seafood, floating in a chipped bowl of wavy noodles and red, pungent curry broth, with spring onions and spicy crumbles of fried shallot on top.

I crushed the food coma with a cup of hot coffee and a slice of lemon cake around 4 pm, and dinner was a hand-staining piece of tandoori chicken, ripped to shreds and sent into my my face the way a 4-year-old tackles ice cream in July. I cleaned my fingers with a paper towel made out of garlic naan bread. Then I ate the paper towel. Don’t judge me.

One might ascertain from my last blog post that I was simply celebrating being alive. The truth of it is, Penang inspires one to eat. That inspiration is a constantly flowing river of smells, hawker stall after hawker stall of pungent unpronounceable, conversations yelled in dim sum dens and the calls of the Indian men selling Biryani from carts. Food is simply everywhere. It defines this town, more than the gorgeous architecture, more than the beaches, the mingling cultures, the friendly people. It’s food you come here for, and you are simultaneously able to eat the best of the world – from Cantonese to Northern Indian to Middle Eastern, Malay and Burmese.

Even if you don’t intend to have more than the three-square a normal day demands, you will. Here’s a little journey I had while in Penang. You want recommendations? I can’t give them to you. I just wandered and ate. Consumed, smiled and moved on. I didn’t look at a sign, take down the name of an alley or recall the location of a single curry puff. And I will not apologize for that for a second.