A place I dream of...

It's been exactly 104 days since I arrived here since my christmas break. It will be roughly 1 year from now that I expect to return for a break. I plan to stay there for the duration of one semester, roughly three and a half months. What I will do with my time here will include learning how to cook properly, hang out with friends, catch up with people that I didn't have time to say hi to , and celebrate my 20th birthday with the best of my friends.

But now, for this one year, I am stuck in college studying, working at a sandwich joint for minimum wage, staying at home and surfing Youtube, and instant messaging my friends back home at 2 in the morning because they're asleep when I'm awake. Yes, I'm wasting away. Not really, but you get the idea. I don't mesh well with the people here, somehow. Most of their activities consist of hanging out at the mall (female), going to the bar to watch the hockey game (male), going to a club (both), and overall not stuff I would do. There's absolutely nothing to do in Canadian malls. They're desolate, I tell you.

So, relating to the title. When I say, "lets go for a drink," I mean, "lets go to a mamak store and grab a few teh tarik." When I say it here, the implication is "Lets go to the bar and grab a few beers." It's a subtle cultural thing. I can't say that bars and beers are bad. But, I do miss having a few friends talking for hours on end, sitting around a crappy, dirty, sticky table, drinking teh tarik, which is dirt cheap, laughing at the one wuss who would order a limau ais because it was 'too hot to have a warm drink'. I miss it all too much. I can see it all now: the noisy environment; the warm air; the laughter; the girls, who would order more than they can eat, give the stuff to the guys; the guys, who were too cheap to buy their own food and leech off their friend's plates; the mamaks who were running about, shouting to each other the orders; a freshly cooked roti telur bawang ghee, a joint creation between a friend and I. There is little I wouldn't give for all that now.

To you whom are not of the LotES, let me clarify a few terms here, mainly the ones you see in italics.

-a mamak is a Muslim South Indian person. Their cuisine is a fusion of Indian roti and malay sambals.

-a teh tarik (lit. pulled tea) is the national drink of the LotES. It consists of breakfast tea and copious amounts of sweetened condensed milk. Since no cold milk is used to cool it down, the tea is rather hot. However, before serving, the tea is 'pulled' by pouring from one glass, raised high, into another, usually about hip level. This not only cools the drink, but introduces air and creates foam.

-a limau ais (lit. iced lime) is a drink where lime juice is mixed with sugar water, and ice is added to cool it down. It is probably the ultimate thirst quencher/cooler.

-roti (lit. bread) is an Indian dish where dough is grilled on a solid, usually cast iron, skillet. It is crunchy and oily. It is usually served with lentil curry (dhal), chicken, fish or mutton curry. In mamak stores, it is also served with sambal, which is a thick paste made from different chilli peppers and other condiments. Telur means egg, and bawang means onion. Ghee is clarified butter, used often in Indian cuisine. Hence, a roti telur bawang ghee is a piece of roti stuffed with eggs, onions and fried in clarified butter.

Man cannot live on roti alone...

-Gabe