Time warp

Okay, I am home. My beloved Macbook died when I got back from Bali (just in time to NOT be fixed for my final exam) and promptly broke again in Vietnam. So yes, I am hopelessly behind here. But fear not, I will treat you to an extravagant buffet of Asian destinations and food porn as soon as I get my baby fixed. Again.

Manic update

It's weird keeping a travel blog when you get to the point where you're not traveling so much as living your life somewhere else. That said, much has happened. Here's a run-down:


1) Theemidhi - a Hindu festival in which devotees walk over hot coals.

2) Homesickness - the three-month mark is infamous as the typical onset of this phenomenon. My family got together for Thanksgiving. Mom posted the pictures on Facebook. School ramped up, and Singapore suddenly got less fun. The The Vinyl Cafe did an episode from Via Rail's cross-country train "The Canadian". Same route I took last summer, same sights, same observations about the people you meet and the experience of witnessing the truly spectacular country we call home.


3) Penang - Alisaur and I went to this crazy little island in Malaysia where we helped the locals (including a bunch of dudes with spears stuck through their faces) pull the 9 Emperor Gods float to the water and send off the gods for another year. We rode really terrible 10-ringgit bikes, saw way too many temples, ate some really spectacular asam laksa, used the pool and sauna at a posh hotel (shhh! don't tell anyone!) and went parasailing on a very touristy beach.


4) Kuala Lumpur - I took the train with two of the ladies from home (I do love me some trains). We went to the Skybar in the Traders Hotel for some great views of the Petronas Towers but split up for most of the weekend while they shopped and I...didn't shop. I visited the Batu caves (a Hindu temple inside a gorgeous natural cave) and tried my hand at batik painting. At the Kompleks Kraf, the government-sponsored art centre, I got caught in the rain and spent half an hour chatting with a lovely couple who raise "the world's smallest chickens", a Malaysian variety. They run a shop selling watercolour and pewter representations of their chickens. They gave me a glossy brochure...about their chickens. Then we had a great conversation about law and religion in Malaysia. After I left their shop I met a woodcarver who is passionate about noses - the great diversity of noses around the world. He pointed out his different carvings - that's an Irish nose, that's an Acehan nose, that's a Malay nose. I happen to like noses myself, so I was a fan.

5) I am currently back in Singapore, teaching myself about world trade law for the purposes of writing a research paper on it. Life is less fun, but within a week I will be done both of my research papers and chilling in Bali. That's what's getting me through.

6) Photos to come - they're up on Facebook but it's a bit more labout-intensive to get them onto Blogger and put them in the right places. I can't justify spending any more time on this right now, not when I have 3000 words to write and buckets of edits and citations to complete. But soon!

Festivus

Image from http://www.duke.edu/web/chinacare/midautumn.jpg

It's festival time in Singapore.

Last night a few of us went to a local family's house to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Traditionally this means lots of colourful paper lanterns, celebrating the harvest and telling stories about the lady on the moon. In its modern incarnation, one of the students in my residence - a true Singaporean - assures me that "it's all about the food." That means mooncakes, seriously rich pastries filled with lotus seed paste and salted duck egg. Sounds weird (from a Canadian standpoint) but they're tasty.

For the Hindu population October is the month of Diwali, the fesival of lights. Little India is decked out with light displays every night - think that hardcore neighbour's house in December, but substitute elephants for the reindeer.

Coinciding with Diwali but not (to my knowledge) connected with it is Theemidhi, where devotees walk (or, well, run) across a bed of hot coals. Of course, I had to see this, so at midnight on Monday I was at the Sri Mariamman temple along with an enormous crowd of the supportive and the merely curious.

Even more numerous than the spectators were the participants. I had somehow expected there to be an elite group of holy men solemnly walking across the coals. In fact, for several blocks from the temple there were barricades set up to control the throngs of yellow-clad men who had walked from Little India to the temple in Chinatown* to take part. They then lined up to walk (or run) across the coals.

The promo literature makes much of the fact that none of the devotees get burns on their feet. I wouldn't go that far - I saw a fair few men hopping around afterwards - but for the most part they did seem pretty unfazed by it. Mark tells me this is in fact a "phyisically trivial" feat that takes place at a lot of self-esteem workshops or something. Still. It's not for the wimpy.


*Apparently the walk to the temple takes about an hour. In their bare feet. Keep in mind that that this is a modern city...one where you're fined for spitting or littering, and executed for trafficking in drugs, but still a modern city. I don't know, I just have some psychological aversion to walking barefoot on pavement. Just ew.

Borne-O!

Frequency of blogging is inversely correlated to intensity of living. Sorry for the dry spell on your end - I was just never moved to interrupt the flow with a blog post, which on a travel blog is almost necessarily restrospective. NUS has a week's break in the middle of 1st semester (Canadian universities, take note!) so a few of us rocked over to Kuching, in the province of Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo).

Our arrival coincided with Hari Raya, the end of Ramadhan. The owner of the hostel suggested we take a boat over to the nearby _kampongs_ (villages) and wander around until somebody invited us in. So we did, and they did. We were served lunch and cake by a lovely Malay family. We sat around making awkward conversation with the limited language that we shared, and laughed at the antics of their little grandson who clearly believed that clothing is the tool of the oppressor. Got a little sick that night - as far as we could tell it was the _rice_, of all things - but the experience was totally worth it.



Being in Borneo, of course we had to check out some apes and longhouses. Semenggoh Wildlife centre is a rehabilitation centre for orangutans and they're building a pretty substantial little family there. We headed over for the morning feeding time. Despite the staff's dire warnings about how dangerous the orangutans could be, they seemed pretty indifferent to the horde of people gawking at them and taking pictures.



Further down the road was the only longhouse we could access without spending a few precious days traveling further east. My doubts about the authenticity of the experience were confirmed when we pulled up to the village's own tourist registration centre and received stickers to wear on our clothes - as if we wouldn't be recognized as tourists. There was a "headhouse" so that us crazy Westerners could pretend that the long-dead headhunting ways were still alive, and the locals were clearly instructed to maintain a "traditional" veneer. A few satellite dishes betrayed the modernity that other travelers said was much more evident in the "real" longhouses they had visited.



At Bako National Park, home of the rare proboscis monkey, we hiked for six hours without seeing any wildlife except a bunch of crabs and unnervingly large ants. It's not that we were especially noisy, just that our timing was off and we ended up hiking during the hotter parts of the day. We camped by a small waterfall for the night and ate little boxes of cereal in the morning. Apparently the whole bowl-in-a-box thing is not a universal phenomenon - at least, the mini granolas I bought didn't open that way, and my Australian travel buddy was amazed at the concept. I may have recruited a tourist for Canada. One who's intrigued by the idea of things like bowl-in-a-box mini cereals, s'mores and pie.


The hike back out was lovely but similarly un-wildlife-y. I finally saw some fauna at the canteen, where local boys are hired to weild sling-shots at the macaque monkeys that try to steal people's food (and often suceed). I had a few hours to play with after lunch so I headed to the mangrove where the proboscis occasionally congregate. A few members of our group came with me but left to catch an earlier boat back to town. Minutes (_minutes_!) after they left a whole family of proboscis showed up. I watched them bouncing around in the trees about 20 metres away for about an hour. When it started to rain they scaled some trees a little closer and waited out the storm. Amazing. They look so awkward with their pot bellies and gangly limbs, jumping noisily from branch to branch, but they seemed completely at ease, playing and eating and completely unfazed by the human presence.



For our last full day in Kuching a couple of they guys rented motorbikes and we visited Wind Cave, which was underwhelming but cool in the unnerving way that you could hear but not see the bats and had to home you'd walk out without guano in your hair. Okay, maybe that isn't everybody's idea of a good time. But it was an experience. Worried about the weather, we headed back to town and had dinner at a steamboat barbecue that was really pricey but allowed me to eat substantial amounts of vegetables for the first time all week. Hawker centres in Kuching are cheap and delightful, but even the "vegetable rice" I ordered in one place contained more meat than vegetables. I'm now bingeing on salad.

More Food Porn

Because really, what else is the point of traveling?


Nowhere back home can you walk around a foodcourt with a dish of open flame. But that's exactly what you do when you order a steamboat. I didn't take the picture in time but there was a huge flame coming out of the top when I set it down on the table. This is in a mall. So much for the stereotypcal uptight Singaporeans.



This is salak, or as the lovely lady Liz calls it, "snakeskin fruit":


The skin peels back to reveal crispy white flesh that's vaguely reminiscent of - Mom, you're going to love this - Quality Street chocolates. Truly, it reminds me of taking the lid off a box of QS and smelling that strange-but-delicious mix of the strawberry chocolates and the hazelnut chocolates and the coffee chocolates all intermingled. That's what this tastes like. You can't make this stuff up.



In Chinatown we had a video fail. Here's the transcript:

"Um...it's...interesting. Chewy. No, not good chewy. Gristle-y... No, it's okay. I said I'd try it and I'm going to try to eat the whole thing. *another hesitant attempt* Ugh, how do I do it without the toes hitting me in the face? Ew ew ew. ...Hey, how did you get all the meat off it? Is all that really edible? ...No, no, I'm sorry. I'm all for not wasting any part of the animal but I just can't do it."



Yeah, Alex ate chicken foot. It was not good.

A Happy Journey

As seen on the MRT:

Harmony Tour

Okay, I'm a little behind on my posts. School, etc.

Last weekend the school organized a tour of Hindu and Sikh temples. I didn't take a whole lot of pictures. Even though we were told that we could photograph everything except certain items, it just feels tacky to be blatantly touristy in somebody's place of worship. Anyway, the students who led the tours did a great job and I'm incredibly thankful that I was one of the relatively few people who decided to seize the opportunity to go.


The Hindu temple was vibrant and noisy, full of people eating, praying and smashing coconuts (to symbolize the breaking apart of the ego). Like the many sculptures and deities, the whole vibe is about the divine manifesting itself in all aspects of life.




The Sikh temple was more solemn (but still beautiful). They also gave us a bhangra dancing lesson and tied turbans for us. Of course, it's usually just men who wear turbans but I wasn't going to miss out on it. One of my friends told me I looked like Simone de Beauvoir... One of the old ladies there was thrilled to see us all with our turbans on. She beamed and matted each of us on the shoulder as we passed. So cute.