Penang food is a true Godsend from heaven. I really enjoy the various foods ranging from Chinese, Malay, mamak and Indian food all over the place. Oh, how I love the Char quay teow, fried rice, yong taufu, prawns, fish, prawn fritters, loh bak etc. The hawkers have been very friendly for most of the time and the foodcourt convenient to sit. A heaven for the best quality and cheapest prices in South East Asia.
On the downside of the story, especially in bigger Malaysian cities, I have been pestered by drink vendors. Malaysia is different from Indonesia or Thailand and this means that one coffee shop sublet their place to other hawkers including drink sellers. Not only that they push you into buying their drinks but they also want to see cash as soon as they serve the ordered goods.
As soon as they have brought the food or drinks you ordered, you will hear a monotonous and repetitive "3 RM please". I am sure that not everybody is honest and they need to make sure to receive their money as soon as they have fulfilled their duties, but I still find it irritating. Most of the time the food and the drinks don't arrive at the same time. This can be really annoying especially when you are eating, have washed your hands, have to dig into your backpack to look for your wallet and touch money again. How disturbing and unhygienic! Malaysian people should stand up against this!
In smaller towns, people tend to be more relaxed, allowing us to pay our food after finishing our meals and they don't employ drink head hunters.In every coffee shop there are one or two drink vendors whom I found unpleasant and offensive. Different from food vendors, they will come to your table straight away and pester you into buying drinks for them. As an excuse they keep claiming that they also pay rent to the place I'm sitting in and disturb me further with their obligation to pay entertainment fees.
While I do understand all the reasons leading to their actions, I do not appreciate this type of pestering. Firstly, some of their drinks are such low quality that they can't hide the chlorine taste. They blame the Malaysian government for this and think I'm not very informed about their country. I do have regular vendors who serve good drinks which do not taste of chlorine.
The drink vendors have spoilt it all for me. I haven't asked them to be there and I come to the food court for eating and not drinking. In a foodcourt or coffee shop there are usually many food vendors sharing the rent as well and we can only decide to buy from one.
If the drink sellers' reason is that they also pay rent, then all the food vendors will have the same reason to pester because all vendors pay their rent share. Yet we have to refrain from buying food from other vendors if we have decided for one hawker already.
I have not experienced this very often yet in most Muslim, mamak and Indian foodcourts and start wondering what we can do about this. The final straw was: One of the restaurant owners told me" We have this all over in Malaysia and you have to follow our rules" She totally ignored my claims that we were all free to buy what we want and there was no sign obligating us to buy drinks. The only sign that actually makes sense to me is that we are not allowed to bring outside foods and drinks.
