Eating Davy Jones

I've never made it any secret that I'm a Captain Jack Sparrow fan.

What you might not know is that I didn't even know about Captain Jack Sparrow until Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest previews started coming out, and we picked up a copy of the first movie to watch.

I was a little late to the game, but I made up for my lateness by being an excessively passionate fan. After the second movie, I even wrote 3 alternate possible versions of Pirates 3, one of which completely in rhymed couplets. At the time, I didn't even know fan fiction existed, and my family considered this sort of fan-hood very strange.

When Pirates 2 came out, I saw it multiple times in theaters, the first time at a midnight showing with my dad and some of my siblings, and the second time, earlier in the evening with a group of friends.

"Supper," or a late dinner eaten after 9 or 10 p.m., is a popular outing here. After the movie, we went out to a little outdoor market for supper. I ordered fried rice, my stand-by when I'm visiting a market I've never been to before (because some foods are a gamble when you're eating at outdoor markets, but fried rice is almost always tasty).

It's a really great thing to have an awesome group of people to do life with when you're navigating growing up as a TCK.

My friends harangued me about the way I held my chopsticks, as usual. I've never seen a left-handed person use chopsticks, so the way I adopted might not be considered proper form, but then, neither is using my left hand to eat in the first place, so their good-natured teasing never bothered me. The chopsticks brought the fried rice to my mouth just fine, so I was happy.

One of the shop keepers brought a plate of squirming tentacles out to the little plastic table our group was huddled around. Still-moving tentacles are not actually a typical Malaysian dish, so this particular market must have had a shop which specialized in slightly more exotic foods. As my friends darted their expertly (and right-handedly) held chopsticks toward the plate of tentacles, one of them shouted, "Hey, we're eating Davy Jones!"

And so we were. That's okay, though. His character wasn't exactly one that inspired any feeling of loyalty.

{This is Day 10 in my 31 Days series: 31 Days of Growing Up in Malaysia}