Southeast Asians are inveterate snackers, none more so than the Thais. And when in Rome...

So we've been out snack-sampling on a couple of evenings this week. There's a definite Malay influence detectable in some of these things, it seems to me, but with interesting little twists.

A trawl of the vendors just down the road hauled in the following:

-- roti with sugar and condensed milk;
-- little mouthfuls of peanut and garlic in rice-flour jackets and lettuce-leaf mackintoshes;
-- and what looked like curry puffs but turned out to be custard puffs.

A trip to Songkhla's "walking street" (a street-market held on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings) offered a bewildering array of food options, from which we chose:

-- an interesting doughy thing, which the vendor keeps warm on a hot-plate; from this "cake", she cuts a tube an inch or so in diameter, which she pops into a bowl containing a mixture of sugar, chopped peanut, sesame, and linseed; she then snips the dough "sausage" into pieces, mixes these around a bit to coat them with topping, and fishes them out again -- very, very nice, and unlike anything I've ever eaten;
-- rice flour "blancmange" surrounding a mixture of brown sugar and coconut, and wrapped up in a leaf package;
-- the same kind of rice-flour base, but delicately flavoured, and poured into little leaf cones (note how the latter two conform to my "packages" theory).

(The walking street is immensely popular, by the way. It is thronged with local people enjoying not only the food, but also the various musical offerings, which included a young people's classical Thai orchestra, and the shopping opportunities.)

Pao are abundant here, and other day we tried yellow ones (made from maize-meal, I wonder?).

And Melaka, it turns out, is not the only place for nice pineapple tarts.

Finally, from our next-door purveyor of daily necessities, we bought some interesting spicy, crispy things made out of dried fish-skin (which turned out to be much nicer than I'm making them sound).