Eat, drink, and you will be merry

One of my friends said that a person's satisfaction with the place they are living is directly related to how much they like the food of that place.  Do you agree?  I do.  Eating delicious Chinese food significantly contributes to my quality of life in China.

Heh heh.  (But I really do like Chinese food.)  Eating delicious food also contributed to my enjoyment of Southeast Asia.  Here are my food rankings:


Malaysia: Winner for best multicultural food.  With its fusion of Malay, Chinese, and Indian culture, Malaysia offers a big variety of food and drinks.  You should seriously consider visiting Malaysia just for the food.

• Best dishes: Chicken tandoori, naan, and satay (Malaysian meat on a stick)
• Best beverage:  Teh.  Hands down, my favorite drink of the trip.  It's a strong, black tea mixed with sweetened condensed milk.  I wish we were all drinking iced teh on the beach right now.
• Best dining moment:  My friend Samson, a meat-on-a-stick connoisseur, ordering thirty (thirty!) sticks of satay to go along with his lunch.
• Worst thing I put in my mouth:  ABC Special.  This cold dessert featured shaved ice topped with green and pink syrup, sweetened condensed milk, creamed corn, and peanuts.  Please tell me this was a joke they played on the tourist and not a real dish that people eat on purpose.

A meal with friends in Penang.  Satay on the bottom left.

 

Chicken tandoori and naan -- awesome Indian food in Malaysia

Bags of teh and lemonade

ABC Special: not so special.

Thailand:  Winner for best overall cuisine.  Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

• Best dishes:  Pad thai, a chicken curry soup whose name I forgot, banana rotee, mango sticky rice
• Best beverage: strawberry smoothies at that one place by our hostel
• Best dining moment: Walking through our neighborhood on our first day in Thailand and finding our favorite tiny little restaurant.

Gloria and I at our restaurant.  I have the curry soup and she has pad thai.

 

In Thailand, we ate a lot of meals at our conference hotel.

 
 Vietnam: Winner for most coffee shops.  (Vietnam may not have the MOST coffee shops, but we frequented them most in Vietnam)

• Best dishes:  Pho (a noodle soup dish), fresh spring rolls, fried prawns with butter and garlic
• Best beverage:  This may not be truly Vietnamese, but I had a delicious iced caramel latte.
• Best dining moment:  Downing a collective 96 scoops of ice cream at Fanny's ice cream buffet in Hanoi.  That was seriously a happy night.

 Pho and Fanta

What was this stuff called?  It was good.

 

Tickets to the ice cream buffet!

Enough said.

The Samson Tang Method for eating mangoes

Cambodia: Winner for best fruit shakes and smoothies. 

• Best dishes:  Loc loc (a stir-fried meat dish), most of the desserts I ate at the Khmer buffet in Siem Reap
• Best beverage: Mango smoothie
• Best dining moment:  Watching traditional apsara dancing while feasting at the Khmer buffet

Coconut shakes in Phnom Penh on the eve of the lunar new year

 Apsara dancing at the buffet

Food is a huge part of traveling and experiencing a new culture, which is my excuse for devoting so many words and pictures to this topic.  Hungry? :)