Penang -- Week 2, Part 4

Day 13 - Thursday
Today is better. I still want out of the hotel, George says he'll talk to someone about it. Regin and I do well. I give him a bath and slather him with vaseline. We'd stopped using it for a while; we'd hoped his skin would be sufficiently moisturized by the humidity. It's funny how you think things will change when you move, but then as soon as you start to become acclimated, life is much the same as it was before, and you'd be surprised what problems keep following you. Regin's starting to get rashes again and blotches of eczema. He's scratching right through his skin again. My hypoglycemia is getting worse again, and the back pains that had stopped when we'd left Colorado are worse than ever today. But!!! I'm thrilled to report that Regin has spontaneously started using the potty again, but not for pooping. Ugh. How do you non-EC people deal with this for 2-3 years?

George cancelled for lunch, so I made myself some pasta. It's weird. I don't have all my usual spices, and the canned tomatoes had a little surprise in them: green chilies.

I've finally found myself some vinegar and baking soda, but they come in puny containers, and I have no spray bottles yet to mix my concoctions in. Still, it's nice to be able to wipe stuff down with vinegar and feel like some things are at least a little clean.

Regin has this to contribute to the post:

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I go out to buy some new clothes. Finally! All those trips to the mall and none of them were to buy clothes! I came here with almost nothing. The little I had wasn't fitting well. The hypoglycemia diet has been making me lose weight like crazy. Now, since I've been off the diet, at first I puffed up like the Michelin man, but then I started losing again, and the few items of clothing I have are hanging on me like curtains. Still, I have only an hour to shop and I don't know my way around these stores, and I can't understand the associates, so it's not my most productive shopping trip.

Speaking of understanding people, apparently here the two main languages spoken are Hokkien (Chinese) and English. Everything written (signs, etc.) is in Malay, but not very many people are speaking it. So is it a waste of time to try and learn it? I'm still not used to the accent here, so even when people are speaking English to me, I'm really not sure what they're saying.

We head home after shopping and watch a movie. Now it's really late and I can't bare to hold my eyes open for another minute. I go to lay Regin down on the bed, and... more ants!!! We call house keeping, they come and change the sheets again, and we go to bed at like 2am. I'm serious. I can't live like this. We had to go buy new toothbrushes, which are living in ziplocs, because the other ones had ants crawling all over them!! I also found a couple of dead ants floating in my bath water. I'm telling George we need to change hotels, even if we have to lose having a kitchen, and I'm also telling him that if our apartment is like this, I cannot stay here. I have never dealt well with the dirtier side of life. For that reason camping lost its appeal to me a long, long time ago. To make my creepy-crawly phobia worse, I sat on a ants' nest on a Girl Guide camping trip as a pre-teen, and ended up with a swollen ankle and ants crawling throughout my pants. I hate ants! I guess thank goodness these are ants and not spiders. If I had to deal with spiders to this degree, I'd have left already.


DAY 14 - Friday
At the hotel all day again. Life here is uneventful, but Regin and I are learning how to be alone together. In the evening we have our first salsa party to go to! We are officially hooked in to the latin crowd here. Yay! We head over to Carmen and Fernando's house. As I enter their neighborhood I start to get the picture of what life is like for them here. I should have known this already, being that they have several servants, but seeing how they and their neighbors live makes it all the more real. Their house isn't quite as grand and luxurious as some of the others around them, but the inside is fully decorated. Every nook and cranny has just the right little trinket to fill the space. They have tons of furniture, books, photos and artwork, and I'm really starting to be jealous. I can certainly live without the servants; the idea of them makes me uncomfortable anyway. But they have a space that's filled to the brim with "them." Stuff that makes them feel at home. With the limitations we have on our trip set by Agilent, we have very little of our stuff from home, and very little money to play with to buy our own stuff here. It's because we're officially here on a short-term assignment (extendable) and if the contract were for a long-term assignment, we may be living much more like the Paz family.

The party itself is a little smaller than I thought it would be, but how many latin people do I expect to be living here on this small island?

We took a photo with all the ladies too, but I didn't get it on my camera.

Carmen, the hostess with the mostest. Carmen, dancing with hubby Fernando.

The party is held in honor of a Colombian couple who have lived here for some 5 years and are now moving to Indonesia. He works in the hotel biz, and manages the hotels I guess. He's lived in 10 countries now and off he goes on his next adventure. He has several stories to tell about the region. For instance, it's better to swim in the resort pools. In his 5 years in Penang, he has never been in the sea. The danger of jellyfish is just too high.

We met another Colombian man there who is absolutely thrilled to meet another "Colombian" in George. Immediately they are talking about things like where their families come from and whether or not they can get Aguardiente here. Too bad we left our stash at home in Colorado. This guy is a serious story teller too. And when he acts out parts of his story, he's dancing, though unaware of it. I think this is why I feel so at home with latin people. They party, they dance, and they tell stories. They're an awful lot like Faroese people. They also love to eat.
This Colombian guy told us about how we navigate the streets here, and how it's worse in other nearby countries. The way to cross the streets in some regions is to jump into the street holding your head high and paying no attention to the oncoming traffic, they will stop for you. Here, such an act is suicide. Here you are playing a very high level of Frogger, and Carmen and Fernando tell us it's best to play this version of Frogger by jumping directly behind a local pedestrian and following their path.

I've been invited to a weekly ladies' lunch. Yay! It'll be just like the one in Colorado I have with my girls (miss you guys!), but with one slight difference: The rule is, you have to speak only Spanish. Ugh. If that rule is enforced, I don't know if I'll make it to too many of the lunches. Maybe they'll allow me to speak English back to them while they all speak Spanish.