Far Away Places ...

I started teaching again ten days ago and now our holiday feels well and truly behind me.  This term I have more classes and a routine more like a full-time language teacher.  I work Monday to Thursday and most days I teach for six hours, which with preparation time makes for an eight to ten hour day.  It's been good to see my students again and to say hello to some new faces.  Up to now all my students have been Chinese, but I now have a group of eighteen year olds which includes some Malays and a feisty bunch they are.

Looking back, I wish I'd written more about Sri Lanka and the experiences we had there.  One morning in particular keeps coming back to me when I was lying in bed at dawn in our B&B up in the tea country and as I tossed and turned I could hear church bells competing with the chanting from a nearby Buddhist monastery.  Haputale, where we were staying, is up at about six thousand feet and quite chilly at night and at dawn you can get some wonderful light effects as the tropical sun shafts in through the mist.  Lying under our mosquito net looking at the light through the bedroom window the whole impression was quite surreal.

Also I said nothing about our Christmas in the UK - it came as a surprise to realise it was our first for maybe eleven or twelve years.  Dad seems to be coming to terms with his lack of mobility and it was good to catch up with Jim and Audrey and all of Sue's family.  When I go back to the UK these days I feel both a powerful connection and that I am an outsider.  The more I've travelled the more English I realise I am, but at the same time my England now seems a strange place, eccentric yet orderly, much more like Belgium or Germany than I would ever have credited.  I still respect the British sense of justice and fair play and the willingness of people to have opinions about things and to argue the toss.  This was summed up for me when driving through Uxbridge I saw a "white van man" standing in front of a policeman and debating something, maybe a penalty notice, but you could see there was no real aggression to it, just two people exchanging their views.  There aren't actually many countries in the world where you would feel free to do that with a policeman.

On the other hand the UK also seems to me these days to be place where people have less and less real choice and more and more meaningless "virtual" options.  All the big supermarkets look the same, but spend a fortune shouting at you how different they are.  Walk inside and you can find three packs of tomatoes badge-engineered to look different from "basic" to "taste the difference" and yet the only real difference between them is the words.  "Hand-picked by contented Italian peasants and brought fresh to your table by Tesco/Asda/Sainsbury/Waitrose" blah, blah, blah.

I guess I'm just getting old.

Saratok, tik, tok

I used to think jet lag was a myth propagated by people who secretly wanted to boast about their travels, but for the last week I've been a zombie, psychotic with tiredness yet unable to sleep.  Sue and I occasionally meet up in the living room at two in the morning to catch an old episode of a Jamie Oliver cookery programme or a sniper competition.  If only they could combine the two.

We had been away from Saratok for five weeks and now everything seems strange again.  The day after we arrived I sleepwalked into Everise, our local supermarket, to be greeted as a long lost friend by one of the assistants who urgently directed me to the storeroom.  "Tiger beer" he said proudly, indicating a pallet load of blue cardboard wrapped twenty-four packs.  His logic was clear - a pink man coming to the store on New Year's eve must be in need of beer.  I staggered to the check-out with a case while smiling dutifully.  Then I witnessed another mystery I've yet to get to the bottom of - at the check-out the price of the pack was marked down from the 167 ringgits on the label to 67 ringgits.  This always happens to me at this supermarket on the rare occasions they have cases of beer, while in the big towns the price is typically around 160-170 ringgits.  At the other supermarket in Saratok they simply mark up beer at a low price, 45-70 Ringgits per case.  I'm guessing that because of its remoteness Saratok has arbitrarily declared itself a duty-free zone, but I'm scared to ask in case I open up a can of worms.  Maybe it's a special beer-addicted pink persons' discount?

By the way, every town in Saratok, maybe the whole of Malaysia, has its own symbol, which is usually represented on a large piece of urban sculpture somewhere prominent.  Kuching has a big statue of a cat and Sibu a swan, while Sarikei has a pineapple.  Opposite is a photo of Saratok's symbol.  I think it's a catfish on crutches trying to make love to a prawn.  The nobbly thing at the bottom that looks like an HIV virus is actually a durian, the vile smelling but tasty fruit popular throughout southeast asia.  Somehow it seems to capture the spirit of Saratok.