When we woke up to our first morning in KL after 21+ hours of travel and a good night's sleep, we were after two things: nasi lemak (a traditional and very popular Malaysian breakfast dish) and a good cuppa (tea for me, coffee for Gerry). We wasted no time in finding a local eatery, then sat down and placed our order.
The nasi lemak was easy. And it wasn't too difficult to figure out from the menu that I wanted teh and Gerry wanted kopi. However, we did cause a bit of a kerfuffle due to a misunderstanding on our part.
It turns out that our attempt to explain to our server that we wanted milk in our drinks was entirely unnecessary. Imagine saying "I'd like apples in my apple pie please" and you'll get the idea. Our poor server was rather confused!
We also discovered that sugar comes complimentary. It's part of the sweetened condensed milk that's almost always used in drinks, I suppose because fresh milk is pretty scarce here.
Now if you want your morning cuppa without milk or sugar, or both, there are different words for those options, that basically translate to "tea with no milk/sugar" or "black coffee."
Anyway, in relatively short order we figured out that if you order tea or coffee, it will by default come with sweetened milk added. Although we don't normally drink it this way at home, we like to go with the flow when traveling, so we just kept things simple and drank it sweet.
Once we'd got the milk and sugar situation figured out, the only other question we had to answer was whether we wanted our drinks "hot" or "ais." Because of the heat and humidity, we decided to try them iced on that first morning. We've never looked back.
In fact, the first Malay words we learned with any confidence were kopi ais and teh ais.
Yes, it costs a few cents more for iced drinks in this climate, but when you consider that in most places we're paying less than a dollar for basically the same thing that Starbucks charges six or seven dollars for, I think we can afford to go iced.
The really fun part about our morning beverages has been never knowing what type of vessel they'll arrive in. The first morning both my tea and Gerry's coffee were served in something that resembled a beer mug. As I recall, the mugs were actually made of glass too. High class!
Most food courts just serve up tea, coffee, and pretty much every other beverage in a plastic cup. Sometimes these cups even come with a straw and a spoon, though I'm not sure why. We just used our straws as swizzle sticks most of the time and that worked just fine.
But with or without spoon, if you find that your morning cuppa is a bit too sweet, as we did on occasion, you can just wait a few minutes and stir now and then. The ice will melt and the extra water will be incorporated and voila! instant sweetness adjustment.
Occasionally, tea and coffee are served in glass that's a bit more elegant.
And sometimes, at tourist attractions where you're 88 stories up in the air with no other option, they come in these high-tech take out cups with space age sippy lids and a price tag that's five to six times what we'd pay at a ground level food court. Ouch!
But the ones I liked best were the takeout "cups" that we had this morning. We were eating leftover Yemeni bread pudding for breakfast before packing up to head back to KL and I suggested I could pop down to the food court and grab a coffee and a tea to go. Yep, for real!
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