time to go
For our benefit as much as the children’s <wink>, our little ones tend to be in bed by about 7pm at home.
We knew this was one routine that would not necessarily be observed on the road.
The first four or five days we woke at 4am regardless of what time we went to bed. That was 9am by our internal body clocks, which for our crew is a sleep-in of a magnitude never experienced at home. So we lay in bed for a couple of hours trying to rest and adjust. We expected to wake later and later each day. But suddenly one morning we all woke at 7. The switch had been made. Caught us by surprise.
We started staying up later at night. And by the time we made it to Melaka, we were eating dinner at dusk, wandering up and down the night market, weaving through the streets of Chinatown after dark.
This was good preparation for Kuala Lumpur.
The first night we were staying with an uncle who had arranged a family feast at a nearby tennis club. Dinner was to be at 7. As the water supply to his house had been turned off, he decided we should go to the club for showers about 6:30. At 6:45 Aunty started to show K9 how to play a game and uncle started the second round of rambutan-picking from the tree. We got to the club about 8 😉 Three hours later, when dinner finished the children were still coping. Just.
Day Two Uncle said to be home by 3:30 so we could beat rush hour traffic to get across town to his daughter’s place where we would be staying for the rest of our KL time. We were home in time. Packed, sitting ready to leave. At 4:30 he started to clean the van. At 5:30 we were discussing his time sense with Aunty. "Is this Malaysia time or Uncle time?" "Well I’m not like that!" she sputtered!!!!! In walked Uncle, declaring, "Let’s have a cup of tea, we’ll go at 6" 😉 It was going to be another late dinner! This time the smallest one did not fare quite so well, although a lollipop offered by the proprietor quietened her for some time.
And now our time with Uncle is over. He said he’d drop us off at the YMCA by 3pm, and for the very first time, we were actually early, releasing us from his abundant generous hospitality. For a week and a half we have been treated like royalty, being shown attractions, showered with gifts, and taken out for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Our cultural norms make this hard to accept, especially for such a prolonged time. While we didn’t do half of what Uncle had planned, we packed far more in to our time than we would have if left to our own devices. Even with the many hours spent waiting to get going 😉
Uncle’s time-sense is a source of amusement for the whole family (his family, not ours, that is…..oh, OK, his family AND ours now too)….and it’s a good reminder to our children to not make broad sweeping generalisations about an entire race based on one person!
Final pictures from the Cameron highlands trek down to Ipoh:
PS. GPS-ing in Ipoh
Here we are on our own negotiating this 2 million person city. It’s just us, Uncle’s van and the GPS. And it would appear the world has turned upside-down or back-to-front while we were up in the hills away from technology. Really! The GPS announced we were arriving at the Railway Station on our right….but it was sitting there grandly to the left. As for the actual buildings, they, according to the GPS, were positioned on the wrong side of the railway tracks! Not to worry. We have decided to take a bus to Penang anyway, so we don’t need the railway station after all. Mr GPS told us the bus station was 300m away from the train station in a northerly direction. Before embarking on the walk, we asked a head-scarfed Malay lady, who pointed (with her thumb, of course) due south. We followed her thumb and arrived at the bus depot, only to discover it was the wrong one. Clever Mr GPS managed to get us to the right one – after driving us across town he declared we’d be seeing it on our left, but luckily we looked out the other window and spotted the busses on the right!!
Two days without internet and the world falls apart!
Tags: postcard: Malaysia, transport
rayres
yum sweetcorn
and must help havign your body clocks set to the right time again
I thoroughly enjoyed the “P.S.” Too funny!!
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