Playing Catch Up

So much has been happening that I haven't been blogging it. Also, my internet at home is pretty terrible. I'm frantically writing this as I await my taxi to a bus to a metro to another bus to a plane to Australia, and I don't think I'll be able to upload pictures in this post. I feel compelled to blog, though, because I know I will have a lot to blog about from my Australia trip. Maybe I'll come back and put in pictures later.

-At the end of June, I had a "half-time" meeting in KL with all the ETAs. It was a very strange meeting psychologically. It was odd to be back in a luxury hotel with really hot water and a bath tub and AC and no mosquitoes biting while you sleep. We also happened to be around for the Fulbright Malaysia 50th anniversary gala at the hotel. It was fancy and there was lots of delicious, small food--including a sorbet to cleanse the palate--and many speeches. Afterwards, I went to a rooftop Middle Eastern place in KL with friends.

-Although I was dreading working on a Sunday and having to be athletic, Sports Day at my school turned out to be a blast. I was a member of the blue house, and as soon as I got to school I was enlisted to help kids put on their outlandish jellyfish outfits for the house parade. America needs more spectacle like that. I then hung out with the other blue team teachers and ate blue rice. Of course. Then I spent the day judging foot races, bonding with the other teacher judges, and congratulating the kids on their swiftness. It was kind of awesome.

Blue rice! Also, look, I have teacher friends!

Obligatory bunga manga shot.

Are you getting jelly?

Dude, Malaysian 16-year-old boys tend to take themselves a lot less seriously than their American counterparts. Look what a good sport our main jellyfish man was. 

-I attended my first primary school English camp. The theme was "Silly Science," and the children were absolutely adorable. It was a good learning experience to think about how different it would be if I were teaching primary school here. On the one hand, the kids' enthusiasm and energy was much higher than my students', and they never "got fresh." On the other hand, you can't really talk about any interesting concepts with them, which makes me overall prefer my sassy teens. To see just how cute the camp was, check out this video that Amy made: http://vimeo.com/70841089.

-Amy spent three days in the hospital in Kuantan for tonsilitis, so we had a lot of party time to watch movies and Arrested Development. It was eye-opening to see that even a relatively good hospital in this part of the world kind of, well, sucks. As in, when you are admitted, they just have you sit in a hospital bed for an hour before anyone really tells you why you've been admitted, whether they'll be giving you medicine, etc. And when the nurse does come around to give you your IV, she may say disconcerting things like, "So, your operation is tomorrow?" when you have no plans to have an operation at all. You may share a room with an entire family, including rowdy small children, who are camped out to support their dad and who never quiet down until after 1 am. One of your other roommates may appear to have been admitted for chronic loud burping. Also, in general, there is a culture of disgusting hacking coughing in Asia that I will not miss. It's hard to explain the prevalence of extremely loud and unabashed hacking and spitting on the streets and, as I now know, in hospital bathrooms here. For some people, it seems to be a nightly ritual.

-Once Amy recovered, we went on a lovely dive trip weekend at a beautiful island. But first, we attacked coconuts with scissors to make homemade coconut shakes, made homemade pudding, and watched The Lady Vanishes. All of these activities are highly recommended. The island was beautiful, and our "all-inclusive resort" (read: no hot water or AC, cheap package deal with diving) ended up having a great family feel to it. We made friends with some middle-aged Chinese Malaysian businessmen who were on our dive boat with us. Turns out they were diving in order to shoot fish with a crossbow. We later ate their fresh catch in the family-style outdoor dining room. The fish still had little harpoon-type marks in their sides.

Note the scissors and coconut victim number 1 draining in the background.

-Then, my friend Achsah and I went to Malacca for a weekend. I LOVED Malacca, since everyone knows I love a good walking around and eating city with history. Nyonya food is delicious; those Straits Chinese grannies have been doing fusion cuisine since before fusion cuisine was a thing. I highly recommend the Baba Nyonya Museum, which is basically just a tour of a wealthy Straits Chinese family's turn-of-the-century mansion. It was kind of like a Malaysian Newport mansion tour. Throughout the weekend, Achsah and I gorged ourselves on nyonya delicacies, pineapple tarts, dim sum, tandoori chicken and naan, chicken rice balls (a Malacca delicacy, for some reason), and all the free homemade baked goods provided each morning at our beautiful hostel. We also did a very soothing "tea appreciation" ceremony, visited some historic sites, and toured what is perhaps the world's finest museum. It's called the "People's/Kite/Enduring Beauty Museum," and it has exhibits on Malaysian history, traditional Malaysian games, kite-flying the world over, and, my personal favorite, "Beauty through Torture," an exhibit on body modification from corsets to scarification. The captions in the beauty exhibit were completely over-the-top and hilarious. The section on tattooing, for instance, included quotes from "modern primitives"--today's tattooed and pierced members of modern society--about their motivations for sporting tattoos. Some of my best friends are "modern primitives," I discovered, so the exhibit was enlightening. Anyway, Malacca is a beautiful city, and I would love to go back.

Thanks, Christ Church, for captioning yourself.

Unidentified crumbly building. You know I love it. 

That white tower is Kling Mosque, which looks lovely but was closed for renovations when we visited. 

St. Peter's

Old gravemarkers that used to be in the floor of St. Peter's. 

-Island hopping with the Fulbrighters. To bid farewell to one of our program coordinators who is heading back to the US to start grad school, 50 ETAs piled onto 3 small boats for the day to explore small, semi-deserted islands off the coast of Malaysia. There was snorkeling and beautiful turquoise water and white sand galore. One of the islands we visited turned out to be the filming site for some European versions of "Survivor," and somewhere in the vicinity a crew was filming Eden, a movie about a soccer team that gets stranded and goes all Lord of the Flies. The whole shebang cost each of us less than $25 for the day. It was one of those times when I thought, "Is this real life? I'm going to miss this when I go home."

-It's Ramadan, kids. I tried fasting for 1.5 days, but I didn't go so far as to avoid drinking water all day. (One day I made it till 5 pm without any water, but then I thought I might die.) I attended an iftar dinner at my school, where a teacher told me she finds it easy to fast because, "We are not fasting with our stomachs, but with our hearts." Admirable sentiments. One of the best parts of Ramadan is getting to break the fast with murtabak, a really delicious food (google it!) that is everywhere during this season. I really enjoyed going to a Ramadan bazaar with a teacher friend from my school and talking to her about how she observes Ramadan.

-I am an honorary Chinese teacher. Maybe. I went to a goodbye dinner attended by all the Chinese teachers and ate a ton of delicious Chinese food. They promised me karaoke for my farewell party in October, so I think I'm in. I've also been racking up the invites to go get noodles outside of school during class breaks, which we're allowed to do during Ramadan because the school cafeteria has only limited options.

-Writing Workshop has been going like gangbusters with the one or two kids who show up. Before, I would've felt like a failure for getting such poor attendance, but now I'm just like, "Whatevs. These two kids are going to get the best darn writing instruction I can give them for an hour and a half on Tuesdays." I'm really enjoying it, because the kids who come are really bright-eyed and eager to learn and full of creative ideas, like a murder mystery in which Nicki Minaj's chihuahua, which has one red eye and one green eye, is brutally killed.

Phew! So there you have it. It's not all glamor, folks. Don't forget how many nights I spend in my apartment just reading and sweating, dreading lesson-planning, and wishing there was more to do in Kuantan.

Books!
My kindle died for a while there, which was scary, but now it's back.

The Garden of Evening Mists. By a Malaysian author. Kind of a downer. If I can get away with saying this, the style was way too meditative and, well, Asian for my taste. Too much stuff about honor and stoicism and face and shooting arrows with your mind, not your hand. Couldn't identify.
I think I forgot to say last time that I read On the Road. Eh.
Finished The Rasputin File, which was awesome.
To my semi-shame, I read a Sookie Stackhouse novel called Dead Reckoning. The series is the basis for the show True Blood.
Moonwalking with Einstein. Excellent book about a journalist entering the U.S. Memory Championships. It makes me angry that the author was 24 when he won the championship and started working on this book. I am 23. What am I doing?