Sleepy Tereng­ganu was a small town that offered a lot less than we thought. Com­piled with the fact that it was an area of Malaysia still devoutly Mus­lim, there was not much for us to do on a bor­ing Sun­day afternoon.

Except of course, eat.

Hawker stalls are huge through­out South­east Asia (they don’t really exist in the same capac­ity here in China), per­haps no place more pop­u­lar than in Malaysia. Each Malay city seems to have its pock­ets of hawker stalls just as Los Ange­les has its strip malls, New York has its parks, and Chicago has its rooftop farms. Local fam­i­lies and tourists alike were seen din­ing at these hum­ble estab­lish­ments, although this one seemed to get a lit­tle less fan­fare than some of the other ones we visited.

After sit­ting down and get­ting our hands on some flimsy menus, this old man came and sat down with us. For about five min­utes, he didn’t say a word, and pro­ceeded to puff on a cig­a­rette that didn’t seem to get any shorter. Finally after deep dis­cus­sions over the trans­la­tion of sev­eral meny items, he finally piped up say­ing “ikan, FISH.”

So that proved it, some­how he worked at one of the hawk­ers, maybe he was a reg­u­lar, who knows. He con­tin­ued to help us through the menu, though his “trans­la­tion” were prob­a­bly not any bet­ter to what we could have fig­ured out our­selves. A wel­comed guest at first, we all soon real­ized he did not speak more than five words of Eng­lish (rice, chicken, fish, soup, and yes).

Luck­ily break­ing down a Malaysia menu is sim­pler than in other parts of the world. Like most meals that were had on our trip, our options con­sisted largely of dif­fer­ent prepa­ra­tions of rice (Nasi) and noo­dles (Mee), var­i­ous selec­tions of friend chicken (ayam), or soups like Tom Yam. Nat­u­rally we kept our eyes peeled for goreng, mean­ing fried, as in fried rice and fried noodles.

And of course, we could not help but order a favorite dish of the trip: Nasi Goreng USA, or USA fried rice. Fried rice served with a fried egg on top and a side of soy sauced beef bacon and veg­eta­bles. The Diplo­Man got this for every other meal of his, I think.