Malaysia

It is a country we ended up in because of a cheap connecting flight and then could not bring ourselves to leave. Kuala Lumpur’s skyline is the part everyone photographs, but the part we remember is the food. The lorong food stalls outside Jalan Alor. The claypot rice place whose name we never learned. A roti prata we ate every morning for a week at the same hawker centre, from a man who did not speak a word to us past the second day and did not need to.

Up the peninsula, Butterworth and Penang were slower, quieter, and had better beaches than the guidebook suggested. We took the overnight train back down on a whim because neither of us had been on a sleeper train in maybe ten years and it seemed like a waste not to.

It is still a trip that we refer to often. Mostly when we are discussing whether the food in our neighborhood Malaysian place is any good, which it is not.