penang -- Week 16 -- Thursday Night at the Bayu Lounge

THURSDAY, July 3rd

There is a new salsa night now on Thursdays.  We decide to go check it out on its first night.  Shanti shows up half an hour early to babysit, and she just lets herself in with her key.  This is just so strange for us!  And we have to remember to be decent plenty early or we could have an um, awkward moment!

The Bayu Lounge is a little hideaway on the beachside of a resort hotel.  They have free hot hors d'oeuvres, buffet style, for everyone.  I can't eat any of it, but it looks tasty.  The dance floor is small.  So small, in fact,  that it has a maximum capacity of about two couples.  The rest are dancing on the carpet between tables.  We're told that the owners didn't know what kind of turnout to expect, so halfway through the night they go and grab some more dance floor (it's modular) and extend it so that about four couples can now cut a rug on some wood (or linoleum or whatever it is.)  Some people are talking about how they should move the pool table that takes up more than half the room so we can have more dance space, but I'm not sure they realize what a big job that would be.  It's hardly something they could do every week!  Besides, while it may not be conducive to crowds of dancers, I think the size of this place may be part of its charm.  You know, this wouldn't be a bad hangout spot if I wasn't after salsa.  The club is actually kind of cute and the decor is fairly stylish.  One large wall is covered with a black wall paper that has a graphic, tone-on-tone design and the lighting is dimmed just enough to add a touch of drama to the room.  And one major bonus:  it has air conditioning.  Prior to this we've been shedding pounds of sweat every time we've been out dancing, tonight we're only sweating ounces.

There is a miniscule stage in the corner by the dance floor and this week there is a "band" performing.  Thank goodness the band only has three members, any others might fall off the stage.  It's an all-girl group, and two of the three are vocals only.  The third chick is the instrumentals, all of it, on synthesizer.  You know those movies where they have those scenes that play the cheesiest possible synthesizer music so you get a feel for just how just how painfully awful a place is?  I'm thinking like the worst muzak you can think of.  Well, that's how this music is.  And it's for a salsa night and they play Ricky Martin, a disco medley, the Lambada, and they even do a cover of "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna!  The hot-pant-wearing vocalists, cute as they are, really, truly look like they stole their dance moves from Jennifer Lopez in the Selena movie.  No one dances during their sets.  The floor clears and we all wait till they are done and the CDs come back on.  But we're not jerks about it.  I'm singing and bopping along with the girls, and there are several couples teaching each other salsa moves while we wait.

Honestly, it still would be a fun night for me and none of that would keep me from going back again.  The part that makes this evening a one-time thing is the smoke.  It's a small, enclosed room, and there are people smoking.  This used to be an annoyance.  Before Denver went smoke-free indoors it wasn't even something I noticed unless it was a particularly thick smoke.  But now, with my hypoglycemia I can't be around smoke.  I am shaking by the end of the evening and there are only a few people smoking.  I miss smoke-free Denver.  It's amazing how clean the air smelled.  I immediately smelled a tinge of smoke everywhere (indoors and out) in the air the moment we left Colorado.  I don't just mean that I caught whiffs and wafts of somebody's cancer cloud, I mean that the sky itself was tainted; I could smell it in the open air and in the exterior walls of buildings everywhere we've been.  I smelled it in LA, I smelled it in Tokyo, and I am starting not to notice it as much here.

That night something else happens.  Something sad.  Well, for me it's kind of sad.  My laptop dies.  It falls off the table for the last time.  The corner is busted open (from a previous fall) and the functioning was already slowing down.  Now the screen is shot.  Actually the computer is not totally dead.  I can see stuff on it when I connect to the TV, but the TV quality is so bad that even when I set the computer resolution to its lowest (meaning the words are the biggest I can make them) I still have trouble reading anything.  What'll we do?  A new computer is hardly in our budget at this point.  But George's laptop also has a bad screen due to its own fall, so I can't really use it for image editing, plus my video editing software is mac only.  You know, tiny fingers just love pulling cords that dangle mysteriously from table tops, particularly when no one is looking.

Photos from this week:  Shanti & Regin

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And the view from Regin's play room (Regin's perspective):