Almost home almost home almost home! So many funny and cool and downright freezing cold things have happened here in good 'ol Tokyo in the past few days, but I've been so blinded by the fact that I'm coming home!!!!!! that I seem to have forgotten a bunch.
It's freezing here. I have no closed toes shoes and ONE long sleeved shirt and my newly purchased jeans. That wasn't going to cut it. Well, today after going to like 5 stores and being laughed out of four of them, I finally found some men's shoes to buy. All the clerks took one look at my massive huge feet and said "Noooo, no shoes for you, big lady!" My men's shoes are fine though. Everything is expensive as all hell, but I guess I should have known all hell, but I guess I should have known that. Oh, when I came in from the airport I got in a train called the Skyliner. I was in the wrong car though, so I tried to move to the next one. The door was closed, and I saw a red button. Naturally, I tried to push the button to open it. Instead of pressing down, the thin red plastic cover shattered and "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!!!!" Yup, I stopped the train dead in its tracks. Luckily I didn't get carted off to jail. I love that I'm not in Singapore anymore! Ross has been more than hospitable. Wow, I can't believe how lucky I am that I know someone who lives here. I would have seriously spent my unborn childrens' college fund by now. OK, this Japanese computer is really confusing me with the keys in all the wrong places so I'm going to go before my writing becomes entirely unintelligible. I'm sure I'll send some long winded email when I get back that will show how truly unemployed I am. Crap crap crap I really have to go. Love you all, see you all in like five minutes, I swear!
OK, so this has to be a really quick note since I'm sort of scamming my internet time at this fancy hotel that I'm NOT staying at. More about that later..
So yeah, I went to the tallest twin towers in the world yesterday. Stayed a while too. Saw a movie, ate sushi from a carousel, and shopped my butt off-or at least window shopped. I was too late to be allowed up tho the top, but seriously, the view from the bottom and the inside and the little Pacific Science Center-like room near the elevators was enough. This thing is ridiculously massive and seriously a sight to behold and respect. Can't describe it in words. Thought I was in space or in the future or something when I first walked up to it. I also learned an interesting fact. While The Sears Tower is 442 meters, and the Petronas Twin Towers is 452 meters, there's a new friggen building in Taipei that's a whopping 502 meters! I had no idea! I was so sure I was looking at thee tallest building on planet earth! And then the science room went on to inform me that there are other structures taller, but they're more like funky space needle-like things that i guess don't count as much because they don't have to accommodate as many levels. Anyway, it was awesome. AND I got to see Ocean's Twelve for under $3.00!
Yeah, the hotel....Stupid Expedia. They let me book a room in a booked solid hotel. They're taking pity on me by letting me use their computer for a few minutes. Staying at a rat hole across the street for 10x's what it's worth and miles and miles from where I would have wanted to be had I known I wouldn't be here (rooftop jacuzzi, flat screen TV, etc). OK enough rant. Not exactly deserving of a pity party. Change of subject: I'm in Singapore and did you know that gum is illegal here?!
Crap, really have to go. I've been moved from the lobby (wireless modem on a laptop) to a little chair next to the busy restaurant. Going to try to go out and find a nice place to eat to try to make it up to myself. I'll be home in a frighteningly short amount of time. Come see me! I'll be unemployed and broke. I'll let you buy me a beer!
Yup, I just left Pualu Pangkor this morning and now I'm in lovely Kuala Lampur literally dripping streams of sweat all over the place. It's got A/C, but you know how sometimes when you're really hot and then you walk into an A/C room, you realize how hot you really were and you can't stop the nasty streams of sweat suddenly appearing all over? Yeah, well that's me right now.
I had sort of a best of/worst of experience on this little island. Ultimately I'm glad I went I guess, but my eye may not agree. OK, so I left Penang the other day and got on a bus to Lumut, which is where I took a boat to Pangkor. I thought I was so cool because I was sort of going off the beaten track or whatever. There was only a very small section of it in my bible-er, Lonely Planet, and hardly any buses were even going to Lumut from Penang, and I was like the only tourist on the bus or boat. At some point it goes from cool to what-the-hell-was-I-thinking?. I get to this island and there's a sea of pink minivans. Man, I wish I had the guts to take picture and look like a completely asinine tourist. You'll just have to imagine it I guess. I took the first taxi I saw to one of the LP suggested places. The Seagull Hotel. The driver even recommended it. So I went willingly like a good tourist does. It was actually not that bad. I mean they were rickety bungalows like a half a mile from the water, but I saw a TV and a semi-clean toilet and no rats, so I said fine. Kind of pricey, but when you're stuck on an island, you don't really have a lot of choices.
So yeah, the island. Let's just say it was nothing like Koh Phangang. But really, I can't expect any place to be like that. That's the beauty of it, right? So yeah, I was very excited about the TV. Who cares if it only got two channels? One was Cinemax. And I've been dying to see the made for TV movie "Lucky 7" with post 80's, pre-Will & Grace Patrick Dempsy! There were a few other travelers there, but not many and they weren't very social. It was also rainy. I ventured onto the beach sort of, but it was full of crap. Boats, food stand, people drying out fish carcasses. There were some wooded areas, but I only walked a little ways in before I got the old "Friday The 13th" fright in me. This place strangely reminded me of Point Defiance Park in Tacoma. It's like the five mile drive but with palm trees and much steeper, more treacherous roads.
So I ate some small dinner at a restaurant down the road and peed at one of the worst bathrooms ever. I was a paying customer, and they gave me a key to this special guest only bathroom like a half mile down the sidewalk with a padlock on it. Stupid me thought that would somehow make it a more bearable bathroom. Yeah, the lid had been broken off by what looked like wild animals or something, and there was, well, "matter" all over the place. And as always, the floor was soaking wet and therefore so was the bottom of my purse, my shoes, and the bottom of my friggen pants.
Warning! If I may rant for just one more quick second, I would almost go so far as to say that I prefer the Indian method of going to the bathroom more than the Southeast Asian way. There's this water hose, much like on some nice sinks in the states. You know the one. You use it get all the yucky stuff down the drain so you don't have to touch it? Good enough concept. Use it on yourself, save the paper, everyone wins right? WRONG!!! The water is so strong, it gets everywhere. It always looks like someone just got done taking a shower in there. The seat is wet and of course you're never 100% sure it's just water, and ever worse is that the floor is wet too. the cuffs of my pants are always wet, and god forbid I wear my Thai pants with the string! End Rant
So yeah anyway, I go back to my home away from home, and try to eat something small since I sort of gambled and lost at the last place. The only other ones there were this older German guy who seemed to have an aversion for shirts, and the owner of the hotel. They were sitting outside on the couches arguing about who sells the best organic pumpkin seeds in Penang. Very odd. The German's English was OK, but the owner's was impeccable. Wait, is that the right word? I mean he's really really good at it. So I get some simple fried rice or whatever and get to talking to these men. The owner is from Kuala Lampur and he gave me some suggestions of hotels and places to shop or whatever down there. So now it's time to go to bed and I guess I make the biggest faux pas of the evening. I leave my bathroom door open. Didn't know that was the gateway to all the critters. AND it was pouring down rain later so i guess that drives them all in. I thought that so long as none of those critters were rats, I could handle anything. Boy was I wrong!
So I get out my super-strong 100% deet spray that literally melts plastic when it comes in contact with it. I spray it everywhere but my face, then try to cover up to my neck in the sheet to protect myself. Then in the middle of the night when I am absolutely being eaten alive, I get up and put on this long sleeved "Buzz Off" shirt of mine that's woven with insect repellent. And just for good measure, I tie my "Buzz Off" bandanna around my neck like a big dork. i had to cover up my ear because there's nothing more irritating than the sound of a mosquito buzzing in it when you're trying to sleep. So what happens when I wake up the next morning? After I have taken every damn precaution I thought possible?! My eye is swollen shut. Yup. Not just that, but the surrounding area is like twice the size it should be. And I don't even think it was a mosquito, because it's not red or itchy. Just huge and nasty. Luckily, I have a huge pair of "Ray Ban" (according to a street vendor in Bangkok) sunglasses that cover it up nicely. Tried to walk into town, but it was rainy and I kept bumping int stuff. Finally I went back to the bungalows and showed the owner, Edward I finally discovered, my eye. He flipped out and got the German guy, Heinz, to get some fancy German ointment. I thin it was just camphor, but it made me feel better. So yeah, I sort of became less adventurous with the whole eye thing, so I had some breakfast with the old guys and discussed computers a bit. Turns out Edward really wants to know more about computers. I went in his office and showed him a few things and he gave me free internet time. He had these pictures of his grandson that his daughter emailed him months ago that he hasn't been able to open. I helped him open them and he was ecstatic. Then I had him make a Power Point Presentation with the pictures and he almost peed himself.
Then they just sort of took me under their wing the rest of the day and h ad me go with them to run errands. I guess they felt bad about my eye. We went into town, Edward and his wife of almost 40 years (anniversary is on the 19th) bought me lunch, then they took me on a tour of the entire island. they stopped no less than three times and insisted I get out and take pictures. They were so cute! Then we got back to the bungalows and Edward wanted me to help him devise a new way to organize his occupancy statistics. At first I was trying to show him Excel, I realized that that wasn't going to cut it. So we did a crash course in MS Access. I hardly knew how to use it, but it got easier as we went on. He was so grateful that his wife Jenny and Edward invited me out to dinner that night. We went to this Chinese place and by then thankfully some of the swelling had gone down. Not sure how I would have eaten in the dark with sunglasses. We had this awesome meal and I swear I tried to pay, but they already had it charged to their tab before we (the German guy and I) had a chance to offer anything. A very nice surprise. I wish the weather had been a little better, and of course it would have been nice if my eye didn't explode, but overall I'm glad I went. I woke up this morning with it swollen up again, but not as bad as yesterday. Man, I wonder what bit me....
OK OK long email again I know. I'm in KL right now. Just looked at the tallest buildings (twin towers) in the world. Sorry to break it to you Neil, but it's not the Sears Tower! Will visit it for real tomorrow. Right now I'm in the second to last hotel on this trip. Decided to splurge and reserved a room in Singapore via Expedia called The Hotel 1929 I think? Really cool place. Seeing as I was sharing a $3 hotel room with a random British dude (NOT how it sounds, really!) in Dalat on my birthday, I sort of needed a birthday make-up day. Just one night, but I'll get my money's worth! This place is huge and scary. Will deal with it a little better tomorrow I think.
Love you all, miss you all, blah blah blah, has it snowed yet?!
This has a double meaning. I just wrote this really long, quite witty and intelligent if I do say so myself, email to everyone, then the computer conveniently crashed. Oh, and I saw a big fat rat leisurely stroll across the hall here in the lobby of my "hotel" I'm staying at in Penang, and chill out and stare at me for forever before I scared it back into one of the rooms. Ugh.
OK, so I had a lot of cool stuff happen this week that I already wrote about but lost, so this I guess will be my attempt to piece together my previous literary triumph.
Ao Nang. Beautiful like I already said, but way cooler because I know people that know the town. I got to go to the places the tourists don't, and even if they do, I got the local prices. Tee hee. I've been treated like royalty by my gracious hosts Hilton and Anja. I can only hope to be able to return the favor one day. We rode three to a motorbike all week. Poor Anja really got a workout in her legs trying not to scape them on the ground. Watched a lot of pirated Malaysian DVD's and finally got to see what both of them do for a living. Will get to that in a sec. But seriously, they have a nice little set up going over there. If I could ever bring myself to live abroad (see rant at end of email), this could easily be my choice of living situations. I don't even want to tell you the rent they're paying for fear that I will flood Ao Nang with new residents. Let's just say it's a good deal. It was just so awesome to have a few days where I could leave my passport and bag and not be worried, and to actually not carry my Lonely Planet book with me every single step I take like it was a part of my body or something. So liberating! I had many devastatingly good meals, and probably hit one too many happy hours. Let's just say my liver is probably happy I left when I did. Finally broke down and ate at an Asian McDonald's too. My first chicken since leaving the states. McNuggets. Mmmmm.
Swedes. I had no idea that Ao Nang was such a mecca for Swedes, but I swear it's at least half if not more of the non-Thai population here. Half the restaurants serve Thai/Swedish Food and blonde hair is prettymuch the norm among the Ferang (foreigners). I swear, out of all of Hilton & Anja's friends (Anja is from Sweden too), I don't think I even met one that wasn't Thai or Swedish. I wonder if there's some sort of fascination with Thailand over in there. Maybe every man woman and child is expected to visit Thailand and give a full report when they get home--if they ever go back home. It must be really nice though to have an entire community that understands you so far from home. It probably makes it easier to stay abroad too.
I Found Nemo!! I'm so excited to have gone on a real adult officially enlightening excursion. Snorkeling and SCUBA at Bamboo Island (the first person who can tell me the acronym for SCUBA off the top of your head wins a Popsicle!) with Hilton & Anja's boat Kon-Tiki ( www.kontiki-krabi.com ). It was an hour and a half boat ride in perfect weather. There were maybe 30 or so people on the boat. I was the only non Swede besides Hilton! He was busy doing his way cool job that's I will get to later-I swear. It was sort of embarrassing. They gave like a 10 minute speech about the rules of the boat and instructions on snorkeling in Swedish, then they had to take me away separately to be told the same thing in English. It's funny though. i had sort of a "Lost in Translation" moment. The speech to the Swedes was easily 10 minutes long, but my little personal speech could not have been more than 3 minutes. Helen swears up and down that it's just because they don't know English as well and they had to use smaller words. I think there's just some big joke that I'm seriously not in on. Ah well. So yeah, we got to the island and jumped off the boat in full snorkel gear-fins, life jacket, and a state of the art mask. I don't know why i always thought snorkeling was for wussies. Not only that, but I thought it was pretty pointless because you can never really dive deep enough to see anything cool. Man was I wrong! We went along these big-ass coral reefs that were amazing. School of fish swimming all around you, a million different kind of sea urchins, big fish small fish, octopuses, everything! And of course, the clown fish. the little orange and white number that Nemo was. they love cleaning themselves in the big urchins. they didn't even swim away when i approached them! Also, there are these things called sea lice that I have never heard of before, but will certainly not soon forget. it's like getting a million little bee stings at once. Seriously. But you can't see the little bastards. They hurt as much as bee stings, but in a slightly smaller area and for not quite as long. Ouch! The instructors get to wear wet suits so they're protected a little better. After pruning myself sufficiently, I went back on the boat for some lunch (Masiman curry & rice, yum!) and a healthy second dose of sunburn.
"Dive", er... Then came time for my trial dive with the SCUBA gear. It made me very glad that I stayed in with Anja the night before and watched movies instead of going out drinking with Jimmy the dive instructor and Hilton. It's easier to completely embarrass yourself with a stranger I think, then to look halfway cool and then ruin your image the next day. just a theory. So yeah, it's sort of the underwater equivalent to tandem skydiving. but I imagine I'd have an easier time doing that. i could probably bungee jump, alligator wrestle, or do any of that adrenaline rush stuff before i could SCUBA dive. See, the extreme sports crap is all about a leap of faith. you take the one leap, and the rest you really have no choice but to just deal with it. What, are you going to decide mid-air that you no longer want to skydive? Well yeah, so i quickly realized that SCUBA is more a practice in meditation and trust in machines than anything. the two things I'm probably worst at. In order to do this dive I would have had to turn my brain completely off, trust that this random-ass tank of air was going to provide me with the one thing i need to LIVE, and at the same time, be as calm and cool as possible. Yeah, anyone who has known me even for five minutes probably already knows that I would have sucked at this. And boy did I! I would go under for like a half a minute, then freak out and come back up. i would be like 2 feet under with the instructor holding onto me, and I would feel like I'm a hundred feet down and out of air. i all of a sudden forgot how to breathe and panicked. Poor Hilton was trying to capture this on film, but I kept coming back up above the water. I have seriously found a new appreciation for oxygen.
Pirate Videos. that is the name of Hilton and Anja's business. it's awesome. they have a digital video camera with an underwater case that they take on these dive trips. they get all the people in the video, put some fish in it, a few nice songs, then are miraculously able to have it edited and complete to show on a little TV to everyone during the ride back to shore. they get orders from the customers, then they deliver the burned DVD's that night or the following morning to the hotels everyone is staying at. It's awesome. I'm bringing one home so you can see my five seconds of SCUBA diving glory. they have a powerbook and an iBook to edit everything with iMovie (don't you have that Jason?). it is so cool. it really makes you realize that you can do something completely fun and fulfilling for a living and not starve. hey, the Kon-tiki website is looking pretty shabby, AND Hilton and Anja don't even have their website up yet. there may be a place for me in this town after all! Maybe Damien could look into it. he'd probably be better at it than me. You can sublet your apartment to me (at a discount of course because I got you such a fabulous job...). How does that sound? So yeah, I'm totally jealous of them and their emerging business. Give me hope.
RATS Pt 1. So yes, Hilton and Anja have a small infestation. A small price to pay I'd say for their beautiful surroundings and economical rent. But now I officially know the difference between mice and rats. the mice at Christa's in Honolulu were a little creepy, but mostly cute. Rats on the other hand are huge, menacing, evil, diseased, smelly, loud, ferocious, and damaging. You'd think the cat in the neighborhood would have a field day with them because there appears to be a whole plump juicy family for the eating. maybe they outnumber the cats? I'm really not sure. they run around above the ceiling tiles at night and sound like they're doing the Indie 500. I came home from Bamboo Island and found one on the sofa bed where I was sleeping. it just sort of looked at me, shrugged, then leisurely walked up the cable cord to a hole in the roof. Then Hilton stuffed one of his shirts in the hole to at least prevent it from nibbling on my toes in the middle of the night. While I was trying to sleep that night, I heard what sounded like a death match between the rats and a cat, or maybe each other, or perhaps with an altogether different animal that I'd prefer not to know about. But the wailing and high-pitched squealing and scratching and running led me to believe that at least one animal did not make it out of the battle. Well, the next morning, the shirt was gone and there was a fist-sized hole in my bag where I had stupidly left some cashew nuts i had brought from home (that's the same thing Christa's mice went after!). the bag was right next to my head. One of the surviving rats had been next to my head while I was sleeping! Man do I hate those damn things.
Malaysia. OK, trying to wrap this up, but you know, sometimes I can be a little long-winded. I'm sitting in my hotel lobby in the Georgetown area of Penang, Malaysia. It's a lot different than Thailand. I'm leaving tomorrow for this tiny little island just south of here called Pulau Pangkor. Smaller than Block Island I think. Then off of Kuala Lampur, then Singapore, then tTokyo then home. It's the off-season so hopefully it will be pretty cheap. Penang is not so cheap. Went to like the biggest friggen mall in the world today. All the camera and computer and music equipment imaginable, every single kind of cheap plastic gift, toy, accessory and cheap clothing you can wrap your brain around. An A&W, KFC, and McDonald's. I can tell that I'm getting ready to go home when I'm actually going to these places knowing full well that there is better food all around. Just for the familiarity I guess? Well, I went to KFC today (I never go at home) and man was it ass nasty! Won't need to go back there for a few more years at least. I finally broke down and bought a pair of jeans too. Not sure how it will fit in my bag, but it was really time. I don't own any decent ones, and I can wear them in cold Tokyo. This place as a whole seems cleaner and more organized, but Thailand seemed much more mellow and tranquil. Ah well. My hotel however is the best of both worlds, or maybe the worst. It's got Malaysian prices, and much less developed aaccommodations Kind of scary really. You can see my rat rant below. I'm paying nearly $10 for this room that I'm pretty much terrified to sleep in. The walls are peeling off and the plumbing is downright scary. Now at this stage in the game, I'm used to all kinds of nastiness and disheveled conditions. There's just something different about this place that scares the crap out of me. I can survive one more night though I guess...
RATS Pt 2. Wow. Seriously. That was no mouse. Rat all the way. Can't they chew your face off in your sleep? Man I hate those things. That's the real reason I can never live abroad. Crap like that. Oh, and bad bathrooms. You'd think that all the times I've been abroad I'd get used to it. Nope. Bad bathrooms and rats will keep me living stateside probably for the long haul. Nothing makes me miss home more than the smell of raw sewage or the nibbling of diseased vermin where you sleep.
Wow, a bit of a long one, huh? Can you tell I'm being anti-social? My room is not a cool place to hang out and I already ate lunch. Just waiting to get hungry again I guess. Luckily that won't be long. I've been like a bottomless pit lately.
Love you all, see (most of) you in less than two weeks!
Why hello there! I'm been pulled out of my blissful bungalow in Koh Phangang (Haad Son Bungalows if you're interested: http://www.kohphangan.com/haadson/index2.html) and into another tranquil, tropical, beautiful beach near Krabi.
I left the bungalows yesterday morning at 6:15, got on a huge cargo ferry, got on a minibus, got on a big fat local bus for two hours, then got into Krabi Town at like 1:30pm or so. I gave good ol' Hilton a call and he zipped on over in his motobike and picked me up to take me to Ao Nang. Man, I keep having to eat my words about being in the most beautiful place I've ever seen. Each place keeps getting better and better. Krabi was OK, but when we drove into Ao Nang it was breathtaking. There are all these huge things. Much bigger than boulders, too rocky to be islands (besides, a few of them are on land anyway), and too huge to go unnoticed. They remind me of huge icebergs except of course they're made of rock and have grass growing on the tops and probably haven't seen ice since the last ice age. They're so gorgeous I can't even tell you. First thing we did was drop off my bags, have a beer, have another, then I met a buttload of people. Well, not that many, I just love typing the word buttload. First I met Anja, Hilton's girlfriend. They have their own company that records DVD's for the tourists gong out on diving trips. She just got finished with a two-day dive. I met another person on the boat and i quickly realized that Thailand is like a second Sweden. I guess I've noticed through traveling this past month that I've met more Swedes than anyone, but here it's particularly concentrated. Very interesting. So yeah, later that night the three of us, Anja's best friend, and her grandmother and great aunt all went out to dinner. Four Swedes, a Brit and an American. The communication was interesting to say the least. We went to this awesome restaurant where you can pick out your own fish before they cook it. I rolled myself out of there, and quickly affirmed that my whole plan of losing weight on this trip has officially been scrapped. Had a few more beers, then got on a motorbike (don't worry mom, Anja was our designated driver!) to go home. I had never ridden three on one before. Not as scary as I had first thought. I'm only really on day two here, so not a lot has happened yet. Just met a lot of cool people who live here and makes me tempted to come back. Especially after hearing what they pay for rent! Going on a "dive" tomorrow on Bamboo Island with their company, Kon Tiki. And by dive I of course mean I may go for a 20 minute test dive or something, then mainly snorkel. Real diving is too expensive if I'm not planning on using the certification later. And let's face it, I'm prettymuch a wuss. Well, this Internet has wonderful A/C and all, but I should probably join the real world out there before the sun goes down. I'll probably stay here until Friday or so, then off to Malaysia, Singapore, then with Ross in Tokyo. Woo hoo! Wonder if i can handle the cold weather after all this sun....
Hope you all had a glorious turkey day, and um, that's it I guess!