whoever can tell me why life is like a hornet's nest.
I'll post the "real answer" in a few days.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
I should be planning for my 2nd lesson tomorrow but
due to the overwhelming, unsurmountable, indefatigable, irrefusable requests, I will e-procrastinate for a few moments.
The first story takes place in the no-man's-land between Singapore and Malaysia, sometime around the 16th of December, in the Year of Our Lord 2009. For a few days in Singapore, I had been to some degree constipated, despite copious amounts of Indian, Malay, and Chinese food and beer, and despite my best efforts to....well, not be all plugged up.
Needless to say, I was a bit worried about the bus ride from Singapore to Melaka, having no idea how long it'd take or how many stops there'd be. I of course tried my darndest to relieve myself at 1) my hostel; 2) the subway station, and 3) the Singapore immigration office, all to no avail. With my visa stamped and ticket purchased, I had no choice but to board the next bus. I expected it to take about 3 hours - after all, it did have "Melaka" written on it - and was utterly terrified. Thankfully, it dropped us off at the Malaysia entry point after just 3 or 4 minutes, at which point my companion YoungHo and I got into the freakishly long line of people waiting for their entry visas.
After about 90 minutes of slowly inching forward, we got our visas, passed through customs, and went out to tbe bus terminal. By this point I was pretty ready to go (and I don't mean to Melaka). I started following the signs to the bathroom, which were taking me back in the direction I had come from, but this time on the outside of the building. I ducked in to some little alleys and wove my way around cars and trucks and finally found the bathrooms, guarded by some old lady who couldn't speak English. She put her hand out and I realized I had to pay a fee. Unfortunately, I hadn't changed any of my Singaporean currency into Malaysian Ringgit; fortunately, she accepted the smallest Singaporean coin I had and even gave me a change. Home free!
Or not. There were two stalls inside the bathroom. One was locked, though nobody was in it, and there was no way of going over or under. The other stall was open, but there was a man inside. (The toilets were squat toilets. Sometimes there's a flush mechanism, but more often than not, you just have to scoop some water in with a ladel, itself floating in a bucket of water. When the bucket runs low, you just fill it up from the spigot jutting out of the wall.) Said man was desperately trying to plug a hole in the wall where the spigot used to be. Water was flowing out at a respectable rate; and when he tried to jam a wrench with a cloth wrapped around it into the whole, the flow turned into a horizontal shower spray, soaking him from head to toe. He called in the woman to fix it, but she had the same bad luck. Conclusion: toilet unusable.
I gave the woman my saddest look and pointed to the ladies' room. I figured I'd never get away with it, since Malaysia's officially a Muslim country, but she ushered me in. Home free!
I lower my pants and arrange them and myself to avoid soiling. Unfortunately, due to factors such as hasty positioning and unpredictable, uncontrollable trajectories, not all of the evacuated material made it into its proper receptacle. That is to say, the floor and wall, and, worse, my shoes and calves, found themselves with a light coating of something less than pleasant. Nooooooo!
And what's the other thing that one must always worry about in a public bathroom? If you responded "Idahoan senators performing homosexual lewd conduct," well, that is something one should worry about, but wrong. If you responded "lack of toilet paper" then you are indeed right! Can't pull up the pants...can't go anywhere...what a dilemma!
In my one stroke of luck that day, I did have a few packs of tissues in my manbag.
The first story takes place in the no-man's-land between Singapore and Malaysia, sometime around the 16th of December, in the Year of Our Lord 2009. For a few days in Singapore, I had been to some degree constipated, despite copious amounts of Indian, Malay, and Chinese food and beer, and despite my best efforts to....well, not be all plugged up.
Needless to say, I was a bit worried about the bus ride from Singapore to Melaka, having no idea how long it'd take or how many stops there'd be. I of course tried my darndest to relieve myself at 1) my hostel; 2) the subway station, and 3) the Singapore immigration office, all to no avail. With my visa stamped and ticket purchased, I had no choice but to board the next bus. I expected it to take about 3 hours - after all, it did have "Melaka" written on it - and was utterly terrified. Thankfully, it dropped us off at the Malaysia entry point after just 3 or 4 minutes, at which point my companion YoungHo and I got into the freakishly long line of people waiting for their entry visas.
After about 90 minutes of slowly inching forward, we got our visas, passed through customs, and went out to tbe bus terminal. By this point I was pretty ready to go (and I don't mean to Melaka). I started following the signs to the bathroom, which were taking me back in the direction I had come from, but this time on the outside of the building. I ducked in to some little alleys and wove my way around cars and trucks and finally found the bathrooms, guarded by some old lady who couldn't speak English. She put her hand out and I realized I had to pay a fee. Unfortunately, I hadn't changed any of my Singaporean currency into Malaysian Ringgit; fortunately, she accepted the smallest Singaporean coin I had and even gave me a change. Home free!
Or not. There were two stalls inside the bathroom. One was locked, though nobody was in it, and there was no way of going over or under. The other stall was open, but there was a man inside. (The toilets were squat toilets. Sometimes there's a flush mechanism, but more often than not, you just have to scoop some water in with a ladel, itself floating in a bucket of water. When the bucket runs low, you just fill it up from the spigot jutting out of the wall.) Said man was desperately trying to plug a hole in the wall where the spigot used to be. Water was flowing out at a respectable rate; and when he tried to jam a wrench with a cloth wrapped around it into the whole, the flow turned into a horizontal shower spray, soaking him from head to toe. He called in the woman to fix it, but she had the same bad luck. Conclusion: toilet unusable.
I gave the woman my saddest look and pointed to the ladies' room. I figured I'd never get away with it, since Malaysia's officially a Muslim country, but she ushered me in. Home free!
I lower my pants and arrange them and myself to avoid soiling. Unfortunately, due to factors such as hasty positioning and unpredictable, uncontrollable trajectories, not all of the evacuated material made it into its proper receptacle. That is to say, the floor and wall, and, worse, my shoes and calves, found themselves with a light coating of something less than pleasant. Nooooooo!
And what's the other thing that one must always worry about in a public bathroom? If you responded "Idahoan senators performing homosexual lewd conduct," well, that is something one should worry about, but wrong. If you responded "lack of toilet paper" then you are indeed right! Can't pull up the pants...can't go anywhere...what a dilemma!
In my one stroke of luck that day, I did have a few packs of tissues in my manbag.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Two Coincidences
1) Every time I cross a border, I thumb through my passport and admire the growing collection of stamps and visas. I was doing so yesteray when I noticed that exactly 1 year had passed between my first and second entries into Thailand: 07 Feb 2008 and 07 Feb 2009. Crazy, eh?
2) On a slightly different note, both my first (Singapore-Malaysia) and final (Laos-Thailand) border-crossing experiences were marred by Severe Gastro-Intestinal Distress. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, I'll just leave it at that. Unless I get 5 comments (all from different non-anonymous readers, no cheating!) begging to know all about my adventures in digestion.
2) On a slightly different note, both my first (Singapore-Malaysia) and final (Laos-Thailand) border-crossing experiences were marred by Severe Gastro-Intestinal Distress. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, I'll just leave it at that. Unless I get 5 comments (all from different non-anonymous readers, no cheating!) begging to know all about my adventures in digestion.
Cessation of Perambulation
Yes, that means what you think it does. My 9 weeks of vagabondage are over and from tomorrow I will stay in one place for more than 4 days, and perhaps change my clothes more often than every other day.
Just had an exhausting day consisting of: minvan rides, boat rides, bus rides, taxi rides, accomodation-searching, toilet stops, and no food. And the poor little kid next to me on the last bus puking (but not on me). But now I'm in my hotel for the night, having been ripped off one final time.
Class starts the day after tomorrow...
Just had an exhausting day consisting of: minvan rides, boat rides, bus rides, taxi rides, accomodation-searching, toilet stops, and no food. And the poor little kid next to me on the last bus puking (but not on me). But now I'm in my hotel for the night, having been ripped off one final time.
Class starts the day after tomorrow...
Friday, January 23, 2009
A few days
I just spent a few days on Phu Quoc Island. You should look it up, because it truly is ridiculously beautiful. While there, I did the following things:
Here was my daily schedule:
wake
read
eat
lather
read on beach
swim around
eat
read (in hammock)
nap
play pool
beach
sunset
happy hour
australian open
dinner
play pool
read
maybe play poker
sleep
again
I finished 3 more books:
- The Last Supper, by Chris McChristopher or something, a truly trashy spy novel that I recommend to nobody, ever. I only read it because the other stuff on the shared-book shelf was in German
- When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, by a Vietnamese Lady named Bay Le Ly or some such, kind of like a "Diary of Anne Frank" except a lot more graphic and terrifying. Not that I've ever read "Diary of Anne Frank."
- White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. A truly zany post-modern, post-colonial, post-whatever melange of Salman Rushdie and Douglas Adams and probably some other people. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't recommend reading all 540 pages in one day.
I am still reading Soul Mountain, but it's actually so awesome that I don't want to finish it, so I keep buying or bumming all these other books to read in between chapters. I just got "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy. Despite the promising surname, all the good reviews have me skeptical. Also purchased a pirated "Lonely Planet: Laos" guidebook. Pirated books are all over the place here, it's truly crazy. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly, enough, I have scruples with buying pirated books and managed to search out a legit Vietnam guidebook. No such luck on Laos, though.
Tomorrow afternoon I start a 19 hour train ride that will take me to Hue, which is only in the middle of Vietnam. Who knew this place was so stretched out? It takes 31-41 hours to get from Saigon to Hanoi by train (depending on which kind you take), and that still leaves off quite a bit of the North and South regions.
After the ride, I'll have at most 5 days in Hue before my visa expires and I either move to Laos or a prison. I'm hoping to wind up in prison, because getting to the capital of Laos apparently requires another 25 hours of bus rides. Maybe next time I'll try to calculate how many hours I've spent going places and how many hours I've spent being there. The ratio will surely make me sick.
Here was my daily schedule:
wake
read
eat
lather
read on beach
swim around
eat
read (in hammock)
nap
play pool
beach
sunset
happy hour
australian open
dinner
play pool
read
maybe play poker
sleep
again
I finished 3 more books:
- The Last Supper, by Chris McChristopher or something, a truly trashy spy novel that I recommend to nobody, ever. I only read it because the other stuff on the shared-book shelf was in German
- When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, by a Vietnamese Lady named Bay Le Ly or some such, kind of like a "Diary of Anne Frank" except a lot more graphic and terrifying. Not that I've ever read "Diary of Anne Frank."
- White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. A truly zany post-modern, post-colonial, post-whatever melange of Salman Rushdie and Douglas Adams and probably some other people. Pretty cool, but I wouldn't recommend reading all 540 pages in one day.
I am still reading Soul Mountain, but it's actually so awesome that I don't want to finish it, so I keep buying or bumming all these other books to read in between chapters. I just got "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy. Despite the promising surname, all the good reviews have me skeptical. Also purchased a pirated "Lonely Planet: Laos" guidebook. Pirated books are all over the place here, it's truly crazy. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly, enough, I have scruples with buying pirated books and managed to search out a legit Vietnam guidebook. No such luck on Laos, though.
Tomorrow afternoon I start a 19 hour train ride that will take me to Hue, which is only in the middle of Vietnam. Who knew this place was so stretched out? It takes 31-41 hours to get from Saigon to Hanoi by train (depending on which kind you take), and that still leaves off quite a bit of the North and South regions.
After the ride, I'll have at most 5 days in Hue before my visa expires and I either move to Laos or a prison. I'm hoping to wind up in prison, because getting to the capital of Laos apparently requires another 25 hours of bus rides. Maybe next time I'll try to calculate how many hours I've spent going places and how many hours I've spent being there. The ratio will surely make me sick.
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