The Life of Leisure
It's been awhile since my last post, hasn't it? Or has it? I'm not too terribly sure myself--at any rate it's possibly less time than I think--or possible more. It's hard to tell; I've been in Patience for a little over a week now: my flight here was on the 18th and it's now what, 8 days? 9? since then. It certainly feels like a bit more. But one's sense of time is different when there's no assignments to do, or classes to attend, or suchlike.
At the moment I'm not living in my own house, though my family does possess a house here; it's reasonably well-kept because a relative goes down every week or so to hang around it for a bit, make sure all the parts still work, runs the car for a bit and tops it up as necessary. I'm just not going there yet because I hate doing laundry and cooking and especially cleaning--sure, slipping around on soap water is fun, but not the kind of thing you want to do for a whole day especially when you've got things on the floor that can't take too much exposure to water.
Life? Well, let's see. It's been going on. It's hard to imagine I've only spent one weekend so far with all the many things that've happened, though I suppose I'm not used to having more than one non-repetitive event occur per week; and in the past 8 or 9 or maybe 10 days, a lot of non-repetitive events have occurred. I've not got photos, but my memory should serve to recall the basic details well enough.
I arrived last, let me see, Tuesday; but I should begin the story earlier, because the last you heard of me was in So Hour--if then--and my flight went from KL; you will no doubt want to know the in-between. So thus it goes.
The fifth sister of my father, whom I shall call Fifth Aunt because that's what I do call her, has a son and two daughters; the son has begun (at the time when I was there he was due to begin) studies at TAR--ACCA accountancy. And as that is in KL, I thought that perhaps they might go up early and I would go along with them, saving myself the hassle of ticket-purchasing and an amount of travelling-time; not to mention that I had not been able to procure a place to stay yet, and that was a main sticking-point in my plans to just go up myself.
Therefore I stayed in So Hour, in the house of my grandfolks, until after dinner on the 16th of May (which, in So Hour, takes place around 6 or 7 pm); then I had my cousin drive me to Fifth Aunt's house, where I stayed the night, chitchatting and catching up with her and the cousin who should by now have started classes--I shall call him Pig's Tail, because that is what his name more or less translates to. The next morning at around 6am, I was woken by my cousin (I suppose he felt rather less need to sleep, this being a rather big thing for anybody who hasn't constantly moved around since youth) and got up, repacked anything I'd taken out (my toothbrush and that was about it really), and off we piled into a little rented van. There was myself, the cousin, three of his friends who were also going to TAR but not all going to study Accountancy, the driver of the van, Fifth Aunt, and two other mothers (of the additional friends). The adult women were very worried (you could see it) and the young ones... well, not so much so.
It was a decidedly interesting journey, mostly because only one of them had actually been to the rented house before and knew more or less where it was; other than that I was the only person in the van with anything more than a passing knowledge of KL and unfortunately my sort of knowledge of it doesn't extend to the location of every student-rented building in the immediate vicinity of TAR; thus the journey went smoothly until we entered KL, upon which the van was a cacophony of "Stop and ask directions!", "I think it's over there", phone calls to people to say where we were and ask where should we go next?, and so on. Very deafening and I have no idea how I managed to go through the whole thing without breaking down and yelling at them all to be quiet and not worry so much and we'd get there eventually. The place eventually turned out to be located behind a dilapidated restaurant that's been there for at least 15 years and quite possibly is older than I am; and the rented apartment itself was dilapidated too: dust all over the place, water that didn't run so much as limped along through the pipes, and at least the electricity was working.
We spent two hours cleaning the place--the three mothers naturally were the main workforce here, sending everybody else running to get sponges or buckets of clean water or brushes or rinse the mop or help them hold something steady while they gave it the scrubbing of its life. It took us two hours but eventually the mothers pronounced the place fit for human inhabitation (I noticed through all this that there were no spiderwebs. It was very odd.) and proceeded to take us off on a journey for more things--easily-portable wardrobes, mattresses, curtains and curtain-hooks, gas stoves, plastic cabinets, and various other things. It was 6 or 7 before we were quite done with that place and even so the mothers couldn't resist talking about the crime rate in KL and how important it is to keep one's keys close to oneself at all times and such like before going off back to Patience in the rented van, probably talking all the way back about how worried they were and how completely unsuitable KL is for poor young things with no parents to guide their every step.
I spent the night there, sandwiched between Pig's Tail and one of the other male occupants of the apartment. It was quite interesting watching the group dynamics; Pig's Tail, you see, is commonly a very taciturn person, doesn't talk much, etc. but that's only in the presence of family gatherings, and apparently only when there's no computer nearby and the only people around are cousins and aunts, uncles, grandfolks, etc. In the presence of friends he lightens up a great deal more. It was quite reassuring (yes, I worry about my cousins too. At least, some of 'em. The Brats could be found tied up and dead in a ditch tomorrow outside this house, with all their organs harvested for black market sale, and I wouldn't turn a hair other than to wonder if the parents knew yet). The next morning I woke, around 6, and left along with some of the occupants who also had to wake up that early. Pig's Tail also woke up to send me off.
It was about 3 hours' journeying to get to the airport and check in and everything; my check-in luggage was about .5kg short of the limit, because I was wearing my trekking shoes and had put my flipflops in the bag. (When I was wearing the flipflops and had the shoes in the bag it was 1 kilo overweight. Those are very heavy shoes.) I left the apartment around 7.15 or so; it was about five minutes from the apartment to the bus stop, ten minutes by bus to the LRT station (we happened to arrive with the bus so there was no waiting), about fifteen minutes' waiting for a sufficiently empty space on the LRT trains, half an hour on the LRT to get to the Central Station, five minutes to find the shuttle buses, another ten minutes of waiting for the shuttle bus to start moving, about 75 minutes or so of the bus ride, and then I was at the airport and ready to check in. I was the 38th passenger to check in on that flight, if I remember correctly; I certainly went online, on the WiFi (weak thing it was too, kept disconnecting and I couldn't open MSN and had to communicate by Facebook chat), at around 9.45 (boarding at 10.40 which gave me 50 minutes' chatting).
I arrived at Patience, and almost immediately due to a snarl-up of communications it was three hours before I was fetched from it and arrived at the house where I am currently staying.
And thus I am now here in Patience, in this house (which is not mine).
My hosts are a middle-aged couple, whose children I know through church and who also know my family quite well. The children are currently away, and will eventually return. I could dissect their personalities for you, but you'll find out enough from these posts anyway, if you read; so I'll not do so. They're very devout Christians--well, if you hadn't known my beliefs before you certainly ought to by now--so they somehow shoehorned me into attending an all-day conference thing of some sort on Saturday. To be honest of course I didn't put up too much resistance since I hadn't got any plans on that day anyway so I said okay.
In between Tuesday and Saturday, I found out that my computer has issues with routers and cannot go online for some reason--I am typing this post in WordPad which is primitive but at least won't crash my computer every few minutes. I also found out that my external hard disk will not work for unknown reasons--Jogger and I discussed it over MSN and it's probably something loose in it, but I can't open it up because I haven't got screwdrivers and I don't know where the screwdrivers are in this house. On the other hand it might be something in the power supply or whatnot--I've never, I realised a few days ago, tried to use that hard drive in this country. It's always only been used before in Spore, China, and Hong Kong--never Malaysia. Of course that shouldn't explain it, but at this point I'm willing for even an inane reason to hope that I won't have to scrap that thing and all the data in it. My laptop also somehow lost a driver (it is apparently called the IDE Controller, and is listed as an AWHNBLAHBLAH thing) and now keeps telling me to update that driver. I tried. It won't update (partly because I have no Internet connectivity on this blasted laptop). I'm very seriously considering getting a new one.
Saturday came, my hosts and I went to the conference, met some other friends from church there, and sat down to listen. Very unfortunately it was not an enlightening experience in any way--the man may have gifts of all sorts but preaching and teaching certainly aren't in his skillset. It may also have been because the speaker was a Sanguine and tended to get carried away with anecdotes, little jokes, metaphors and descriptions: at one point he ended up spending ten minutes describing a metaphor as an analogy to some sort of simile and the audience--at least, I--ended up not getting his point entirely. If he had had one to make to begin with. It was all very incoherent and I didn't find it at all useful. On the other hand... Charismatic Christians are differentiated from other denominations by their huge insistence that God should play an active, visible, audible role in their lives. At least, that's how I see it; and one particular result of this is that they believe that prophets exist and can relay God's words directly to you, because you're too dense or un-gifted or naughty for God to speak to you or be heard by you. Or something. I find the theology behind the idea somewhat eyebrow-raising to say the least; though admittedly sometimes God works a lot too subtly for the common person to hear. That's the whole idea behind the mystics running off to be hermits and monks after all, the idea that you get rid of all the wordly distractions so you can act as an uncluttered pipeline of a sort... but I digress. This speaker chose, after the seminar was done, to pray for every single person attending, which ended up including me. He turned out to be rather accurate, which I'm not sure to be happy about or slightly creeped out about. The idea of a near-total stranger (and don't you give me that stuff about everybody being siblings-in-spirit because that does NOT automatically get you my approval) knowing stuff about you that only God should know... is less than comforting to me. And of course the fact that he was doing it in earshot of a lot of other people just decreases that comfort even more. (Then again, I'd turned my phone's voice-recorder on and had accidentally recorded what he said about the three or four people he was talking to before me, so... yeah.)
After the seminar, I was invited to sleep over at the house of a couple of church friends (they'd attended the seminar too) so I did, and was introduced to TED.com: quite entertaining that site is. Pity about the buggy Internet connection, though, because it froze up halfway through Bill Gates' speech and we went to sleep shortly thereafter.
Sunday I went (with the aforementioned friends) to church (leaving my camera behind in their house in the process), and was recognised by about 30% of the people there; 70% of the church was totally unfamiliar faces to me, which I suppose is a good thing really. We talked a bit, and then that was that for that.
I should add a note here that my hosts are also members of a club located by a nearby beach; thus they go there almost daily for tennis, gym sessions, etc; and I usually go along with them to walk on the beach, usually in about five or six inches of water and sometimes a bit more, depending on the length of my shorts at the time--they're not all the same length. In fact we went there the evening I arrived, and a lovely rainstorm came along and I thought it was a nice way to make up for the irritation of sitting in an airport for three hours calling people up to find out just what had gone asnarl and why nobody was already there to pick me up. In any case it's a lovely beach: quite clean, there's crabs and snails and things all over the place most of the time, and in some parts of it if you wade out to knee-height, you can quite suddenly come across a clump of jellyfish--little cute bubbles that nevertheless inspire the most amazing fits of terror. And crabs, of course, tiny little territorial buggers that react to your shadow falling on them by raising up their claws and doing a little side-to-side dance, covering random bits of sand and kicking up a little cloud in the process--and then the dance stops, and the sand-cloud clears, and the crab has vanished safely under the sand. I've accidentally set off a lot of crabs a-dancing, and once even accidentally stepped on one. It was quite a nip, but only painful because it was unexpected--if I'd seen it coming I shouldn't have felt it at all, I think. Sometimes when the tide is especially low, starfish are exposed as well and then you're treated to the sight of a lot of little five-armed (or less; some of them are injured) critters slowly undulating their way back to water. Some of them don't even do that, preferring to burrow under the sand so that they get to the damper layers underneath. Overall it's an entertaining sight, because starfish are not very stealthy burrowers: they can be found by the star-shaped indentations they leave behind (or rather above) them. I unfortunately have very few photos of these; due to having only gotten my camera back yesterday (after Sunday), I haven't had the opportunity to photograph very much. I fully intend to remedy this.
It was, I think, on Saturday night that the Pig first SMSed me after my arrival in Patience. Unfortunately my phone was on silent as it always is, and I didn't read it until far too late to respond. On Monday night he called instead (clever move that, really), and we went out to supper and eat. I got back at 2am, to my hosts' disapproval the next morning; fortunately I've gotten into the habit of always having keys around when I go out so I didn't have to wake anybody up to get back into the house. On Tuesday night I went out again for supper and came back at 3am, having discovered a wonderful little place that apparently serves insomniacs because it's a collection of little mamak stalls that open beginning from 1am or so; I also visited his new house (new to me: he's been in it for a couple years or so by now) and--my goodness--I want a screen like his. And a laptop, of course. And pretty much everything else. I feel like a pauper really: a very ill-equipped pauper. Wednesday morning I woke quite early, having got about 4.5 hours' sleep, and went out with the church friends and some of their old schoolmates and some other schoolmates of theirs (they used to be local, then moved to Canada, and now are back for their summer holidays too) to an island.
It was a nice trip: I've always liked water anyway, and the sea spray was absolutely delightful. It was partly disappointing that the beach of the island in question was mostly composed of bits of broken coral and shells, which made it painful to walk on; and trash left behind from previous visitors (it is far too popular an island!), which made it painful to look at. But we didn't spend too much time walking on the beach or staring at the trash, because the fishes distracted us. We'd been swimming for awhile, and eating in the water (or, rather, eating just above the surface of the water) when we noticed fishes. Thinking we'd feed them, we dropped in a bit of fruit and watched the fish attack it ravenously. We next dropped in a bit of meat and the fish went Vashta Nerada on it: the meat spun for a bit and turned into a bone. And then the big fish appeared, having somehow caught scent of the meat or perhaps the little fishes were gossipy. I'm not sure how, but we soon were feeding bits of meat on bones to the big fish too. This lasted awhile, during which the big fish demonstrated their ability to grab and swim off with small bones, as well as their propensity to nibble on fingers when the bone had no meat left on it.
We then went on a banana boat ride (two of the others went parasailing), which was also decidedly enjoyable. A banana boat ride occurs in the following way: you go on a speedboat out on the sea into deep waters, after which the boat-driver unties some ropes and pulls a large inflatable cylinder down, leaving it to drift behind the boat attached by some very long rope. The cylinder looks like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette in cross-section, so it doesn't continually roll over and over like a log. On the part of it that is supposed to be the top, are five handlebars. You sit on the topmost cylinder, holding on to one handlebar. At least three people are needed, though (obviously) a maximum of five people are allowed on. Once everybody is on, the boat starts off again (it stops while the driver deploys the inflatable thing and you get on), and the boat driver does his best to get you to overbalance and fall off. Two falls and the ride's over; but the falling, admittedly, is the most fun part. My particular bunch of people was most entertaining, because our first fall didn't all happen at once; one girl fell off first and was left in the sea some distance behind, upon which the 4 of us still hanging on yelled to the driver that she'd gone overboard. The driver made such a sharp turn back to her that we all immediately fell off. The second one was far more simple, and everybody fell off together. As a side note, my watch strap somehow contrived to snap during the first ride; fortunately it didn't fall off, being stuck to me by sweat, sea, and forward moment; and I had the presence of mind to grab onto it as soon as I saw it was broken, so I didn't lose it in the fall. I'm quite thankful for that.
After the banana boat rides and falls we went snorkeling, eating, swimming, photographing, shell-and-coral-collecting--essentially what anybody does on an island. It was good fun, and it eventually ended and we all went back on the last boat available (I think it was, anyhow), at around 5pm.
Later that night I went out again with the Pig to catch the premiere of Terminator: Salvation. It's not too bad, quite entertaining, although in their effort to be all techy and stuff the directors omitted a lot of science and research. Helena Bonham Carter put in a minor appearance as a somewhat deranged technician. Admittedly she does the deranged role very well, but one somehow wonders if she isn't getting a bit typecast. The movie wasn't too bad, and after it we visited the Insomniacs' Mamak Collection again (as I'm starting to think of it, because I don't know its name--the Pig calls it Lido or something like that).
I woke up today at 7, 9, and 12pm (but got out of bed only at 12).
At the moment I'm not living in my own house, though my family does possess a house here; it's reasonably well-kept because a relative goes down every week or so to hang around it for a bit, make sure all the parts still work, runs the car for a bit and tops it up as necessary. I'm just not going there yet because I hate doing laundry and cooking and especially cleaning--sure, slipping around on soap water is fun, but not the kind of thing you want to do for a whole day especially when you've got things on the floor that can't take too much exposure to water.
Life? Well, let's see. It's been going on. It's hard to imagine I've only spent one weekend so far with all the many things that've happened, though I suppose I'm not used to having more than one non-repetitive event occur per week; and in the past 8 or 9 or maybe 10 days, a lot of non-repetitive events have occurred. I've not got photos, but my memory should serve to recall the basic details well enough.
I arrived last, let me see, Tuesday; but I should begin the story earlier, because the last you heard of me was in So Hour--if then--and my flight went from KL; you will no doubt want to know the in-between. So thus it goes.
The fifth sister of my father, whom I shall call Fifth Aunt because that's what I do call her, has a son and two daughters; the son has begun (at the time when I was there he was due to begin) studies at TAR--ACCA accountancy. And as that is in KL, I thought that perhaps they might go up early and I would go along with them, saving myself the hassle of ticket-purchasing and an amount of travelling-time; not to mention that I had not been able to procure a place to stay yet, and that was a main sticking-point in my plans to just go up myself.
Therefore I stayed in So Hour, in the house of my grandfolks, until after dinner on the 16th of May (which, in So Hour, takes place around 6 or 7 pm); then I had my cousin drive me to Fifth Aunt's house, where I stayed the night, chitchatting and catching up with her and the cousin who should by now have started classes--I shall call him Pig's Tail, because that is what his name more or less translates to. The next morning at around 6am, I was woken by my cousin (I suppose he felt rather less need to sleep, this being a rather big thing for anybody who hasn't constantly moved around since youth) and got up, repacked anything I'd taken out (my toothbrush and that was about it really), and off we piled into a little rented van. There was myself, the cousin, three of his friends who were also going to TAR but not all going to study Accountancy, the driver of the van, Fifth Aunt, and two other mothers (of the additional friends). The adult women were very worried (you could see it) and the young ones... well, not so much so.
It was a decidedly interesting journey, mostly because only one of them had actually been to the rented house before and knew more or less where it was; other than that I was the only person in the van with anything more than a passing knowledge of KL and unfortunately my sort of knowledge of it doesn't extend to the location of every student-rented building in the immediate vicinity of TAR; thus the journey went smoothly until we entered KL, upon which the van was a cacophony of "Stop and ask directions!", "I think it's over there", phone calls to people to say where we were and ask where should we go next?, and so on. Very deafening and I have no idea how I managed to go through the whole thing without breaking down and yelling at them all to be quiet and not worry so much and we'd get there eventually. The place eventually turned out to be located behind a dilapidated restaurant that's been there for at least 15 years and quite possibly is older than I am; and the rented apartment itself was dilapidated too: dust all over the place, water that didn't run so much as limped along through the pipes, and at least the electricity was working.
We spent two hours cleaning the place--the three mothers naturally were the main workforce here, sending everybody else running to get sponges or buckets of clean water or brushes or rinse the mop or help them hold something steady while they gave it the scrubbing of its life. It took us two hours but eventually the mothers pronounced the place fit for human inhabitation (I noticed through all this that there were no spiderwebs. It was very odd.) and proceeded to take us off on a journey for more things--easily-portable wardrobes, mattresses, curtains and curtain-hooks, gas stoves, plastic cabinets, and various other things. It was 6 or 7 before we were quite done with that place and even so the mothers couldn't resist talking about the crime rate in KL and how important it is to keep one's keys close to oneself at all times and such like before going off back to Patience in the rented van, probably talking all the way back about how worried they were and how completely unsuitable KL is for poor young things with no parents to guide their every step.
I spent the night there, sandwiched between Pig's Tail and one of the other male occupants of the apartment. It was quite interesting watching the group dynamics; Pig's Tail, you see, is commonly a very taciturn person, doesn't talk much, etc. but that's only in the presence of family gatherings, and apparently only when there's no computer nearby and the only people around are cousins and aunts, uncles, grandfolks, etc. In the presence of friends he lightens up a great deal more. It was quite reassuring (yes, I worry about my cousins too. At least, some of 'em. The Brats could be found tied up and dead in a ditch tomorrow outside this house, with all their organs harvested for black market sale, and I wouldn't turn a hair other than to wonder if the parents knew yet). The next morning I woke, around 6, and left along with some of the occupants who also had to wake up that early. Pig's Tail also woke up to send me off.
It was about 3 hours' journeying to get to the airport and check in and everything; my check-in luggage was about .5kg short of the limit, because I was wearing my trekking shoes and had put my flipflops in the bag. (When I was wearing the flipflops and had the shoes in the bag it was 1 kilo overweight. Those are very heavy shoes.) I left the apartment around 7.15 or so; it was about five minutes from the apartment to the bus stop, ten minutes by bus to the LRT station (we happened to arrive with the bus so there was no waiting), about fifteen minutes' waiting for a sufficiently empty space on the LRT trains, half an hour on the LRT to get to the Central Station, five minutes to find the shuttle buses, another ten minutes of waiting for the shuttle bus to start moving, about 75 minutes or so of the bus ride, and then I was at the airport and ready to check in. I was the 38th passenger to check in on that flight, if I remember correctly; I certainly went online, on the WiFi (weak thing it was too, kept disconnecting and I couldn't open MSN and had to communicate by Facebook chat), at around 9.45 (boarding at 10.40 which gave me 50 minutes' chatting).
I arrived at Patience, and almost immediately due to a snarl-up of communications it was three hours before I was fetched from it and arrived at the house where I am currently staying.
And thus I am now here in Patience, in this house (which is not mine).
My hosts are a middle-aged couple, whose children I know through church and who also know my family quite well. The children are currently away, and will eventually return. I could dissect their personalities for you, but you'll find out enough from these posts anyway, if you read; so I'll not do so. They're very devout Christians--well, if you hadn't known my beliefs before you certainly ought to by now--so they somehow shoehorned me into attending an all-day conference thing of some sort on Saturday. To be honest of course I didn't put up too much resistance since I hadn't got any plans on that day anyway so I said okay.
In between Tuesday and Saturday, I found out that my computer has issues with routers and cannot go online for some reason--I am typing this post in WordPad which is primitive but at least won't crash my computer every few minutes. I also found out that my external hard disk will not work for unknown reasons--Jogger and I discussed it over MSN and it's probably something loose in it, but I can't open it up because I haven't got screwdrivers and I don't know where the screwdrivers are in this house. On the other hand it might be something in the power supply or whatnot--I've never, I realised a few days ago, tried to use that hard drive in this country. It's always only been used before in Spore, China, and Hong Kong--never Malaysia. Of course that shouldn't explain it, but at this point I'm willing for even an inane reason to hope that I won't have to scrap that thing and all the data in it. My laptop also somehow lost a driver (it is apparently called the IDE Controller, and is listed as an AWHNBLAHBLAH thing) and now keeps telling me to update that driver. I tried. It won't update (partly because I have no Internet connectivity on this blasted laptop). I'm very seriously considering getting a new one.
Saturday came, my hosts and I went to the conference, met some other friends from church there, and sat down to listen. Very unfortunately it was not an enlightening experience in any way--the man may have gifts of all sorts but preaching and teaching certainly aren't in his skillset. It may also have been because the speaker was a Sanguine and tended to get carried away with anecdotes, little jokes, metaphors and descriptions: at one point he ended up spending ten minutes describing a metaphor as an analogy to some sort of simile and the audience--at least, I--ended up not getting his point entirely. If he had had one to make to begin with. It was all very incoherent and I didn't find it at all useful. On the other hand... Charismatic Christians are differentiated from other denominations by their huge insistence that God should play an active, visible, audible role in their lives. At least, that's how I see it; and one particular result of this is that they believe that prophets exist and can relay God's words directly to you, because you're too dense or un-gifted or naughty for God to speak to you or be heard by you. Or something. I find the theology behind the idea somewhat eyebrow-raising to say the least; though admittedly sometimes God works a lot too subtly for the common person to hear. That's the whole idea behind the mystics running off to be hermits and monks after all, the idea that you get rid of all the wordly distractions so you can act as an uncluttered pipeline of a sort... but I digress. This speaker chose, after the seminar was done, to pray for every single person attending, which ended up including me. He turned out to be rather accurate, which I'm not sure to be happy about or slightly creeped out about. The idea of a near-total stranger (and don't you give me that stuff about everybody being siblings-in-spirit because that does NOT automatically get you my approval) knowing stuff about you that only God should know... is less than comforting to me. And of course the fact that he was doing it in earshot of a lot of other people just decreases that comfort even more. (Then again, I'd turned my phone's voice-recorder on and had accidentally recorded what he said about the three or four people he was talking to before me, so... yeah.)
After the seminar, I was invited to sleep over at the house of a couple of church friends (they'd attended the seminar too) so I did, and was introduced to TED.com: quite entertaining that site is. Pity about the buggy Internet connection, though, because it froze up halfway through Bill Gates' speech and we went to sleep shortly thereafter.
Sunday I went (with the aforementioned friends) to church (leaving my camera behind in their house in the process), and was recognised by about 30% of the people there; 70% of the church was totally unfamiliar faces to me, which I suppose is a good thing really. We talked a bit, and then that was that for that.
I should add a note here that my hosts are also members of a club located by a nearby beach; thus they go there almost daily for tennis, gym sessions, etc; and I usually go along with them to walk on the beach, usually in about five or six inches of water and sometimes a bit more, depending on the length of my shorts at the time--they're not all the same length. In fact we went there the evening I arrived, and a lovely rainstorm came along and I thought it was a nice way to make up for the irritation of sitting in an airport for three hours calling people up to find out just what had gone asnarl and why nobody was already there to pick me up. In any case it's a lovely beach: quite clean, there's crabs and snails and things all over the place most of the time, and in some parts of it if you wade out to knee-height, you can quite suddenly come across a clump of jellyfish--little cute bubbles that nevertheless inspire the most amazing fits of terror. And crabs, of course, tiny little territorial buggers that react to your shadow falling on them by raising up their claws and doing a little side-to-side dance, covering random bits of sand and kicking up a little cloud in the process--and then the dance stops, and the sand-cloud clears, and the crab has vanished safely under the sand. I've accidentally set off a lot of crabs a-dancing, and once even accidentally stepped on one. It was quite a nip, but only painful because it was unexpected--if I'd seen it coming I shouldn't have felt it at all, I think. Sometimes when the tide is especially low, starfish are exposed as well and then you're treated to the sight of a lot of little five-armed (or less; some of them are injured) critters slowly undulating their way back to water. Some of them don't even do that, preferring to burrow under the sand so that they get to the damper layers underneath. Overall it's an entertaining sight, because starfish are not very stealthy burrowers: they can be found by the star-shaped indentations they leave behind (or rather above) them. I unfortunately have very few photos of these; due to having only gotten my camera back yesterday (after Sunday), I haven't had the opportunity to photograph very much. I fully intend to remedy this.
It was, I think, on Saturday night that the Pig first SMSed me after my arrival in Patience. Unfortunately my phone was on silent as it always is, and I didn't read it until far too late to respond. On Monday night he called instead (clever move that, really), and we went out to supper and eat. I got back at 2am, to my hosts' disapproval the next morning; fortunately I've gotten into the habit of always having keys around when I go out so I didn't have to wake anybody up to get back into the house. On Tuesday night I went out again for supper and came back at 3am, having discovered a wonderful little place that apparently serves insomniacs because it's a collection of little mamak stalls that open beginning from 1am or so; I also visited his new house (new to me: he's been in it for a couple years or so by now) and--my goodness--I want a screen like his. And a laptop, of course. And pretty much everything else. I feel like a pauper really: a very ill-equipped pauper. Wednesday morning I woke quite early, having got about 4.5 hours' sleep, and went out with the church friends and some of their old schoolmates and some other schoolmates of theirs (they used to be local, then moved to Canada, and now are back for their summer holidays too) to an island.
It was a nice trip: I've always liked water anyway, and the sea spray was absolutely delightful. It was partly disappointing that the beach of the island in question was mostly composed of bits of broken coral and shells, which made it painful to walk on; and trash left behind from previous visitors (it is far too popular an island!), which made it painful to look at. But we didn't spend too much time walking on the beach or staring at the trash, because the fishes distracted us. We'd been swimming for awhile, and eating in the water (or, rather, eating just above the surface of the water) when we noticed fishes. Thinking we'd feed them, we dropped in a bit of fruit and watched the fish attack it ravenously. We next dropped in a bit of meat and the fish went Vashta Nerada on it: the meat spun for a bit and turned into a bone. And then the big fish appeared, having somehow caught scent of the meat or perhaps the little fishes were gossipy. I'm not sure how, but we soon were feeding bits of meat on bones to the big fish too. This lasted awhile, during which the big fish demonstrated their ability to grab and swim off with small bones, as well as their propensity to nibble on fingers when the bone had no meat left on it.
We then went on a banana boat ride (two of the others went parasailing), which was also decidedly enjoyable. A banana boat ride occurs in the following way: you go on a speedboat out on the sea into deep waters, after which the boat-driver unties some ropes and pulls a large inflatable cylinder down, leaving it to drift behind the boat attached by some very long rope. The cylinder looks like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette in cross-section, so it doesn't continually roll over and over like a log. On the part of it that is supposed to be the top, are five handlebars. You sit on the topmost cylinder, holding on to one handlebar. At least three people are needed, though (obviously) a maximum of five people are allowed on. Once everybody is on, the boat starts off again (it stops while the driver deploys the inflatable thing and you get on), and the boat driver does his best to get you to overbalance and fall off. Two falls and the ride's over; but the falling, admittedly, is the most fun part. My particular bunch of people was most entertaining, because our first fall didn't all happen at once; one girl fell off first and was left in the sea some distance behind, upon which the 4 of us still hanging on yelled to the driver that she'd gone overboard. The driver made such a sharp turn back to her that we all immediately fell off. The second one was far more simple, and everybody fell off together. As a side note, my watch strap somehow contrived to snap during the first ride; fortunately it didn't fall off, being stuck to me by sweat, sea, and forward moment; and I had the presence of mind to grab onto it as soon as I saw it was broken, so I didn't lose it in the fall. I'm quite thankful for that.
After the banana boat rides and falls we went snorkeling, eating, swimming, photographing, shell-and-coral-collecting--essentially what anybody does on an island. It was good fun, and it eventually ended and we all went back on the last boat available (I think it was, anyhow), at around 5pm.
Later that night I went out again with the Pig to catch the premiere of Terminator: Salvation. It's not too bad, quite entertaining, although in their effort to be all techy and stuff the directors omitted a lot of science and research. Helena Bonham Carter put in a minor appearance as a somewhat deranged technician. Admittedly she does the deranged role very well, but one somehow wonders if she isn't getting a bit typecast. The movie wasn't too bad, and after it we visited the Insomniacs' Mamak Collection again (as I'm starting to think of it, because I don't know its name--the Pig calls it Lido or something like that).
I woke up today at 7, 9, and 12pm (but got out of bed only at 12).
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