The markets are overwhelming. Early in the morning fresh produce markets explode from rickety stalls, creaking with the weight of freshly slaughtered dead-headed chicken and ducks, big and small and silver and red fish and crabs and clams, slithering eels and slimy catfish and bags of coconuts, ginger, red, green and yellow and orange chillies and thousands of types of vegetables which we have never seen before, a sea of green leaves and red tomatoes and giant pineapples and gauvas, orange bananas, bristling red rambutin, pink, scaly dragon fruit and here and there a splash of wet, expensive plump grapes.
In the evenings the day markets make way for hundreds of stalls of snacks and curries and noodles and rice and sosaties of fishballs and crab sticks and chinese sausages and freshly squeezed juices on ice... Eating in Malaysia and Thailand is a hugely social affair. At night everybody comes out and snacks and shares and saunters and chats around the huge, bustling market cauldron - eating is the hub of the big wheel around which civil life revolves...