Thursday, October 27, 2011

21 Degrees Centigrade

So after many calls, hand wringing and head banging, I have finally booked flight tickets to Morocco from the 29th Dec to 8th Jan. My ass is sore from leaning back in my chair too much, my throat dry from shouting so much (sorry Cheam) and my head spinning from receiving too many heat-radiation-waves from my handphone after talking so much. But, it is done, and woo hoo Jia, Yihang, Paur, Cheam and I are off to Morocco - for better on worse since it is a rather motley sort of crew (I almost spelt it as 'crue', Kurt Cobain would be so proud of me).

First world problems for the win.

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21 degrees centigrade is the average daytime temperature in Morocco for Dec to Jan.

SEA + China Part 1

Oh gosh I forgot that I had this lying about, was writing as I was actually travelling, just forgot to post it up.

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26th August - Singapore - Macau
Arrived in Macau near the evening, to realise how smoggy everything looked. The taxi driver brought us past the new Cotai Strip, and we saw the Venetian from the outside. After checking into the hotel, we took the hotel's shuttle into town and walked about a bit before having dinner. I did not like dinner. Throughout, I felt a bit nauseous as I smelt the water of the nearby fish tanks, splashing their dirty water everywhere. My appetite was not helped by the fact that I kept seeing a promfet fish swimming upside down, righted only when it drifted into the air pump - shooting it across the fish tank - and then flopping upside down only moment later.

After dinner we walked around Macao, looking for the ruins of St. Pauls. When we went there, we were disappointed to find it in darkness, usually it's lit up at night. However it turned out we had arrived on the first day of a special annual light show. After waiting around for about 20 minutes, the crowds came en masse, and the light show began. It was a trippy light show. Quite cool, but trippy, and not very useful at all. Then we had a meal of dandan/shuang pei lai.

The highlight of the night however was wandering into the various casinos. The first casino was the original one, by Stanley Lai, the . Then we went to . Finally we went to two random small crappy casinos, all because I was looking for those old school slots machines where you pull the lever. There were none. Instead everyone was playing baccarat, to my disappointment. No recognisable poker or blackjack. It was also smoky like hell. Then, we went back to the hotel for the night.

27th August - Macau - Zhuhai - Kaiping
Kaiping is home of the Diaolous, a UNESCO world heritage site. Diaolous are essentially houses-cum-fortresses built in Southern villages around the early 1900s, when the Qing Dynasty fell apart/the Warlord era began and there was no law and order and banditry was rife. It was funded by money sent from overseas relatives who had dispersed all over the world. This made for some really strange buildings, who had semi-Western features, in addition to being towering blocks amongst the other small village buildings. I'd first known about them when I watched Let the Bullets Fly earlier in the year.

We first had breakfast on the Macao side, and then crossed the border into China. Looking at the hordes of Chinese trying to cross the border into Macao, we thanked our stars that it wasn't us. The queue had at least over a thousand people squeezed in under the hot sun. Sometimes it's easy to forget that China just has so many damn people. Opportunists sold their places in the queue for sums of money.

We took the coach from Zhuhai to Kaiping and arrived there at about 1pm. At the coach station, we were met by a singular tout, and we ended up hiring him. He drove us to the incongruously named Milan Hotel, which was a nice place and waited for us as we checked in. Then he brought us to eat claypot rice, a speciality of the area, in a small local store. The first sight we visited, an entire diaolou village, was closed as they were apparently filming a new movie there. Still, we walked about and saw a small museum of the area.

The next sight we went to was another small cluster of diaolous in Zili Village. Amongst the diaolous there was the one they used as a facade for the movie, Let the Bullets Fly. My parents and I poked around, but after a while the heat started to get to us, plus the interiors of the diaolous were the same after a while. The next stop was the Li Garden, yet another cluster of diaolous by one extremely rich family. These diaolous had marble staircases and special tiles. Finally we went to a diaolou that was more like a fortress than a house. It was also the location of the last stand by 7 brothers/relatives during the Sino-Japanese War. Shell and bullet holes lined the exterior of the tower.

The driver the dropped us in the middle of town, to walk around a bit before we took a taxi nearby our hotel for dinner. Dinner again wasn't very good, and I remember not being particularly happy about it. Went to a supermarket on the way back to buy some bread and drinks for the next day.

28th August - Kaiping - Wuzhou - Guilin
Spent a total of 8 hours on board the bus(es), most of it sleeping. The first bus was a local bus. Felt frustrated when the driver, who smoked while driving, kept blasting his music while the guy behind me blasted his own music. It eventually turned out as expected: a volume war, with me caught between. Somehow I managed to sleep and woke up to find the driver had (naturally) won the battle. The bus kept making random stops to pick up villagers along the way who had flagged down the bus, charging arbitrary prices. The sole bathroom stop the bus made revealed old skool toilets with no doors. After 5 hours, we ended up in Wuzhou only to find that there was no bus to Yangshuo as planned. Instead we booked tickets for Guilin and then had lunch, where we ate a really tasty chicken soup.

Then we took the bus to Guilin, where I fell asleep again. Driving into Guilin, I was reminded of Hangzhou. For dinner none of us were really hungry, but due to sheer greed I ordered a ton of meat for the hotpot, partly due to the fact that I was thrilled that I could read the menu properly. As I ate, watching how annoyed my father looked, I kept thinking about the tumblr blog "this is why you're fat".

The Chill

Sitting on the floor in Dex's posh flat, I originally thought the underfloor heating was kicking in as I felt warmer and warmer. However a short while later I realised this was deceptive: it wasn't that the floor was getting warmer, it was that my leg was getting number and number, and for some reason that made it feel warmer. Oho winter 2012, here we come.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

White Cabbage

I don't know why but everytime I'm in the shower I get an urge to blog. But when I'm actually at my computer, I lose the urge. But then I really ought to force myself to, because I need to inculcate some sort of follow-through habit.

On Sunday I got it into my mind that I wanted to make my usual vegetable soup that I drink back home, the inclusion of soy sauce being only thing strangely really making it Chinese. I bought all the ingredients, but as usual forgot to buy the critical and main one: white cabbage. So off I went to Waitrose on a Sunday evening, 1 hour before it was set to close. As usual it was packed to the brims with people doing last minute Sunday dinner shopping (used to do that last year all the time, and spend an agonising 15 minutes hobbling home while overladen with groceries). Then I walked to the vegetable aisle and to my horror I saw that there were no more white cabbages left, only the weird green and leafy sort. I grudgingly picked up a random ass cabbage for the lowest amount.

As I was about to walk off disappointed, I suddenly remembered that Waitrose, being the middle-class sort of establishment it is always has an organic veg section. True enough, there were white cabbages there at twice the original price. Just as I was about to suck it up and pay 2x the amount for a bloody cabbage, I spotted a discarded Waitrose Basics white cabbage hidden among the organic ones. Some middle class sucker decided to pay 2x the price for an organic white cabbage. Hurrah! I had my cheap 68p white cabbage. As I walked back to the general cabbage section, I had a massive and silly grin on my face. I felt very very accomplished.

Then on my way back to the flat, I peeked at the veg seller's stand and noticed he had bowls and bowls of white cabbage sitting out -______- 2 white cabbages for £1. Well admittedly I wouldn't know what to do with so much cabbage (soup needs only half a head at one time), but somehow it detracted from my joy anyway.

At least the soup was tasty.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

un homme et une femme

I watched un homme et une femme last night, after spending ages before rolling about aimlessly on Tiffany's (my flatmate) bed while she watched the Law and Order episodes I passed to her. One 10am and two 9am starts every week never fail to make me feel like I am a million years old, although objectively there's just 6 real hours of academic time during those 3 days. So I just lay on her bed and sort of died, without actually sleeping, while Tiffany sort of laughed at me. My friday nights are happening, yo.

Anyway Un Homme is simply lovely. It is very very French, and very very charming. I don't know what else to say beyond that. Sadly it's proven to be one of the better movies I've seen lately. It's the London Film Fest and I'm being a film whore as usual. I've seen 3 films so far, one the pretty well known 50/50 and two more obscure ones, Mourning and There Was Never a Better Brother. 50/50 delivered the goods, but both Mourning and There Was Never a Better Brother failed to fully realise their potential. So I suppose, Un Homme was the movie (rather than Better Brother) that made my day yesterday.

Though of course I was attracted to Better Brother because I wanted to SEE what Baku, Azerbaijan was like, since I am focusing my History dissertation on it. It reminds me a bit of what I imagine Cuba/Iran to look like.

And on Monday, I watched Driving Miss Daisy with Dexter. Got to watch Darth Vader voice man in action. Cool.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

BT/VM/3

I have not fallen off the face of the Earth. Rather, thanks to lovingly decaying British infrastructure, I appear to have fallen off the face of the Earth.

First Virgin Mobile tells us they will take 3 weeks to come over and set up the internet. Alright. This was a week before I was due to return home, so it really was 2 weeks. That was livable, I suppose. To augment the many trips of going to Shu's/Dexter's/the Library, I bought BT Open, which sucked and sometimes worked.

Then last week the Virgin Mobile men came. They were a friendly, happy lot the two of them. First the set up seemed very straightforward, then it soon became apparent there was Big Trouble ahead when they had to take a ladder and access the cables from the outside. They'd been cut and disconnected, they said, evidently mystified as to why someone'd do that. We'll get Virgin to give you a call back.

So wait we did, for that proverbial call. Then it came one day as I was at Shu's house, this Wednesday I think, and I hit the roof. The diplomatic female voice on the other end of the line said it'd take "6 to 8 weeks" for construction to come and install the lines. WHY? I asked, obviously seething with rage and frustration. "Because we need to get permits and blabalabalabala".

I went to 3 and got a dongle (either a terribly bad or terribly brilliant name). But because my 5GB a month contract kicks in on Monday, I am brought back to a place where I was when I was 12. Dial up pay-by-the-data/time-internet. So as I type this I am surreptitiously thinking of how much this is going to cost me (it says 2.72MB for this sojourn already!) BUT GOODNESS IT HAS TO BE SAID. RAGE RAGE RAGE, I WANT MY INTERNETZ.