Going "Boink"
I'm predicting that the WordPad file I'm currently typing all these bloggings on will grow quite freakishly huge by the time August rolls around and I actually start posting all this up; by which time, of course, it'll all be sadly outdated and be of no interest whatsoever except to whatever obsessive person decides to read it. After all, even I know that reading another person's entire life musings borders on the extreme side of interest.
At any rate... well, I'm now in Fifth Hun, with all my family except Gobbler and the Empress. Tomorrow is my mom's birthday and we're all going out for steak, on the condition that we dress up for the occasion. Maybe I'll make a card, except I don't have anything to make it with. More likely I'll get a tub of vanilla icecream from the store tomorrow and sprinkle Oreos and M&M's into it and make a sort-of-Flurry. I like those things. I don't know what the two youngest siblings have in mind, but it'll probably be a good thing.
I should probably recall my entire journey, beginning with the madness of yesterday, when I and Mrs Gorilla were caught up in the exuberance of last-minute shopping and packing, and so went off on a three-hour shopping spree, including a little lunch at Burger King (yes, unhealthy, but a little indulgence now and then never killed anybody). In any case we bought up a lot of pastes and sauces that we thought wouldn't be logically available outside Malaysia due to lack of popular demand, such as curries and various stuff, and then the rest of the day was meeting people and packing up.
The Coconut came over around 7 to help with finishing up the stuff, and it eventually turned out that we needn't have bought all that stuff after all since it was 5 kilos overweight and I didn't want to lug a lot of overweight baggage around; at any rate I didn't have to leave behind a lot of the pastes, and my mom doesn't seem too disappointed, so it's more or less okay. We went to sleep around midnight; the Coconut on the bed and I on the couch. We woke around 2; I woke from my handphone alarm going off and she woke when I switched the lights on to finish off the last-minute packing.
The Gorilla woke a little later to send me off; the Coconut came along; they dropped me off at the bus depot and I got the next bus to the terminal. It wasn't particularly nice to be going off for so long, and really I was rather dragging my feet as I got ready to be going off. In fact I wasn't looking forward to finishing packing at all since it'd have made the going-away seem too final--though, of course, I eventually did have to put the padlock on the wheelbag and be done with it. In any case, the events after the bus depot are a long line of going through gates and passing around paperwork, getting stamps and forms and various signs of official approval and boarding passes and entirely too expensive airport food. For all that they call it the Low-Cost Carrier Terminal, they don't seem to see any contradictions with selling RM8.90 fruit juices in the duty-free area. At least the Shenzhen terminal had free drinking water.
I arrived at the Wuhan terminal around 3pm. That makes about 12 hours or so of travelling; at least I got enough napping done during the flights that I'm not too sleepy now, though I can't say I'll be happy to jump out of bed in the morning. My mom and the driver picked me up, and from then on it's been more or less a reunion and an integration into the way things are done in the house now: chores are divided up, computer time is haggled over, Internet time is still a precious commodity, and I still share a room with the youngest brother, who really should be given a name of his own...
Otherwise? They've all grown, changed, but then again that was only to be expected. My mom's turned out to have an unexpected artistic side: Chinese painting, sketches, watercolours, and I must say she's not half bad at all: it's quite possible that whatever sketching ability I have derives from her, then, since I've never seen my dad do a single drawing. The kid sister has gotten clever, seems happy, and I'm betting that she's already unwittingly breaking every other male heart she passes in the school corridors. And the kid brother? Winning awards left and right, a book collection that threatens to surpass my own, and huge amounts of mp3 files in his iPod. I'm forced to admit that at this rate, I'm going to be left behind in the dust or something, but then at least now I can be even more legitimately proud of my immediate family.
At any rate... well, I'm now in Fifth Hun, with all my family except Gobbler and the Empress. Tomorrow is my mom's birthday and we're all going out for steak, on the condition that we dress up for the occasion. Maybe I'll make a card, except I don't have anything to make it with. More likely I'll get a tub of vanilla icecream from the store tomorrow and sprinkle Oreos and M&M's into it and make a sort-of-Flurry. I like those things. I don't know what the two youngest siblings have in mind, but it'll probably be a good thing.
I should probably recall my entire journey, beginning with the madness of yesterday, when I and Mrs Gorilla were caught up in the exuberance of last-minute shopping and packing, and so went off on a three-hour shopping spree, including a little lunch at Burger King (yes, unhealthy, but a little indulgence now and then never killed anybody). In any case we bought up a lot of pastes and sauces that we thought wouldn't be logically available outside Malaysia due to lack of popular demand, such as curries and various stuff, and then the rest of the day was meeting people and packing up.
The Coconut came over around 7 to help with finishing up the stuff, and it eventually turned out that we needn't have bought all that stuff after all since it was 5 kilos overweight and I didn't want to lug a lot of overweight baggage around; at any rate I didn't have to leave behind a lot of the pastes, and my mom doesn't seem too disappointed, so it's more or less okay. We went to sleep around midnight; the Coconut on the bed and I on the couch. We woke around 2; I woke from my handphone alarm going off and she woke when I switched the lights on to finish off the last-minute packing.
The Gorilla woke a little later to send me off; the Coconut came along; they dropped me off at the bus depot and I got the next bus to the terminal. It wasn't particularly nice to be going off for so long, and really I was rather dragging my feet as I got ready to be going off. In fact I wasn't looking forward to finishing packing at all since it'd have made the going-away seem too final--though, of course, I eventually did have to put the padlock on the wheelbag and be done with it. In any case, the events after the bus depot are a long line of going through gates and passing around paperwork, getting stamps and forms and various signs of official approval and boarding passes and entirely too expensive airport food. For all that they call it the Low-Cost Carrier Terminal, they don't seem to see any contradictions with selling RM8.90 fruit juices in the duty-free area. At least the Shenzhen terminal had free drinking water.
I arrived at the Wuhan terminal around 3pm. That makes about 12 hours or so of travelling; at least I got enough napping done during the flights that I'm not too sleepy now, though I can't say I'll be happy to jump out of bed in the morning. My mom and the driver picked me up, and from then on it's been more or less a reunion and an integration into the way things are done in the house now: chores are divided up, computer time is haggled over, Internet time is still a precious commodity, and I still share a room with the youngest brother, who really should be given a name of his own...
Otherwise? They've all grown, changed, but then again that was only to be expected. My mom's turned out to have an unexpected artistic side: Chinese painting, sketches, watercolours, and I must say she's not half bad at all: it's quite possible that whatever sketching ability I have derives from her, then, since I've never seen my dad do a single drawing. The kid sister has gotten clever, seems happy, and I'm betting that she's already unwittingly breaking every other male heart she passes in the school corridors. And the kid brother? Winning awards left and right, a book collection that threatens to surpass my own, and huge amounts of mp3 files in his iPod. I'm forced to admit that at this rate, I'm going to be left behind in the dust or something, but then at least now I can be even more legitimately proud of my immediate family.
Comments