Fam-Uh-Leeeeeee!
I type this on my laptop from the computer room of the little flat in Fifth Hun. Outside are my mom and Gobbler and my aunt (mother's older sister), and somewhere running about is the latest addition to the family and the latest in a long line of dogs, Oreo (whom my youngest brother named). She's a little black-and-white ball of fur, whose face is pretty evenly split between the two and so there's always a little bit of oddity for me when I look at her and only one eye is visible (the other is only visible by the light reflecting off it in bright places).
It's pretty cold right now--I've no idea what the temperature is, but it's cold enough that the heat radiating off my laptop is a very nice thing for my fingers. I've considered buying myself a nice pair of wool or cotton gloves or, really, any sort of covering to get my hands out of the wind. It's probably compounded by my parents' refusal to turn on the heating except at night, and even then it's only on while we're awake (which means that when we go to sleep, not a single electrical appliance in the house remains active apart from the odd handphone charger).
And thus, I suppose, everybody roams around the house in socks and thick slippers and long pants and at least three layers of shirts/sweaters/jackets on, with additional such layers for every time we go out of doors. Which is quite often, for my family seems to be composed of inveterate walkers--we had a two-hour stroll last night after dinner, and we probably didn't burn all the calories either since it was a very big dinner.
In any case I'll detail the journey here, since I have photographs and I might as well have some sort of commentary to refer to in future when I look at those photos... in fact, I think I'll detail the life I've been living ever since the exams ended (November 27th), since it's only been what, a week or so? A little over a week, I think...
I met Gobbler the day after the exams ended, around 10am at the Sporean side of the Customs. We were both early, but I was a little earlier; the rest of the trip was uneventful since it was pretty regular: bus trips and then a taxi ride for which we paid far too much (of course, we didn't know it at the time). We arrived quite soon after that, the entire trip from the Customs having taken a little over two hours.
The next few days were a haze of grandparents and eating and sleeping and mosquitoes (at night) and cousins and aunts and uncles, all of which hadn't seen me since September and Gobbler since Chinese New Year (way back in February or March), so understandably there was a lot of catching-up and chitchatting. And a lot of food, of course! Even if I was somewhat rotund in September and have only been putting on weight since then, I seem to have gotten something of a reputation as a big eater--bigger than most of the cousins in fact, which is... not quite proportionate to the kind of physical exertion of the respective daily lives. But in any case my typical meal there (lunches and dinners) consisted of two bowls of rice or porridge, plus one whole fish (fried or otherwise), plus whatever side dishes happened to be available for eating, which usually means vegetables or meat. And of course, after the meals there was always dessert--fruits, usually, but occasionally some sort of other tasty thing.
I left a couple of days before the flights; in fact I almost ended up missing the flights by a whole day, but thank God I checked the email containing my itinerary and Gobbler obligingly reminded me by MSN of the flight date--upon which I rushed back to the room in the afternoon, a few hours after I'd gotten the news. The grandparents were understandably unhappy about it, since the next foreseeable visit will be next year; though it really isn't that far off since the next Chinese New Year is in January.
In any case I got back, spent a day (half a day, really) cleaning up 4 months' worth of detritus and accumulated stuff, packed the wheelbag and left the stuff for the backpack lying about in obvious places, and the next day I forgot half the stuff I'd left lying about in obvious places and didn't remember them until it was much too late to go back and retrieve them. It's a great pity one of those things was a food item since it's probably rotting by now, unless my roommate got the email I dashed off and decided to go eat it.
I met Gobbler at the Singy Airport around 9.30am, after a panicky exchange about "should I go get the stuff I forgot" which ended in "nah, it's not that important and anyway there's no more time". We then spent the time until that flight on chitchatting and taking photos of each other and trying to bum off the terminal's wireless network--it turned out that one needs an account to use that, and Gobbler was the only one with such an account (it's free but I still don't have one) ; even so we were only there for a little over ten minutes before we had to board and leave.
It was an hour's flight to KL, so Gobbler slept and I stayed awake--I've never been able to sleep well on planes. We got there, got our luggage, and had some very overpriced and undersized lunch before topping it off with some equally overpriced (but at least regularly-sized) stuff from McDonald's. I do declare that terminal needs more than one restaurant--both to service the customers and to introduce some semblance of competition to the place. The prices are very nearly criminal and yet customers queue for ages for food and tables because they've no other choice.
We had some bother with the luggage when trying to check it in again, since it was overweight with a lot of things--some of them our own and some of them due to the shopping list our parents usually issue whenever we go to visit them for stuff that they can't usually get in Fifth Hun. So we had to unpack, repack, and go waddling about the rest of the day with the extra weight slung around in cloth bags on our arms.
The second flight was delayed, at quite near the last minute--we'd even checked in and gone through the whole rigmarole of sitting around, having your flight called ("AK88 to gate T6. Calling AK88 to gate T6...") and were actually standing less than thirty meters from the plane when the pilot or some person with similar authority (well I wouldn't be sure, but he was wearing a suit) came down and said the engine wasn't working, and waved us all back into the terminal. I remember thinking, quite aggravatedly, that if AirAsia would only spend a little more of the money they're supposed to be saving up on aircraft maintenance, they'd get a lot more customer goodwill. As it is that 86% on-time rate they have on their site strikes me as utter bosh.
We were delayed for one and a half hours, which seems relatively minor for a delay from AirAsia unless you knew, as we did, that the next flight (from Deep Province to Fifth Hun) left at 10.45 and it's a three-hour flight to Deep Province from KL. So we sat in the terminal, bumming off the wireless and some available electric ports (we went roaming around until we found one, quite hidden from previous searchers, and used it with great glee) until we were called again.
Thank God when we landed (Gobbler slept again through this flight, though I didn't--I had a nosebleed in the beginning of it and my mouth tasted of blood for awhile), we found that the connecting flight had got delayed as well, so our worries were in vain. It'd still have been nicer if we hadn't had to worry in the first place, of course, but at any rate we got through the customs at record speed.
So the past few days, in Fifth Hun, have been spent pretty much being leisurely sitting around and chitchatting to family, eating, walking, being cold, and coughing--my dad's got a bit of a cough and now so do I. We're both on a course of medication.
It's pretty cold right now--I've no idea what the temperature is, but it's cold enough that the heat radiating off my laptop is a very nice thing for my fingers. I've considered buying myself a nice pair of wool or cotton gloves or, really, any sort of covering to get my hands out of the wind. It's probably compounded by my parents' refusal to turn on the heating except at night, and even then it's only on while we're awake (which means that when we go to sleep, not a single electrical appliance in the house remains active apart from the odd handphone charger).
And thus, I suppose, everybody roams around the house in socks and thick slippers and long pants and at least three layers of shirts/sweaters/jackets on, with additional such layers for every time we go out of doors. Which is quite often, for my family seems to be composed of inveterate walkers--we had a two-hour stroll last night after dinner, and we probably didn't burn all the calories either since it was a very big dinner.
In any case I'll detail the journey here, since I have photographs and I might as well have some sort of commentary to refer to in future when I look at those photos... in fact, I think I'll detail the life I've been living ever since the exams ended (November 27th), since it's only been what, a week or so? A little over a week, I think...
I met Gobbler the day after the exams ended, around 10am at the Sporean side of the Customs. We were both early, but I was a little earlier; the rest of the trip was uneventful since it was pretty regular: bus trips and then a taxi ride for which we paid far too much (of course, we didn't know it at the time). We arrived quite soon after that, the entire trip from the Customs having taken a little over two hours.
The next few days were a haze of grandparents and eating and sleeping and mosquitoes (at night) and cousins and aunts and uncles, all of which hadn't seen me since September and Gobbler since Chinese New Year (way back in February or March), so understandably there was a lot of catching-up and chitchatting. And a lot of food, of course! Even if I was somewhat rotund in September and have only been putting on weight since then, I seem to have gotten something of a reputation as a big eater--bigger than most of the cousins in fact, which is... not quite proportionate to the kind of physical exertion of the respective daily lives. But in any case my typical meal there (lunches and dinners) consisted of two bowls of rice or porridge, plus one whole fish (fried or otherwise), plus whatever side dishes happened to be available for eating, which usually means vegetables or meat. And of course, after the meals there was always dessert--fruits, usually, but occasionally some sort of other tasty thing.
I left a couple of days before the flights; in fact I almost ended up missing the flights by a whole day, but thank God I checked the email containing my itinerary and Gobbler obligingly reminded me by MSN of the flight date--upon which I rushed back to the room in the afternoon, a few hours after I'd gotten the news. The grandparents were understandably unhappy about it, since the next foreseeable visit will be next year; though it really isn't that far off since the next Chinese New Year is in January.
In any case I got back, spent a day (half a day, really) cleaning up 4 months' worth of detritus and accumulated stuff, packed the wheelbag and left the stuff for the backpack lying about in obvious places, and the next day I forgot half the stuff I'd left lying about in obvious places and didn't remember them until it was much too late to go back and retrieve them. It's a great pity one of those things was a food item since it's probably rotting by now, unless my roommate got the email I dashed off and decided to go eat it.
I met Gobbler at the Singy Airport around 9.30am, after a panicky exchange about "should I go get the stuff I forgot" which ended in "nah, it's not that important and anyway there's no more time". We then spent the time until that flight on chitchatting and taking photos of each other and trying to bum off the terminal's wireless network--it turned out that one needs an account to use that, and Gobbler was the only one with such an account (it's free but I still don't have one) ; even so we were only there for a little over ten minutes before we had to board and leave.
It was an hour's flight to KL, so Gobbler slept and I stayed awake--I've never been able to sleep well on planes. We got there, got our luggage, and had some very overpriced and undersized lunch before topping it off with some equally overpriced (but at least regularly-sized) stuff from McDonald's. I do declare that terminal needs more than one restaurant--both to service the customers and to introduce some semblance of competition to the place. The prices are very nearly criminal and yet customers queue for ages for food and tables because they've no other choice.
We had some bother with the luggage when trying to check it in again, since it was overweight with a lot of things--some of them our own and some of them due to the shopping list our parents usually issue whenever we go to visit them for stuff that they can't usually get in Fifth Hun. So we had to unpack, repack, and go waddling about the rest of the day with the extra weight slung around in cloth bags on our arms.
The second flight was delayed, at quite near the last minute--we'd even checked in and gone through the whole rigmarole of sitting around, having your flight called ("AK88 to gate T6. Calling AK88 to gate T6...") and were actually standing less than thirty meters from the plane when the pilot or some person with similar authority (well I wouldn't be sure, but he was wearing a suit) came down and said the engine wasn't working, and waved us all back into the terminal. I remember thinking, quite aggravatedly, that if AirAsia would only spend a little more of the money they're supposed to be saving up on aircraft maintenance, they'd get a lot more customer goodwill. As it is that 86% on-time rate they have on their site strikes me as utter bosh.
We were delayed for one and a half hours, which seems relatively minor for a delay from AirAsia unless you knew, as we did, that the next flight (from Deep Province to Fifth Hun) left at 10.45 and it's a three-hour flight to Deep Province from KL. So we sat in the terminal, bumming off the wireless and some available electric ports (we went roaming around until we found one, quite hidden from previous searchers, and used it with great glee) until we were called again.
Thank God when we landed (Gobbler slept again through this flight, though I didn't--I had a nosebleed in the beginning of it and my mouth tasted of blood for awhile), we found that the connecting flight had got delayed as well, so our worries were in vain. It'd still have been nicer if we hadn't had to worry in the first place, of course, but at any rate we got through the customs at record speed.
So the past few days, in Fifth Hun, have been spent pretty much being leisurely sitting around and chitchatting to family, eating, walking, being cold, and coughing--my dad's got a bit of a cough and now so do I. We're both on a course of medication.
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