A Taste of something Western

The urge was too great, I had to cave in... Nando's. There it is out in the open now, I've made it nearly a month and I just couldn't resist the chicken cravings any longer. As it turns out I should have gone cold turkey (metaphorically).

Lena had led me to believe, perhaps trying to inflate Malaysian cuisine, that almost all sit-down restaurants in Malaysia have Pepsi on tap. Sadly this was not to be the case in Nando's, which I think is quite ironic considering it is one of the few places in the UK which actually DOES allow free refills. With this bombshell dropped the meal would have to do a lot to drag itself out from the pit it had thrown itself off (in my mind it did so into a sea of Pepsi, but that's just me). Things didn't get off to a good start when I realised I had made a mistake and they did actually have Pepsi on tap but it wasn't out in the open, and if you have been skim reading so far; for shame!

The food itself was nowhere near as good as that back in the UK but I have a theory about that. I am now looking back on the meal and nothing stands out as being bad: the chicken was well cooked; the bread was fresh; the toppings were crisp and added all the right tastes (I had a chicken burger btw). The thing is that I have been spoilt with flavour here in Malaysia, sometimes a man does long for the food of home but a lack of it had built it up in my mind to the point that I had almost deified it. Back to good old Malaysian cuisine for me then!

With that little revelation behind us we went out to dinner with a relative of Lena's over from the land of Oz (I couldn't be assed to type out Australia... and have ended up typing far more; goddammit!). The dinner of choice today: seafood steamboat, now we're talking! The dishes served up offered quite a cross section of crustaceans. The highlight of which was having to throw LIVING jumbo prawns into the boiling soup to cook them. To indicate how alive these prawns were, they had to have a plate over them to prevent them jumping across the table; a fact we only found out once we removed the lid. It became quite apparent that I was now becoming quite desensitised to the killing and dismemberment of crustaceans to the point that I was happy being chief 'terminator'!

After dinner was done we headed for some after dinner dessert! Unfortunately that meant road side durians... oh no. Thankfully it was open air which meant I could keep down wind of the smell. With the smell of durian puncturing my sense of smell for some time to come we called it a night :).