Trip Report II
G'day everyone. This was written on the 10th July.
As before I will surround a word or a phrase in each paragraph in asterisks to make skipping to the bits that interest you easier. One friend suggested I do a web site, but everyone getting this is someone I know and love and I can say things I wouldn't like to put up on a public web site (although I can't think of anything that fits into that category). I suppose the old rule that you shouldn't say anything over the internet that you wouldn't want your worst enemy to know still applies anyway. That's apart from the fact that I'm not sure I could update a web site from any computer in any house or net cafe that I happen to be using, and at least one friend would have trouble if there were any graphics involved.
This brings me to the odd incident of logging on in a net cafe to find my web site at (out of date) was set to the homepage of the computer I was logged on to. I hadn't mentioned my site before because I haven't been able to put up any pictures of the trip yet. There's other stuff of mine there, though, if you're interested. I thought back over the last few days and I had not been at that computer. Wondering what on earth was going on, it took me several hours to remember that I had used that computer the first time I had been in that cafe 4 days earlier, and the window with the controls to clear your cache or temporary internet files (I'm bi-OperatingSystemual) is the same window in which you set the page your viewing as your browsers homepage, which I must have done by accident. In the meantime I had managed to startle Gav, who happened to be chatting to me in Instant Messenger when I noticed the anomaly. Actually I'm multi-OSual, but it's a long time since I was a Unix wizard busting hackers & having Elm as my .login prompt, and all the other OSs I've used are no longer heard from much, if at all.
Having said that, Prabhasa just reminded me I can listen to CDs while I type, which, if I'd remembered would've meant I could have listened to about 20 hours of my friends' music by now (that's how long I've spent at computers since I arrived in Malaysia). I brought 4 of my friends' CDs as well as Offerings by Third Day since I was bringing the software to download pictures from my camera & my French learning CD anyway. I had hoped that I would at least be able to carry out a conversation in French by the time I got there, but the fact that I've twice had to look up English words in my French/English dictionary to get the spelling right in this email, let alone foreign ones, doesn't bode well. Nor the fact that after over a week of living in houses where someone spoke very little English (the housekeepers, now you know the secret of serving up almost a dozen dishes a day), my Malay is still such as "I leave. Back 6. No lunch. Please wash clothes." And that with the help of a phrasebook. Now it's dawned on me that if I switch to Word instead of Notepad I can use the spelling checker (although fauxpas wasn't in there). Time to go to bed.
If you're praying for me, at Jega & Anu's the computer got a virus, using net cafes is slow because the main link between Japan & the US is down, and here at Prim & Kuhan's (where I'm saving this onto disk), their ISP is down. Communications, particularly over the internet, would be a good prayer point. Today I have a sense that the Holy Spirit wants me to pray for computers. While on this subject, if anyone wants to SMS me it's not as expensive as calling (61-403 815 452). You still pay for the message to Australia, & I pay for it to arrive in the country I'm in, but it's still less than a $1 (I hope, depending on whose network I'm using I suppose). I can't figure out how the costs work. If I call within the country it's based on whatever network I'm currently using, if anyone calls me it costs me whatever my network in Australia charges to relay the call to me, but if I ring Australia it doesn't seem to be based on either. At least if my aunt rings Malaysia from England it will cost RM 6 per minute, while if she talks locally in the UK it will cost her RM 8 per minute, but she gets charged RM 3 per minute to ring the UK from here in Malaysia ($1 AUD= RM 2.12 at the time of writing).
I definitely think eating with my hands (or hand actually) is better than using cutlery or chopsticks. I never forget to wash my hands before I eat, I never end up with a mouthful of food that is too hot to swallow (I just drop a bit of food on my plate) and there is less washing up to do. I thought it slowed me down and I was neater, but the mystery of why I make such a mess with a knife & fork was revealed when I began eating just as quickly as I do with them & started making just as much mess. By the way the Ben I said was a neater eater than me in my last email had his 2nd birthday not so long ago. So now we know, it's the wind created by my hands moving so quickly that sends food everywhere! At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Looks like this is the first visit (as an adult) where I'll get to stay with every one of my aunties and uncles, not to mention catching up with my cousins who are studying in Australia in Canberra and Perth. I caught up with Prabhasa (Canberra) in Sydney & probably will again, but it'll be a long time before I get to see Kulendra. I'm glad I caught him before he left for Perth on Tuesday morning. After missing Yudi by hours (who is part of the reason this became a world trip and not just a trip to London with a stopover for a couple of weeks in KL), then finding out Peik See was in Sarawak, I found out Suman was not in Bangkok as well, but at least in his case he'll be there by the time I arrive. I was at Anu & Jega's for 8 days; I'll total 3 here at Prim & Kuhan's; I'll be with uncle Sri & auntie Eeswary for about 4 days not counting 3 with uncle Paramasivan & auntie Janaky & 1 in Singapore where I might meet my auntie Rajes' sister in the middle; Sat. the 20th I'll be back here in KL for Tara's (my cousin once removed) birthday and will hopefully stay with my auntie Dhamayathi and uncle Vaithynathan until I leave Monday morning the 22nd of July for Bangkok. Hopefully by then I will be spelling everyone's names correctly (if you got my last big email more recently I made some corrections).
I'm glad I'm not staying in Terenggarni during this trip. They've introduced the Hudad & Qisas Muslim laws and will be applying them to Muslims & non-Muslims alike. Kelantan also introduced a Hudad law in 1993 but has not yet implemented it, but Terenggarni will be implementing them as of the first of August. Apart from chopping off people's hands for theft, this means rape or adultery requires four Muslim men of good standing as witnesses to prove. Recently in Pakistan a young man (about 20) was caught walking with a 30-year-old woman, so the 4 village elders decided as punishment to rape his younger sister publicly and send her home without any clothes. I've got a friend who was almost sold into slavery in a Muslim country by her husband's family. Anyone remember the name of the lady in Egypt who was showing from the Koran that this kind of thing is not on?
Now that I've calmed down after writing the above I'll talk about Pokemon bubble fruit flavoured toothpaste. My toiletries kit comes courtesy of Countrylink, from when they whacked me in a 1st class sleeper cabin one time coming back from Crescent Head (lack of space in economy again). I seem to have good fortune regarding public transport. Once I had finished the smallest tube of toothpaste I had ever seen (the size of my little finger to the first knuckle) I got the cheapest toothpaste I could find, which was the above. Well those of you who aren't Australian native speakers, you'll probably have heard every Australian expression in the book by the time this trip is over.
Cultural fauxpas So far the Holy Spirit has twice reminded me to remove my hands from my hips (either that or I subconsciously reacted to the looks I was getting), I've already discussed eating, and I'm still forgetting to point with my thumb, but nobody has said anything yet. Between everyone these emails are going to I'm probably making a few in what I write too.
11th July. Two things I have been doing are reading & going to movies. Yesterday I saw Wind Talkers with Prabhasa and today I'm seeing minority report while Prabhasa has a badminton match. I started reading a book about 'Operation Sunshine' (the Indian army's push into Jafna in 1996) from a Tamil perspective. We don't really get to hear much of either side in Australia, but anything we do hear is from the Indian propaganda machinery (independent journalists are never allowed into the areas the Indians have or are 'liberating'). I'll rave on about that some other time though. The other book I have read is "The glass palace" by Amitav Ghosh (Harper Collins 2000), who also wrote "The Calcutta chronicles" & "The shadow lines." Bill, if you haven't already read this guy, you definitely should. It was a brilliant chronicle of three generations of Indian/Burmese and their lives in Burma, India, the UK, the USA, & Malaya (pre-Malaysia) in the style of 'Roots.'
Blessings,
Joe Krishna Mithiran -:)
As before I will surround a word or a phrase in each paragraph in asterisks to make skipping to the bits that interest you easier. One friend suggested I do a web site, but everyone getting this is someone I know and love and I can say things I wouldn't like to put up on a public web site (although I can't think of anything that fits into that category). I suppose the old rule that you shouldn't say anything over the internet that you wouldn't want your worst enemy to know still applies anyway. That's apart from the fact that I'm not sure I could update a web site from any computer in any house or net cafe that I happen to be using, and at least one friend would have trouble if there were any graphics involved.
This brings me to the odd incident of logging on in a net cafe to find my web site at (out of date) was set to the homepage of the computer I was logged on to. I hadn't mentioned my site before because I haven't been able to put up any pictures of the trip yet. There's other stuff of mine there, though, if you're interested. I thought back over the last few days and I had not been at that computer. Wondering what on earth was going on, it took me several hours to remember that I had used that computer the first time I had been in that cafe 4 days earlier, and the window with the controls to clear your cache or temporary internet files (I'm bi-OperatingSystemual) is the same window in which you set the page your viewing as your browsers homepage, which I must have done by accident. In the meantime I had managed to startle Gav, who happened to be chatting to me in Instant Messenger when I noticed the anomaly. Actually I'm multi-OSual, but it's a long time since I was a Unix wizard busting hackers & having Elm as my .login prompt, and all the other OSs I've used are no longer heard from much, if at all.
Having said that, Prabhasa just reminded me I can listen to CDs while I type, which, if I'd remembered would've meant I could have listened to about 20 hours of my friends' music by now (that's how long I've spent at computers since I arrived in Malaysia). I brought 4 of my friends' CDs as well as Offerings by Third Day since I was bringing the software to download pictures from my camera & my French learning CD anyway. I had hoped that I would at least be able to carry out a conversation in French by the time I got there, but the fact that I've twice had to look up English words in my French/English dictionary to get the spelling right in this email, let alone foreign ones, doesn't bode well. Nor the fact that after over a week of living in houses where someone spoke very little English (the housekeepers, now you know the secret of serving up almost a dozen dishes a day), my Malay is still such as "I leave. Back 6. No lunch. Please wash clothes." And that with the help of a phrasebook. Now it's dawned on me that if I switch to Word instead of Notepad I can use the spelling checker (although fauxpas wasn't in there). Time to go to bed.
If you're praying for me, at Jega & Anu's the computer got a virus, using net cafes is slow because the main link between Japan & the US is down, and here at Prim & Kuhan's (where I'm saving this onto disk), their ISP is down. Communications, particularly over the internet, would be a good prayer point. Today I have a sense that the Holy Spirit wants me to pray for computers. While on this subject, if anyone wants to SMS me it's not as expensive as calling (61-403 815 452). You still pay for the message to Australia, & I pay for it to arrive in the country I'm in, but it's still less than a $1 (I hope, depending on whose network I'm using I suppose). I can't figure out how the costs work. If I call within the country it's based on whatever network I'm currently using, if anyone calls me it costs me whatever my network in Australia charges to relay the call to me, but if I ring Australia it doesn't seem to be based on either. At least if my aunt rings Malaysia from England it will cost RM 6 per minute, while if she talks locally in the UK it will cost her RM 8 per minute, but she gets charged RM 3 per minute to ring the UK from here in Malaysia ($1 AUD= RM 2.12 at the time of writing).
I definitely think eating with my hands (or hand actually) is better than using cutlery or chopsticks. I never forget to wash my hands before I eat, I never end up with a mouthful of food that is too hot to swallow (I just drop a bit of food on my plate) and there is less washing up to do. I thought it slowed me down and I was neater, but the mystery of why I make such a mess with a knife & fork was revealed when I began eating just as quickly as I do with them & started making just as much mess. By the way the Ben I said was a neater eater than me in my last email had his 2nd birthday not so long ago. So now we know, it's the wind created by my hands moving so quickly that sends food everywhere! At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Looks like this is the first visit (as an adult) where I'll get to stay with every one of my aunties and uncles, not to mention catching up with my cousins who are studying in Australia in Canberra and Perth. I caught up with Prabhasa (Canberra) in Sydney & probably will again, but it'll be a long time before I get to see Kulendra. I'm glad I caught him before he left for Perth on Tuesday morning. After missing Yudi by hours (who is part of the reason this became a world trip and not just a trip to London with a stopover for a couple of weeks in KL), then finding out Peik See was in Sarawak, I found out Suman was not in Bangkok as well, but at least in his case he'll be there by the time I arrive. I was at Anu & Jega's for 8 days; I'll total 3 here at Prim & Kuhan's; I'll be with uncle Sri & auntie Eeswary for about 4 days not counting 3 with uncle Paramasivan & auntie Janaky & 1 in Singapore where I might meet my auntie Rajes' sister in the middle; Sat. the 20th I'll be back here in KL for Tara's (my cousin once removed) birthday and will hopefully stay with my auntie Dhamayathi and uncle Vaithynathan until I leave Monday morning the 22nd of July for Bangkok. Hopefully by then I will be spelling everyone's names correctly (if you got my last big email more recently I made some corrections).
I'm glad I'm not staying in Terenggarni during this trip. They've introduced the Hudad & Qisas Muslim laws and will be applying them to Muslims & non-Muslims alike. Kelantan also introduced a Hudad law in 1993 but has not yet implemented it, but Terenggarni will be implementing them as of the first of August. Apart from chopping off people's hands for theft, this means rape or adultery requires four Muslim men of good standing as witnesses to prove. Recently in Pakistan a young man (about 20) was caught walking with a 30-year-old woman, so the 4 village elders decided as punishment to rape his younger sister publicly and send her home without any clothes. I've got a friend who was almost sold into slavery in a Muslim country by her husband's family. Anyone remember the name of the lady in Egypt who was showing from the Koran that this kind of thing is not on?
Now that I've calmed down after writing the above I'll talk about Pokemon bubble fruit flavoured toothpaste. My toiletries kit comes courtesy of Countrylink, from when they whacked me in a 1st class sleeper cabin one time coming back from Crescent Head (lack of space in economy again). I seem to have good fortune regarding public transport. Once I had finished the smallest tube of toothpaste I had ever seen (the size of my little finger to the first knuckle) I got the cheapest toothpaste I could find, which was the above. Well those of you who aren't Australian native speakers, you'll probably have heard every Australian expression in the book by the time this trip is over.
Cultural fauxpas So far the Holy Spirit has twice reminded me to remove my hands from my hips (either that or I subconsciously reacted to the looks I was getting), I've already discussed eating, and I'm still forgetting to point with my thumb, but nobody has said anything yet. Between everyone these emails are going to I'm probably making a few in what I write too.
11th July. Two things I have been doing are reading & going to movies. Yesterday I saw Wind Talkers with Prabhasa and today I'm seeing minority report while Prabhasa has a badminton match. I started reading a book about 'Operation Sunshine' (the Indian army's push into Jafna in 1996) from a Tamil perspective. We don't really get to hear much of either side in Australia, but anything we do hear is from the Indian propaganda machinery (independent journalists are never allowed into the areas the Indians have or are 'liberating'). I'll rave on about that some other time though. The other book I have read is "The glass palace" by Amitav Ghosh (Harper Collins 2000), who also wrote "The Calcutta chronicles" & "The shadow lines." Bill, if you haven't already read this guy, you definitely should. It was a brilliant chronicle of three generations of Indian/Burmese and their lives in Burma, India, the UK, the USA, & Malaya (pre-Malaysia) in the style of 'Roots.'
Blessings,
Joe Krishna Mithiran -:)
posted by Joe at
Thursday, July 11, 2002
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