On food

Because the Malay people are largely Muslim, it's worked out that a lot of our time has been spent with either Chinese Malaysians or Indian Malaysians. This means that we have eaten a lot of Chinese and Indian food, as well as traditional Malaysian food.

Before I came on this trip, I knew that relying on the hospitality of others would mean that I would have to take a brief pause from my plant based diet. I didn't expect to be eating meat and seafood for breakfast though.

Today we went for a street food breakfast in Penang which consisted of a sweet and milky coffee, spicy noodles with pork, some kind of rice flour jelly, rice, prawns and liver....among other things.

We've learnt that a typical Chinese Malaysian diet is rice or noodles for breakfast, rice or noodles for lunch and then rice or noodles for dinner. Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely loving all of this food, but with each meal being made up almost entirely of meat and carbs I'm beginning to wonder about the Chinese digestive system. Let's just say I'm on the hunt for fibre on a daily basis.

Today's meetings have revolved around food, and almost entirely around rice and noodles.

In other news, we took the ferry back to the mainland and are staying in the rather colonial sounding 'Butterworth' for the night before heading to Ipoh tomorrow.