The big relax

Bear with me on the link with this title, I promise it will work out.

So,yesterday was pretty uneventful. Penang is advertised on the telly in SE Asia and everything. Unfortunately, all of the places advertised on the T.V. seem to be within 2 minutes of each other, so once you have done those things…

So we spent the vast majority of yesterday doing nothing, a whopping3 hours spent on the internet (a heady combination of the net being very cheap and a monsoon that was so heavy it made raw sewage flood the streets) left us feeling the day had done nothing.

A bit like the first 2 1/2 hours of Stanly Kubric’s Vatican approved classic. Similar to the movie, the day then went rabid-dog mental in the final20 minutes.

Watching the communal T.V. in our guesthouse, we were 45 minutes into a 1 hour show about the assassination of Martin Luthur King Jr when a drunk Eastern European man decides to change the chanel at the last advert. It’s cool, we think, the man just doesn’t want to watch ads, no problem. He then doesn’t turn it back.

A polite request from me. Followed by an exceptionally arrogant response from him. Followed by a further, slightly less (only slighlty ) request from me to turn it back.

Then the tirade of insults begins. Eventually he backs off, I’m afterall, a clear foot taller and a few inches wider than him in the shoulders. But it seems the unspent testosterone is not ready to sleep yet. The manager assure me and Lauren that the man is harmless and just a very bad drunk so, placated, Lauren and I return to watching the T.V. while the idiot drunk stumbles off upstairs mubling obscenities under his breath.

I go upstairs to our room for a second when a loud, booming American voices thunders down the hallway at me, just as my key hits the lock.

‘Hey buddy!,’ he yells, a tall, long haired hippy type dressed only in a towel, ‘you wanna close that door a bit quieter? All night you been banging that thing and if you do it again I’m going to come down there and kick your ass.’ Brilliantly, I hadn’t been banging the door. It was my friend, the eastern European, who, upon hearing aggressive voices, couldn’t help butpoke his head out to get in on the action. Lauren and I quickly explained to the American that it wasn’t us and we were sorry if we reacted aggressively, but the American had apparently been the target of Euroboy’s insults the previous night, and the bad blood was still there.

Lauren and I returned downstairs to the T.V. the two ment still arguing. Within 10 minutes, the American, to his full credit, came down to apologize to Lauren and I for his misplaced anger, he really was a very reasonable man. So that was all good.

Upon returning to our room, the European is still out in the hallway bitching to some other guest about us and the American. The other guest is clearly just someone uninvolved who barely even knows the man but is too polite to excuse himself. I bite the bullet, walk down the hall, apologize and shake the man’s hand. He smiles and gives me a ‘playful’ punch on the chest so as not to loose too much face for himself.

I could still hear him bitching as I went into my room.  All in all, much ado about nothing.

Did I mention he already had a black eye? What a bad drunk indeed!

Did Hal have a black eye in 2001? That would make this link seem much, much lest tenuous…

Today more of the same, internet, being rained on, good food, banana shake, reading. Tomorrow we’re going to the Cameron Highlands which are meant to be nothing short of spectacular. I’ll tell it as I see it.

Waking up a little late is my favourite thing about traveling, not because I’m out of  the ‘rat race’ of being up for work early, not because it is a big physical statement about my shriking of responsibilities, but because, when we wake up late, I get to have lunch food for my breakfast.

Today we managed a swift 1 pm wake up. In fairness, going to Malaysia has put the clock forwards an hour so for us it was technically midday. We got ourselves together and went in search of some grub. The first place we went to we exited pretty quick sharp. There was a lot of Chinese Malays eating there, but the place had the overall demenour of a scene from a horror film. Like you could almost see the blood of the slaughtered animals on the concrete floor. the menu’s that the lady brought us over (after we had ascertained that it was a lady, some very hairy women in these parts,) were covered in, for want of a better word, shit.

At the end of the street, Lauren spotted a beacon of light, a very westernized looking place that promised sandwiches, which Lauren had 5 minutes previously professed to being her favourite food. The place was a bit too western for me though. *SMUG TRAVELER* *SMUG TRAVELER* *SMUG TRAVELER* so I left Lauren waiting for her roasted aubergeine and olive sandwich and went in search of something a little more authentic.

Straddling Chinatown is Little India. I love curry, really, truly love curry. How Kathy Bates  feels about James Caan in Mysery is how I feel about curry. Little India is freaking curry heaven! I stopped by a little cafe that looked, well not too foreign, but not too western either and went in. There were plenty of local Muslim men chomping away and I timidly asked the lady in charge for a menu.

‘Menu?’ she said, and at first I thought she didn’t understand.

‘We don’t have them, come back into the kitchen and pick what you want,’ awed, I followed her into her kitchen where all sorts of gorgeous smells emanated. I opted for some tomato pilau rice with a chicken breast on top. It came to 4RM with a can of Sprite thrown in. That’s 75p to you and me.

Returning back to the restaurant with the sandwiches and Lauren was still waiting, when it did come, it did look very good. But I sat back, full to the brim of pilau, chicken curry and unmitigated smugness.

Long, long, long ride form Koh Phi Phi to Penang, Malaysia. In reality, it was only about 10 hours, but because it was all in mini-buses a la Laos rather than the VIP busses that the rest of SE Asia ... [Continue reading this entry]