Meet Pierre (and his fiance) 

Pierre is one of the capable but humble sons behind the Mamee family. You know Mamee? Like the instant noodles, Double Decker, Mister Potato and most importantly… MAMEE MONSTER!

I met Pierre some time last year on a professional basis. Mister Potato was going to run a campaign on Nuffnang then so I met him to work some details out. Then we kept in touch but always again on a professional basis. You know how you are on a professional basis right? You be yourself but try not to be TOO much of yourself. For example, you cut down on your profanities when talking.

Then one day Ming came down to KL and I set up a dinner between us and Pierre. It was sort of an off-work dinner so for the first time ever we all talked about a lot of other non-work stuff. Now I don’t know if it was the good steak we had that night or the booze (don’t remember if we had any), or about Ming going on and on about how much he loved Manchester United but we quickly became …. ourselves.

And you know when a group of 20 something year old males are comfortable with each other when they start saying bad words casually. So instead of saying “Dammit!”, you could say “Fuck this shit!” and we would all laugh about it. Or you could take it another level higher and say “Fuck this fucking shit” and we would all laugh even harder.

It was at that dinner that Pierre asked us all to make a trip down to his hometown: Malacca.

I’ve been to Malacca once in my life but that was like 10 years ago and I’ve always been meaning to go so I said okay. We arranged for one day where I would drive down from KL with Princess and Ming would drive up from Singapore with Estee. We’ll all meet in Malacca to spend a night.

That day was last weekend.

We made it down and we had a full day of meals. Seriously. Like we reached Malacca at 12PM and starting from then we had 6 more meals in the day.

Everything from Chicken Rice Balls.

To Satay with peanut and pineapple sauce,

To Mille CREPE (I LOVE MILLE CREPE HOLY SHIT GIMME GIMME GIMME!!!!)

 

To Peranakan food

Cendol at Jonker Street

and ending with Satay Celup supper.

I was sure I had put on like 30 kg thanks to Pierre and I really literally mean thanks to Pierre because that guy always snuck behind us to pay for all our meals when we were there. And because we refuse to let him pay for everything, we often display a very China Man scene: Fighting to pay the bill.

They often give it to Pierre though. Maybe they’re afraid of Ming because he sometimes looks like a Rempit Boss.

So fine, I said when he comes down to KL I’ll buy him a good expensive meal to make up for it. We had Brazilian food in Cangkat Bukit Bintang the night after Malacca and guess what he did? He snuck his credit card to pay the bill again. I had to get up from my comfortable seat, walk to the waiter carrying his credit card to the cashier, replace it with mine and throw his card back at him (Sigh.. the work you make me do Pierre).

Anyway the good news is that in between our food destinations, we also went to do some touristy things like the Riverboat Cruise, 

though Princess still wasn’t satisfied. Being the “MUST SEE EVERYTHING TOURISTY” kind of girl she wanted to go see museums, Kota A. Famosa and everything. Nothing was going to stand in her way… not even the hot sun that she hates so much. 

She has a tiny red umbrella packed in her bag for that.

After the trip I got scolding from her.

I did what many boyfriends would do. Shut up and drive.

Now the last thing I noticed about Malacca is this.

It is the home of Mamee! When you’re driving into Malacca from the highway you’ll even notice the Mamee factory there.

And they take pride in Mamee-ing everything in Malacca.

Heck there are Mamee ads everywhere!

From the coffee shops

To the streets

To even the big Karaoke stage on Jonker street. All MAMEE!

Towards the end of the trip I finally told Pierre

So I went back to KL and bought like 10 packs.

I ate two at one go and the happy nostalgic memories of my school boy days came back to mind. When I was in Form 1, I used to skip meals at recess just to play football and to keep myself from getting hungry I would down two packs of Mamee Monster.

Oh well… I was young.. what can I say…