Malaysian Hamburgers

Okay, I may be 100% off by saying Malaysian hamburgers on this one but I was in Malaysia and I ate what were hamburgers to me.  If you didn’t know, like most major Asian cities,  Kuala Lumpur is a multi-national, multi-cultural city with a wide variety of ethnic foods.   These hamburgers were absolutely amazing.

I was actually quite shocked about how good they were and also amazed by the price which was only 1.5 ringgits (40 cents USD).  There were either chicken or been and you had the choice of adding cheese and a friend egg as well.   These burgers were marinated in some sort of sweet sauce which went incredibly well with the cucumber, onions and sauce which they put on.  I’m sorry for not providing a Wolfgang Puck/Betty Crocker recipe description but take my word for it, these “burgers” are worth the trip to KL.

Yes that was an exaggeration but people actually do come from all over Asia to KL’s Chinatown for cheap knockoffs so if you feel like something other than Chinese food, all you have to do is walk about 20 meters and you’ll be in hamburger heaven.

Where to Find these Delicious & Cheap Hamburgers

If you haven’t been to Asia lately you may be surprised that often the best way to describe the location of a place is by using American fast food restaurants and 7/11 as reference points.   You can actually triangulate the location of most places with the location of a 7/11, KFC and McDonalds!  This works especially well because (as with Thailand)  most of the best food is not in restaurants but on the street!

This time was no exception.  It was directly in between a McDonalds and KFC but is actually easier to find because it’s located by one of Kuala Lumpur’s major tourist attractions.  All you have to do is go to the entrance of Petaling Street which is the main street in the center of KLs Chinatown and walk to the right, until of course you see a KFC to the right and a McDonalds to the left on the other side of the street.

You will see a stand w/ a grill in front of a taxi line and most likely a line of people waiting for their “burgers.”  The stand is yellow and says Halal Berish Bermutu on one side and Pakistan Baru Beli on one side.  The guys working the stand were very nice and let you sit on their plastic chairs and put your drink on their stereo speakers.

Where to Find Boring Household Stuff?

My new apartment was furnished but I still needed to get bedding.  I also wanted to get a rice cooker and coffee maker.

I have been to MBK which is by my old apartment dozens of times where there is a department store called Tokyu.  Tokyu is a 5 level store with everything from a grocery/deli to clothes to houseware.  The stuff at Tokyu is expensive (for Bangkok standards) and not all that great.

I was looking at sheets, pillows, etc. at Tokyu and it was incredibly overpriced.  Sheets were over $30 USD and they weren’t even that nice.  I was feeling frugle so I decided to wait a day to get the sheets and go to Big C which one of my friends Gary recommended to me.

It’s Kind of like a “Low-End Target”

I got to Big C after being in this humongous traffic jam (everyday traffic) and when I walked in it immediately reminded me of old school K-Mart stores of the early 1990s.  It was disorganized (for Thai standards) and filled with mostly generic crap.  All the bedding looked like Ross Dress for Less rejects.  I’m talking Garfield bed sets, pink flowered bed sets, bright purple and brown bed sets w/ ruffles on the pillow cases, etc.  This angered me because I know I have to either go back and spend too much at Tokyu or try to find another store.

Big C was just like the other discount stores like Target and Walmart in the USA as they had some brand name products and some generic versions which were often 1/4 of the price.  I tested my fate with a generic rice cooker and coffee maker instead of a panasonic version which cost 4x more.  I made sure to get a rice cooker which has a vegetable steamer on the top so theoretically I can cook rice and vegetables in my apartment to eat healthy instead of eating greasy friend noodles or rice.

My Big C experience lets me recommend Big C only for people who live in Bangkok and need to stock the house of bulk items you would normally get at Costco (there are none in Thailand) such as toilet paper, bottled water, rice.  Anyone visiting Bangkok for the short term, Big C is a complete waste of time as nothing you can buy in the entire store would be worth bringing home compared to any store in MBK or even on the street.

Sawatdee Khrab! Today was one of the very few days in the past 2 months where I actually had to be somewhere at a specific time.  I had to go look at apartments (read about apartment) then I had my first Thai language class which takes place Monday and Wednesday from 5-7 pm at Thai Language Express and gives me the all-important 1 year Education visa.

First of all, it felt kind of wierd actually having to be somewhere.  Keep in mind that for the last 5+ years I’ve been running around from workouts to personal training appointments 6 days a week.  I went from a schedule heavy in appointments to a schedule heavy in sleep. I managed to arrive to both appointments last minute.

To get to my language class I even considered running  the wrong way down two escalators from the BTS skytrain but I decided I didn’t feel like spending the night in a Thai jail so I took the long way around.

Tonal Languages are Difficult

You can see the Thai alphabet is very different from the letters you are reading but that is only half of the story.  Each word can have 1 or more tones.  There are 5 different tones in Thai, mid, low, falling, high and rising.  Each letter which has a little mark on the top right signifies a different way to pronounce the word.

As we learned there are different tones in English but they do not completely change the meaning of the word.  In Thai they do which makes it extremely difficult for me to grasp on the first day of class   For example you can say mai 5 different ways.  Each tone completely chances the word which could either mean, mile, new, no, right? or silk but western ears won’t likely be able to tell the difference.

How the First Thai Class Went

Anyone that knows me can pretty much see how my first class went.  Of course I was staring at the pretty girls walking by and spacing out while I got my ass handed to me in group activities.  Evidentally, like most Thai things, the cirricululm was not put together with strict rules in mind as some members of my class of 8 or so have been taking Thai for weeks and others have just started like me. The first half of the 2 hour class was tought in English, explaining some rules, etc. while the second half was the total immersion style with the teacher Nana speaking all Thai.

I have heard the immersion method of learning a language is the best but I cannot see how.  I am in living in Bangkok, Thailand and would think that living my day to day life would enable me to become immersed in the Thai language enough. I will leave it at that as it is 5am (my usual bedtime) and have more on Thai language very soon.