Kuantan: Parting Shots

I'm sitting on my friend Katie's comfy couch in her apartment in KL, biding my time while she's away at work. Generous as ever, she's letting me crash here while I get myself together before flying home. I've packed my bags, eaten a delicious street food lunch, and read my previous typo-filled blog post with great dismay. But now I'm typing on a real live keyboard, reunited with my laptop. 

It looks like I've now totally messed up the chronology of this blog. I want to gush to you all all about my travels in China and Myanmar, but I never made good on my promise to write more about my life outside the apartment in Kuantan. I'd also like to talk a bit about some end-of-year adventures. Selfishly, I have my future self in mind as a major audience of this blog, and I want to write about these things before I forget them and thereby deprive 80-year-old Grandma Liz of any hope of ever reading about them. (Or 80-year-old, never-married, free spirit Liz? Let's just hope I make it to 80, whatever the case may be.)

I. Out and About in Kuantan
Here's how I spent my free time in Kuantan after school:
-Naps. It's really, really, really hot. Even with my limited teaching schedule, trying to be peppy in a baju kurung in consistent 90 degree weather really took it out of me.

Peppy in a baju. Never again.

-Reading. I used to think, when I was younger and before I'd ever seen a prison, that if I were put in prison it wouldn't be a big deal because I could just read all the time. Now I know how dumb that is. In Malaysia sometimes I felt like I had nothing to do but read, and it got tiresome sometimes.
-Roti outings. I went to the roti restaurant on my street so often that I got really friendly with the owners. They are super kind people. Here's some pictures from a going-away dinner they threw at the restaurant for Kara and me, which just goes to show how lucky we were.

-Hanging out with Malaysian friends in Kuantan. I met some amazing people through CS meet-ups, especially my friend Anidha. She has a really interesting perspective on life in Malaysia, is amazingly open-minded and laugh-out-loud funny, and is a genius scientist to boot. As an added bonus, she makes a mean banana leaf dinner. This girl really helped me keep my sanity in Malaysia, I gotta say. I can't find a good picture of us together, which means I'll have to pester her for one.

I also made a much younger friend at the roti shop. A little boy named Firdaus "helps"
his godmother, Shanta, there on the weekends sometimes. (Don't get all het up about child labor, now. He mostly just hangs around and sometimes carries people their tea. He wants to be a chef when he grows up. Call it an internship if it makes you feel better.) When I first met him, Shanta prodded him to practice English with me. I knew he was an extraordinarily smart little boy, not only because his English at 8 years old would put some of my older students to shame, but also because on our first meeting he asked me my opinion on why people dream. After that, I looked forward to seeing him on the rare weekends when I was in town. I ended up getting to know his wonderful family. Here's a picture of them at my apartment after they took me out for a goodbye dinner.

I spent some time with a few teacher friends outside school, usually for dinner outings, but most people were pretty busy with their families.

 Cikgu Aidaa at Satay Zul, a famous satay place in my neighborhood.  Aidaa is a great baker and was kind enough to take me to the Ramadan Bazaar in town and advise me on the best things to eat!

With the school counselor, Jas, her son whose name I can pronounce but not spell, and his nanny whose name I can neither spell nor pronounce properly, at the park. Jas introduced me to yoga class in Kuantan.

-Hanging out with American friends, usually in Cherating. About once every two weeks I'd drive an hour to a beautiful beach to meet my ETA friends from the next town north for swimming and/or dinner. It was a lovely respite, complete with Chinese and Thai food and drinking from fresh coconuts. I'm going to miss fresh coconut water a lot when I go home. Somehow the town of Cherating is a magical place where the rules and sometimes-crazy conservatism of Malaysia don't apply, so you can wear a bikini to swim and there's a bar with a really fun band on weekends and the mood is always relaxed. The one downside is that later in the year, as rainy season approached, I would run into a terrible thunderstorm with torrential downpours every time I drove home at night. On the plus side, I got quite good at driving in monsoon-level rain.

This one is stolen from one of my beach buddies, Annie.

-Yoga/Bollywood dance/aerobics class. Here's me with my crazy-intense teacher, Ameena, on my last day in class.

Note that my shirt is soaked with sweat. Ew.

-Volunteering. I spent an hour once a week with some supercute kids at the Drug Intervention Center in town, but I'd rather not put up any supercute pics to protect their privacy.
-Cafe outings. Our internet at home was not great, to say the least, so I often walked to Old Town White Coffee or Frankie Sandwich--haven of western luxury, good AC, and delicious (by Malaysian standards) chicken sandwiches and salads--to write and research and kill time. Even to blog. I was super lucky in that I lived near a big shopping center and was also within walking distance of plenty of cafes and restaurants, albeit most of them with only three walls. The weather is so consistently hot that the open storefront style of restaurant is big in Malaysia.

Malaysia's Starbucks.

StarCity shopping center.  The second view shows "Sweet Time," the French bakery where I occasionally went for delicious, just-as-good-as-America brownies. If my apartment post made you think Malaysian life is without its comforts, this should make you think twice.

-Once in a blue moon, visits to the mall. My town was pretty modern, with two big malls with all the amenities, including movie theaters, Starbucks, department stores (Malaysian ones), and food courts. Once in a while I'd go to do some shopping or to see a movie, usually as a celebration after an English camp.
-Trips to the beach in Kuantan. I didn't go nearly as often as I should have, since going to the beach always made me really happy. It's a beautiful one, despite the huge McDonald's and KFC marring the beachside view. Who knows when I'll leave near the beach again? I would swim on the section of beach in front of the Hyatt, where you didn't have to be quite so scrupulously modest--though I still almost always wore shorts into the water. Running into my students at the beach always killed my buzz--and theirs, too, probably--though. No one wants to see their teacher in a swimsuit.
-Dinners at 888 Food Court. I lived within walking distance of a great outdoor Chinese food court. I developed a purely imaginary relationship with the old Chinese Malaysian man with the bao (Chinese steamed bun) and dim sum cart. In my mind, he was thrilled to see me and missed me when I was gone, since I was such a reliable purchaser of extra large barbecue pork buns. I often waved to him and received a solemn nod in return. I think the affection was purely one-sided, but I loved that man for his consistent ability to provide delicious buns and dumplings. I was also a big fan of the popiah (Malaysian spring rolls) and rojak (a hard to describe cold salad of fruit in a savory plum sauce) stall and the barbecue pork rice with chili sauce. If I was having a real banner day, I'd splurge on a fresh starfruit juice to go with my food.


II. Ambience shots of my neighborhood

Outdoor birdcages! Popular in Asia. Don't try this at home. 

Just to give you a sense of what the day-to-day landscape in my neighborhood was like.

My street. Dog groomer on the corner, then a Chinese vegetarian restaurant (pretty tasty), roti shop further on, mysterious, bare bones, factory-esque bakery where I bought cupcakes for English camp, and some sort of machine shop at the end. When the Bible study group or the congregation at the church below my apartment started singing in the morning, the dogs at the groomer would start barking. Now there's a delightful symphony to wake up to on the weekends.

Down the block in the other direction. Sign says this place is a photo studio. I never saw anyone go in or out, but I liked the look of it.

Lemongrass Thai, tasty restaurant on a main shopping street in walking distance. 

There are mansions in my neighborhood, kids! The only visible inhabitant of this place was a constantly-shirtless, overweight Chinese man who always wore a jade Buddha pendant and stared at Kara and me menacingly whenever we walked by. As Mother always says, "Money can't buy class." Or, apparently, shirts.

Pedestrian hazards. This isn't the best photo  of it, but there are many grates, gaps in the sidewalk, and uncovered huge holes where you could fall down into a sewer. The skywalk is also very necessary, as crossing the street in Malaysia is a difficult enterprise. Malaysians never walk anywhere, and they were horrified that I walked around. "So hot, lah!" 

Nice tropical trees.

Concrete jungle for kids. Never thought Philly playgrounds would look ritzy.

Drain outside our house. At first I thought Kara's report that two-yard-long monitor lizards live in here was as credible as reports of alligators in the NY sewer system. Until I saw them. Maybe there are alligators in NYC, too. I'll believe anything now.

Fruits of the street: A Photo Essay

Kara made fun of me a lot for taking these photos, but I was amazed by the variety of fruit growing within a five minute walk from my house, so I wanted to share my amazement with all of you.

Mango

Pom!

Exotic fruits of the east edition: RAMBUTAN!

So there you go! It wasn't a bad kind of life, all in all, but I'm ready to go home. I think I can never live anywhere but a really big city again.