Siput And Serunding

I will have a long run tomorrow morning. I plan to have a 20km run around the neighbourhood and therefore I am really eating tonight to load the carb needed for the task. There was a plate of spaghetti and sardines on the kitchen counter, accompanied by special appearance from the far east, a bowl of siput and serunding.

This morning at 6AM, I met an old friend, my ex-course mate in our engineering school. She was in transit at  Terminal 3 Dubai Airport, and she had 10 hours to kill, before she got into her connecting flight to Dusseldorf. It was really a last minute arrangement. She dropped me an email a day earlier to check whether we would have a chance to meet after such a long time. It's Tuesday, a working day, a hump day in the Middle East, and I had a meeting scheduled at 9AM that I couldn't postpone or cancel. I did it last week, but not this time. Yet, I agreed to meet her early in the morning. She came with her boss and the boss's wife.

Years back in the campus, whenever I skipped or slept through the lecture, her notes had been a great help to fill in the blanks and holes in my head about enthropy, thermodynamics, the laws of kinetics and some other scary stuffs. I guess the blank and holes are still there but at least the notes had helped me  passed and graduated.  

I waited for her at the meeting point. We met. She has not changed much. Thankfully, her buddies are friendly. I drove them around Dubai. It was exciting to exchange  each other's story while I was driving Lucky, along the Emirates Road, crossing the Sheikh Zayed Road near the Malls of the Emirates, waving at the Burj Al Arab, showing off the Atlantis and the Palm Jumeira and finally, entering Jebel Ali Free Zone. Since I had to attend the meeting at 9AM, I had made an arrangement with our company driver to take my visitors to the Gold Souk and Burj Dubai until lunch time. I told her that I wished I could spend more time with them. She was flattered with the hospitality I was able to extend, given such a short notice. I told her that I was happy and honoured having her though it was just for less than 3 hours. I gave her pouches of chocolates to add the weight of her luggage. She was tactful enough to remove packs of the siput and serunding from her backpack and passed them to me, in return.

Back to my carbo loading session, I really can't stop crunching the siput and chewing it with the serunding. They are really good. Good enough to make me miss home, already.

Definition:

Siput is technically made of dough mixed with some spices and flavourings, rolled, cut and shaped like the  shell of a snail and fried to perfection. It may contained trans fats but it is one hell of great tasting titbits.

Serunding is shredded piece of meat, fried with spices. It gets very dried after a long process of heating, I think.