"*gasp*" "I'm Gonna Jump!" "Don't Do It!" "Okay"
This is a post that comes up only because I should be doing my Chinese Translation essay--it is, of course, late; the past week has been full of disappointments in various forms, of which lateness (I usually like to imagine myself as being relatively punctual) is only one form; even if it did affect two lab reports, that essay, and a lot of classes.
Now, where should I start covering from? Perhaps from, hmmm, two weeks ago. That should produce a nice long post and cover a great deal of stuff. After all I'm due to be typing at least 2,500 words of Chinese tonight, assuming I don't do any backspacing or deleting, which means at least 4 times that number of keystrokes--unless I write by hand and that would just give my poor lecturer a fit of eye-twitches.
So let's see, I'll get at the recess week; then cover this week; and hopefully that'll be enough procrastination to force me to actually get to work on that essay!
[this post is continued roughly 6 days later]
Well then... the last of the two quizzes for this week is over, so I can get down to posting up a nice long long list--you've got another 6 days' worth to account for now, besides, so it's going to be a long read. I hope you brought your reading glasses...
We begin, naturally, with the recess week, as I mentioned above. The recess week--well, it began (so to speak) on Friday night when the lab class (the only class I have on Friday, all three hours' worth of it) was over. I think I can safely speak for most of the class in saying we were very impatient throughout the lab work because a good number of them live in inconvenient places and were anxious to get the travelling over with. Me--I was planning to leave on Saturday morning, so Friday night was mostly spent packing.
I travelled for 7 hours on Saturday, arriving in KL around 3 or 4 and from there to the Coconut's house, where the room I was placed in rapidly turned into a disaster area with clothes, books (my study materials plus the Inkheart trilogy which I finished reading during the bus trip and consequently got no sleep during it), and electronics: laptop, mouse, various cables, a blank hard disk... (Which has just reminded me that I should have passed a copy of MATLAB to the Gigantic Cat, but since he didn't remind me and apparently has forgotten it too we shall let it slide.) It was good to be back, even if I was almost immediately press-ganged into playing piano for church the next day. Heck, who'm I fooling?--I like playing, and I like hymns anyway--my greatest peeve at my current church (apart from the difficulty of connecting to anybody in the congregation who isn't from the University) is that they seem to not sing hymns at all. The number of hymns they've sung in the past year-odd I can count on one hand, and even then it wasn't much more than the chorus, or maybe one verse or so... quite unfortunate really, because I much prefer hymns to the current idea of worship songs: most of 'em fall under Only Chorus, or One Verse Song, or Forgotten Second Stanza (if they even had one to begin with!), or else... You know that description--"four lines, three chords, seventeen times"? It fits a depressingly large number of modern songs.
So the weekend passed: Saturday went moderately well, and I was surprised with a chocolate cake by the Coconut and family (my birthday was on Friday); but all that has been covered in the previous post, has it not? So I shall skip ahead a few days during which nothing happened, and proceed to a day on which something did happen, which is Tuesday; for that day was spent mostly in packing things and hunting up laundry and packing it away in my backpack. It's amazing the amount of stuff that can be crammed into a bag when there isn't a laptop inside and you roll everything up; or perhaps that's just a testament to the thinness of the fabric of my clothes. We were taking a bus that leaves at Saturday midnight, so we were all packed by 10, at which we left the house and went to the bus station. The party size was seven: myself, Soul Sounds, the Coconut, her parents, and two siblings.
The bus trip was 6 hours; we arrived, obtained breakfast and return bus tickets, found a ferry and crossed over to Long Kiwi, got a rented car (with its gas tank almost empty) and a few road maps, went shopping (we obtained chocolates, I got a small bottle of blueberry vodka, and the Coconut's mother got a can of beer), and then dumped our bags in the condo we were borrowing/renting for the time (I'm still not quite sure what the arrangement exactly was); after which everybody took a nap and then woke up to start planning the itinerary. (At this point I have opened up my photos folder to help jog my memory of the exact sequence.) We went, according to the photos, to some sort of theme park containing cable cars and a mini-zoo and an airbrush tattoo parlor and bridges (admittedly the support tower was very nice-looking, though the path itself had loose boards) and a little crying child who was laughing about 4 seconds after I photographed her sprawled on the floor. We remained at that park for at least 2 hours, during which we roamed, had orange-flavoured popsicles (RM1!), and shot a good number of photos.
After that strange little place whose name I cannot remember, we drove on some rather hilly and isolated-looking little roads until we came to a bit of beach with a nice view of the sun and a couple of trucks selling rojak; so we stopped, ordered some food, went walking on the beach while waiting for the food (we found some interesting bits of coral and a worm that covered itself in pebbles and sand and thus surprised us when it popped out), and went back to the food when it arrived.
We went back to the condo after dinner, everybody showered, and then came some card games--the Coconut's family loves them, I think--unfortunately we played Bluff which I'm no good at. Nothing to do with me being honest really, though, I'm just better at lying in situations other than card games: maybe cards bring out the honesty in me or something. In any case the vodka tasted quite nice despite Soul Sounds' accusation that it smacked of medicine; I'm rather suspicious however about the sort of medications he's been having if they taste of vodka.
The next day we went on more travelling, after breakfast by a roadside (claiming to be the best in all the country!!!!111) and filling up at a station that insisted on its customers paying first and NOT TOUCHING the pump until they did; and all the while it was a self-service thing. Really, the cheek of some people... We next went to the Black Sand Beach--most beaches, if they are blackish, are that way due to pollution in the sea that stains the sand. Black Sand Beach, on the other hand, (supposedly!) has naturally black sand, and huge patches of it too--at least, a long time ago there were huge patches. Now it's more like a large patch of regular whitish sand, interspersed with the occasional patch of black; it looks rather as if the Black Death came and got the island and never quite went away. However it's only the sand at the surface that's white (I don't know why it is so); digging a little yields up plenty of black soft sand (very small grain sizes!), and the crabs are obliging enough to dig very industriously. So Soul Sounds and I went off on a photo spree, while the Coconut sat down somewhere and frowned. (She'd been, at this point, frowning for a very long time.)
In any case we got some quite nice shots of that area, I took a few to be blended into panoramic shots (which have not yet been made), and we found an empty crab shell which was full of water; the previous occupant had evidently vacated it some time ago. I took photos of it too, and then left it on a little rock. After that we went to the Underwater Park thing, where we found that all the nearby food outlets had had their prices inflated skyhigh to try to take advantage of the location--so we walked until we found someplace relatively reasonable and ate there, after which we went to the Underwater Place (I forget what exactly it was called--Underwater/Ocean/Sea/Beach/Aqua World/Place/Park/Wonder or some combination like that).
It had the typical tanks full of large fish, like Ocean Park in HK; still stunning, yes, but not quite as awe-inspiring. They did have an albino fish, though, which was quite nice; but the lightning wasn't quite the best they could've selected to show off the contrast between it and the other "normal" fish. Other than that though, there were things only remotely connected to water--ducks and swans, for example; and things not connected at all, like marmosets. (Maybe the connection there was that marmosets drink water.) There was also a tank in which was a positively insane seal: it did nothing other than dive and surface in the same little column, time after time after time. I suspect it was fed only when it performed that maneuver, and over time it simply got used to always doing only that. All the same I pity the poor thing. There were also penguins, who (although admittedly cute and impressive by turns) also seemed to have no connection to tropical seasides whatsoever. They got nicely hooked into the general Save The World And Be Green moral that the entire building seemed to be hammering at people, too, along with the photos of whales and suchlike.
After that was a much larger tank, under which people walked so as to see underwater life through inch-thick glass instead of foot-deep water; the mantas and sharks were pretty, the lone turtle less so, and the giant grouper-fish gave Soul Sounds the willies. There was also one very old, very sick-looking, very lethargic ray that watned to do nothing more than lie under the sand (somehow managing to cover itself very well despite having no hands), and even the feeding didn't rouse it. The highlight of the place? The feeding! Unlike Ocean Park where the dead fish get stuck on a stick, kebab-style, and thrust into the tank at the fish, here there was a man in a wet suit and a little plastic basket of fish that he took out and scattered around the tank. It was much more entertaining, and especially as the fish were actually hungry and so crowded around him to eat; the turtle, greedy thing, was the wetsuit man's biggest fan, and obsessively followed him through the place.
We eventually left the place after stopping by another place to buy things (more alcohol! more chocolates! though Soul Sounds and I made a bad choice and so spent about RM7 more than we could have), then returned to the condo. That night we set out to try to hunt crabs on the night beach, but met with failure: none of us had a torchlight; the handphone-LCD-lamps were too dim; and my camera flash was simply not on for enough time to enable hunting of any sort. I did get some quite good shots of crab holes though.
The next morning was a hectic buzz of packing and leaving Long Kiwi; and thus the account of Long Kiwi is complete. We returned on a Friday, and I left on the following Sunday; but around fifteen minutes before I left, the Coconut chose to have a little talk and the upshot of that little talk was that I left KL as a single person.
So far the weeks since the recess have been very busy--quizzes, homework, lab reports, and all of those add up to a great sleep debt that I haven't yet managed to pay off: the last weekend, when I might have done so, was used up in church rehearsal and it turned into a rather frustrating session of listening to a CD and trying to replicate it without an eqiuvalent level of skill or instruments or anything... Ah well. I shall just hit PUBLISH and go to sleep...
Now, where should I start covering from? Perhaps from, hmmm, two weeks ago. That should produce a nice long post and cover a great deal of stuff. After all I'm due to be typing at least 2,500 words of Chinese tonight, assuming I don't do any backspacing or deleting, which means at least 4 times that number of keystrokes--unless I write by hand and that would just give my poor lecturer a fit of eye-twitches.
So let's see, I'll get at the recess week; then cover this week; and hopefully that'll be enough procrastination to force me to actually get to work on that essay!
[this post is continued roughly 6 days later]
Well then... the last of the two quizzes for this week is over, so I can get down to posting up a nice long long list--you've got another 6 days' worth to account for now, besides, so it's going to be a long read. I hope you brought your reading glasses...
We begin, naturally, with the recess week, as I mentioned above. The recess week--well, it began (so to speak) on Friday night when the lab class (the only class I have on Friday, all three hours' worth of it) was over. I think I can safely speak for most of the class in saying we were very impatient throughout the lab work because a good number of them live in inconvenient places and were anxious to get the travelling over with. Me--I was planning to leave on Saturday morning, so Friday night was mostly spent packing.
I travelled for 7 hours on Saturday, arriving in KL around 3 or 4 and from there to the Coconut's house, where the room I was placed in rapidly turned into a disaster area with clothes, books (my study materials plus the Inkheart trilogy which I finished reading during the bus trip and consequently got no sleep during it), and electronics: laptop, mouse, various cables, a blank hard disk... (Which has just reminded me that I should have passed a copy of MATLAB to the Gigantic Cat, but since he didn't remind me and apparently has forgotten it too we shall let it slide.) It was good to be back, even if I was almost immediately press-ganged into playing piano for church the next day. Heck, who'm I fooling?--I like playing, and I like hymns anyway--my greatest peeve at my current church (apart from the difficulty of connecting to anybody in the congregation who isn't from the University) is that they seem to not sing hymns at all. The number of hymns they've sung in the past year-odd I can count on one hand, and even then it wasn't much more than the chorus, or maybe one verse or so... quite unfortunate really, because I much prefer hymns to the current idea of worship songs: most of 'em fall under Only Chorus, or One Verse Song, or Forgotten Second Stanza (if they even had one to begin with!), or else... You know that description--"four lines, three chords, seventeen times"? It fits a depressingly large number of modern songs.
So the weekend passed: Saturday went moderately well, and I was surprised with a chocolate cake by the Coconut and family (my birthday was on Friday); but all that has been covered in the previous post, has it not? So I shall skip ahead a few days during which nothing happened, and proceed to a day on which something did happen, which is Tuesday; for that day was spent mostly in packing things and hunting up laundry and packing it away in my backpack. It's amazing the amount of stuff that can be crammed into a bag when there isn't a laptop inside and you roll everything up; or perhaps that's just a testament to the thinness of the fabric of my clothes. We were taking a bus that leaves at Saturday midnight, so we were all packed by 10, at which we left the house and went to the bus station. The party size was seven: myself, Soul Sounds, the Coconut, her parents, and two siblings.
The bus trip was 6 hours; we arrived, obtained breakfast and return bus tickets, found a ferry and crossed over to Long Kiwi, got a rented car (with its gas tank almost empty) and a few road maps, went shopping (we obtained chocolates, I got a small bottle of blueberry vodka, and the Coconut's mother got a can of beer), and then dumped our bags in the condo we were borrowing/renting for the time (I'm still not quite sure what the arrangement exactly was); after which everybody took a nap and then woke up to start planning the itinerary. (At this point I have opened up my photos folder to help jog my memory of the exact sequence.) We went, according to the photos, to some sort of theme park containing cable cars and a mini-zoo and an airbrush tattoo parlor and bridges (admittedly the support tower was very nice-looking, though the path itself had loose boards) and a little crying child who was laughing about 4 seconds after I photographed her sprawled on the floor. We remained at that park for at least 2 hours, during which we roamed, had orange-flavoured popsicles (RM1!), and shot a good number of photos.
After that strange little place whose name I cannot remember, we drove on some rather hilly and isolated-looking little roads until we came to a bit of beach with a nice view of the sun and a couple of trucks selling rojak; so we stopped, ordered some food, went walking on the beach while waiting for the food (we found some interesting bits of coral and a worm that covered itself in pebbles and sand and thus surprised us when it popped out), and went back to the food when it arrived.
We went back to the condo after dinner, everybody showered, and then came some card games--the Coconut's family loves them, I think--unfortunately we played Bluff which I'm no good at. Nothing to do with me being honest really, though, I'm just better at lying in situations other than card games: maybe cards bring out the honesty in me or something. In any case the vodka tasted quite nice despite Soul Sounds' accusation that it smacked of medicine; I'm rather suspicious however about the sort of medications he's been having if they taste of vodka.
The next day we went on more travelling, after breakfast by a roadside (claiming to be the best in all the country!!!!111) and filling up at a station that insisted on its customers paying first and NOT TOUCHING the pump until they did; and all the while it was a self-service thing. Really, the cheek of some people... We next went to the Black Sand Beach--most beaches, if they are blackish, are that way due to pollution in the sea that stains the sand. Black Sand Beach, on the other hand, (supposedly!) has naturally black sand, and huge patches of it too--at least, a long time ago there were huge patches. Now it's more like a large patch of regular whitish sand, interspersed with the occasional patch of black; it looks rather as if the Black Death came and got the island and never quite went away. However it's only the sand at the surface that's white (I don't know why it is so); digging a little yields up plenty of black soft sand (very small grain sizes!), and the crabs are obliging enough to dig very industriously. So Soul Sounds and I went off on a photo spree, while the Coconut sat down somewhere and frowned. (She'd been, at this point, frowning for a very long time.)
In any case we got some quite nice shots of that area, I took a few to be blended into panoramic shots (which have not yet been made), and we found an empty crab shell which was full of water; the previous occupant had evidently vacated it some time ago. I took photos of it too, and then left it on a little rock. After that we went to the Underwater Park thing, where we found that all the nearby food outlets had had their prices inflated skyhigh to try to take advantage of the location--so we walked until we found someplace relatively reasonable and ate there, after which we went to the Underwater Place (I forget what exactly it was called--Underwater/Ocean/Sea/Beach/Aqua World/Place/Park/Wonder or some combination like that).
It had the typical tanks full of large fish, like Ocean Park in HK; still stunning, yes, but not quite as awe-inspiring. They did have an albino fish, though, which was quite nice; but the lightning wasn't quite the best they could've selected to show off the contrast between it and the other "normal" fish. Other than that though, there were things only remotely connected to water--ducks and swans, for example; and things not connected at all, like marmosets. (Maybe the connection there was that marmosets drink water.) There was also a tank in which was a positively insane seal: it did nothing other than dive and surface in the same little column, time after time after time. I suspect it was fed only when it performed that maneuver, and over time it simply got used to always doing only that. All the same I pity the poor thing. There were also penguins, who (although admittedly cute and impressive by turns) also seemed to have no connection to tropical seasides whatsoever. They got nicely hooked into the general Save The World And Be Green moral that the entire building seemed to be hammering at people, too, along with the photos of whales and suchlike.
After that was a much larger tank, under which people walked so as to see underwater life through inch-thick glass instead of foot-deep water; the mantas and sharks were pretty, the lone turtle less so, and the giant grouper-fish gave Soul Sounds the willies. There was also one very old, very sick-looking, very lethargic ray that watned to do nothing more than lie under the sand (somehow managing to cover itself very well despite having no hands), and even the feeding didn't rouse it. The highlight of the place? The feeding! Unlike Ocean Park where the dead fish get stuck on a stick, kebab-style, and thrust into the tank at the fish, here there was a man in a wet suit and a little plastic basket of fish that he took out and scattered around the tank. It was much more entertaining, and especially as the fish were actually hungry and so crowded around him to eat; the turtle, greedy thing, was the wetsuit man's biggest fan, and obsessively followed him through the place.
We eventually left the place after stopping by another place to buy things (more alcohol! more chocolates! though Soul Sounds and I made a bad choice and so spent about RM7 more than we could have), then returned to the condo. That night we set out to try to hunt crabs on the night beach, but met with failure: none of us had a torchlight; the handphone-LCD-lamps were too dim; and my camera flash was simply not on for enough time to enable hunting of any sort. I did get some quite good shots of crab holes though.
The next morning was a hectic buzz of packing and leaving Long Kiwi; and thus the account of Long Kiwi is complete. We returned on a Friday, and I left on the following Sunday; but around fifteen minutes before I left, the Coconut chose to have a little talk and the upshot of that little talk was that I left KL as a single person.
So far the weeks since the recess have been very busy--quizzes, homework, lab reports, and all of those add up to a great sleep debt that I haven't yet managed to pay off: the last weekend, when I might have done so, was used up in church rehearsal and it turned into a rather frustrating session of listening to a CD and trying to replicate it without an eqiuvalent level of skill or instruments or anything... Ah well. I shall just hit PUBLISH and go to sleep...
Comments
Oh and Happy Birthday. Hwahaha!