The Blog of Michael Desrosiers: Malaysian Museum Day

I'm currently on a visa run... hopefully the last one for a while. While it's nice to be "forced" to take an international holiday for a week every three months, it can get tiring and expensive, and with the world in a rising state of chaos, I'm really trying this year to take care of everything and lock down my visa and legal status in Thailand so I don't have to keep leaving.

I usually go to Cambodia, but after the trouble I had last year when the border closed, this time I was to take a few days to visit Vietnam. I had my visa in hand and everything, but the ongoing Southeast Asian oil crisis made the short flight completely unaffordable, and I had to change my plans at the last minute.

I ended up flying into Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and my wife was even able to join me for a couple days to have a mini vacation together.

Air travel has become exhausting. Even a short flight takes the entire day, and by the time we had landed in Kuala Lumpur, taken a taxi to the city, and checked in at our hotel, it was time for dinner.

Pinky is great at finding good food for us to eat when we travel, so I just left it up to her to pick a good restaurant. In any case, I had hardly eaten all day, so anything was going to be good with me!

We ate at Lai Foong Lala Noodles, a Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant that grew out of a popular street food noodle cart. "Lala" is the Malay word for "clam", and the dish consists of a huge portion of thin rice noodles and tons of fresh clams in a broth made from Chinese yellow wine, ginger, and herbs.

We decided to have a fairly relaxed first day in Kuala Lumpur. Pinky had just come off of a long week at work, and I had been stressed about my visa, and we wanted to take it easy. We've seen most of the big sites in the city already, so we decided that our first full day should be a museum day.

Of course, you've got to start the day with breakfast, and we started ours at Ho Kow Hainam Kopitiam, a family-run kopitiam (coffee shop) that's been serving Chinese-Malay breakfast and coffee in Kuala Lumpur since 1928!

I ordered the nasi lemak, a breakfast staple and the national dish of Malaysia. Nasi Lemak is a dish made from white rice lightly flavored with coconut milk and sweet pandan and served with sambal chili paste, dried fish, fried eggs, peanuts, and chicken. It's a really filling dish.

We also had the classic butter and kaya (coconut jam) toast and buttery toast with half-boiled eggs. And of course, whenever you are in Malaysia, you can't enjoy breakfast without a class of rich, sweet, iced coffee.

Full of coffee and good food and ready to begin our day, we took a taxi to Muzium Negara, Malaysia's National Museum.

The museum is small but really excellent. The exhibits highlight the traditional art, architecture, clothing, crafts, and culture of Malaysia, a fascinatingly diverse country with three distinct main ethnic groups (Malay Muslim, southern Chinese, and Indian) all bringing bits and pieces of their own culture with them.

After that, we went to the Islamic Arts Museum, one of my favorite museums. The collection is incredible and is made up of pieces spanning centuries and the entire Islamic world from Moorish Spain to Persia to Maritime Southeast Asia.

In the Medieval period, the Arab world was really the center of learning and knowledge in the West, and the museum houses a large number of educational texts including manuals chess strategy and, of particular interest to my wife who is a veterinarian, a sort of textbook on caring for horses.

The majority of art, even outside of directly religious works like beautifully illuminated copies of the Quran, still focused around Islam (it is, after all, the Islamic Art Museum!). One artifact that I found especially interesting was a sort of elaborately painted compass designed not to point north, but to point the way to Mecca and the Kaaba, the sacred, black cube-shaped building located at the center of Mecca, the holiest site in Islam, the focus of the Hajj (Islamic pilgrimage), and the direction towards which Muslims are supposed to pray each day.

And speaking of the Kaaba, one of the crown jewels in the museum's collection is a richly embroidered Kiswah, a large black silk drape or curtain that covered the door of the Kaaba. The cloth is decorated with gold-embroidered Arabic calligraphy from the Quran and is replaced once every year. The piece of display at the museum is an older one. I forget what year it is from, but it's old and faded, either from time or from the harsh desert environment in Mecca.

Another prized piece of the museum's collection is the Ottoman Room, a complete Ottoman palace room dating back several hundreds of years moved piece-by-piece and carefully recreated in Kuala Lumpur. You can't enter the room itself, but you can look through an archway to the richly carved and painted wooden room and imagine the sultan or his family walking through the 18th century halls.

It was lunchtime, and we took a taxi to another Michelin recommended restaurant called Limapulo, which is a Peranakan restaurant.

The Peranakan, or Straits Chinese culture, especially dominant in maritime trade cities like Malacca, Singapore, Penang, and Phuket, is a unique hybridization of Chinese culture with the local cultures of Maritime Southeast Asia, and the result of a centuries-long history of trade, transculturation, and interracial marriage. Also known as the "Baba Nyonya" or "Orang Cina Bukan Cina" ("a not-Chinese Chinese person"), the Peranakans developed a distinctive identity expressed through their language, clothing, architecture, and religious practices. As well, of course, through their food.

We started our lunch with a plate of chicken satay served alongside chewy rice flour balls, crispy cucumber, and a unique peanut dipping sauce sweetened with pineapple and starfruit along with a large serving of "lady fingers" which were not tea biscuits, but a local name for okra. The okra was lightly stir-fried with a savory shrimp paste and had an amazing flavor.

The restaurant's most iconic dish, and the one which won it its writeup in the Michelin Guide is Nyonya laksa, a type of curry laksa served in a rich flavorful broth filled with fish balls, fried tofu, tofu curd, shredded chicken, bean sprouts, a boiled egg, and two types of noodles.

And for dessert we ordered a bowl of sago gula Melaka, a classic Malaysian and Peranakan dessert made from sago pearls and palm sugar in coconut milk.