Look out the window. What do you see? Bright dark rain clouds forming. Bright dark? Got meh? Got la! Look properly. I love throwing in “meh”, “mah”, “la”, “lor”, “hi meh?” into an otherwise, perfect(?) English, sentence, paragraph or essay.
What is a perfect English sentence, paragraph or essay? A perfect English sentence, paragraph or essay is without those funny sounding add-ons, usually at the end of a sentence or question. It was how we were thought English in school.
Here, I am talking about English in Malaysia. People in Malaysia will hardly miss an hour or day (let alone skip a heartbeat) without subconsciously adding either “meh”, “mah”, “la”, “lor”, “hi meh?”, or a combination of these colourful expressions to their conversations. These” colourful expressions” are not exhaustive to the words(?) stated above.
So, ya; bright dark rain clouds forming. The dark coloured shades of the rain clouds are very brightly dark. Then, it rains like there’s no tomorrow…and continues after that. At times, they just tease us with a few drops, “That’s all you are going to get. Live with it. Not a drop more, today”.
However, over the last few, or several or multiple (many, for most people) days and nights, we’ve been getting heavy showers of rain, up to a point where the roads and highways began to flood with a few inches of water.
The thing is with rain aplenty pouring down, we would expect to have cooler or cold late evenings and nights. But they aren’t. It becomes quite uncomfortable as temperatures rise from the evenings onwards. Maybe, it is due to the fact that there are hardly any winds blowing in the evening; not even light breezes. The humidity is probably the main culprit for our discomfort. I can’t tell for sure, as I am not one of those weather people you see on tv who give us the weather report like they are running an auction. That is why I don’t watch the weather news.
Jeannie, my wife; said, “Let’s go for some ice-cream”. Without giving it a second thought, I said, “Yes”. We jumped into the car (not literally), and headed to the nearby Scottish restaurant. It would be the only restaurant opened, that served ice-cream at that hour as it was already after 10pm.
Jeannie ordered the vanilla soft ice-cream; I went for the McFlurry. The McFlurry looked interesting enough on the menu, so I had to give it a go. I am not really an “ice-cream” person. I can eat it once and not have any for months. Another reason we came for the ice-cream was that we just wanted a short break from the work we were doing at that point.
Our ice-creams were ready in a short while. Jeannie’s order of the vanilla soft ice-cream in a cone looked good as usual. It tasted good as usual. I remember years ago when we used to frequent Subang Parade because we had to take our daughter, Laura, for music lessons there; we’d see on most days, a long line of people queueing to buy either the vanilla soft ice-cream or the one with chocolate fused into it.
My Oreo McFlurry looked as unusual as in its advertised picture. It even sounded unusual. Crushed, almost fine, Oreo cookie crumbs was the top layer. As I broke the top layer and went into the ice-cream proper (which was vanilla), I tasted a bit of the gula melaka in it. I could also get the taste of fine coconut shavings, not really noticeable at first. As I got deeper into the ice-cream, the presence of the coconut shavings was more evident. So, was the gula melaka.
I think the coconut shavings helped create a balance to the taste of the gula melaka and the ice-cream.. Otherwise the sweetness of the gula melaka would have been over-powering. The gula melaka was awesome. It was in a thick syrup form. However, I still thought it was too sweet in large quantities. At this stage of the eaten ice-cream, most of the crushed, fine, Oreo cookie crumbs was eaten.
We headed home after our ice-creams. The short break was much needed. The change of scenery, though it was not too long, was quite fun, too. “Was quite fun, too”? What Englander is that?
NOTES:
Having fun and testing the different strokes of English.