We spent a few hours at the dog park today. Turns out it was a HK SPCA fund raising thing so there were lots of people and pooches. It's an enclosed space so pretty good for leash free. This is Lucky meeting Toffee. Turns out Toffee was born in Canada too, so we suspect that they got on well because they both spoke Canadian-dog.
Pulau Pangkor, Malaysia [map it here]
We left on Saturday morning for Malaysia, as detailed a while back, we booked this holiday because we needed it. Friday night I went to my company Christmas ‘do’. We all took a boat over to Cheung Chau – a small fishing island that is part of Hong Kong (remember HK island is itself only one of the dozens of islands that make up the territory, and only the second largest). We walked around a bit, then settled into a seafood restaurant and ate and drank. And ate. And drank. Then we punctuated the evening with drinking. Nobody forced me, it was utterly self-inflicted. We went from there back to HK to Wanchai – the bar district of HK. Here the drinking continued. Until I finally took a taxi home and passed out. The next morning we woke to get ready for our flight, and I woke with one motherfucker of a hangover. Oh sweet mother of fuck, I thought I would die. I was incapable of helping Eric pack our bags – hell I was barely capable of coherent speech. I threw up violently, showered and then felt nearly human, so we left.
The flight to Kuala Lumpur was nice, and I slept most of the way – this greatly improved my general sense of health. The Gravol and Paracetemol certainly helped too. We arrived in KL late in the day and made our way to our hotel. This trip is not a walking tour of anything really, I mean Eric’s reasonable immobile for any great distance for sure. But we got around a bit, had a nice dinner and then went off to bed.
Sunday we spend a few hours finding out how and where we’d have to go to get to Pangkor Island on Monday. Then we did a bit of shopping, puttered, and then went for a two hour massage. I am getting quite addicted to massages here, they are cheap and fabulous and make you feel like a million bucks. Then we hit the local gay disco. It was a Sunday night so the only action in the bar were the Money Boys. Monday we left for Pangkor. It’s a few hundred KMs north of Kuala Lumpur, but took a while to get to. Between the taxi, the bus, the ferry and the bus. But it was worth it.
It’s now Wednesday afternoon, and the weather is awesome. IT’s about 30 degrees, sunny with a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. We’ve had some overcast skies, and then thundershowers at night, but the weather has been totally fabulous for the most part. We’re in a resort with a private beach that has forest reserves on either side. The beach is about 2km long, and there are 2 pools as well. The food is good (although completely weird in that way that only western food can be when cooked by non-western people). The place is completely tropical, in a muslim country and yet they pipe Christmas carols throughout the place day and night. It’s also very weird to see the decorations, and hear the surf. It must be like that in Hawaii or Flordiay too, but add a lot of hijabs and burkas and it’s even weirder.
Probably the weirdest thin is a swimming costume worn by a muslim woman. At the least it covers here from ankle to neck (including a very feminine and discreet skirty thing at the waist) and in some cases includes a hood that functions as a burka (hijab?) It’s odd to say the least.
On the other hand there are lots of lovely looking men in speedos to ogle (and women too I would imagine but who’s looking?)
The time has finally come to retire mail @ markcosgrove dot com. The reason of course is spam. I am now getting spam at a rate of about 20 to 1. So I am going to kill it soon and start a new one. For a while they will overlap, but by the new year I will kill the old one.
Just so that this post does not get read by a spam bot and then used for spam I have written it out (like the one above). But you are clever people and you'll figure it out.
So please update your email address books to:
mnc at markcosgrove dot com
If this does not make sense then email me at the address you already have for me and I'll explain it.
thanks!!
I have not been the kind of travel-writer-new-adventures-blogger I anticipated I would be when I came here. I have resisted writing, not because I lacked anything to say but mostly because I had too many things to say. Some of it banal (subways are clean) and some of it complaining (spitting in public, ugh!). But I think mostly I was not avoiding writing so much as avoiding what I would say, or what I was feeling about this place and the move and all that was going on. There has been a lot, and much of it has been overwhelming.
As a result of Eric's injury, we didn't settle in the way we'd hoped. I had to come home and get some take out (we had not yet bought much for the kitchen when he was injured). It fell to me to do, well everything. I'm enough of a control freak that I guess on some level it suited me to an extent. However I don't speak Cantonese. The problem with that is there's a direct correlation between the cost of a product or service and the likelihood that the clerks speak any English. So every night has been a challenge. Every trip to anywhere, purchase of anything, has been difficult. I am not trying to make out that I'm a martyr or anything like that. Just that the reality has been that my first couple of months in Hong Kong were not the festival of joy and fun that I'd (naively) hoped. It sucks when your husband breaks an ankle, and it sucks about 865 times more when it happens in a city where you know only 3 people and do not speak the language. An example of what I mean: if you were in hospital with your honey and he was injured, you'd do the talking, listen to the doctor, ask the questions, and so on. Instead we've got injured Eric, stoned (hopefully) on painkillers, asking the doc and translating for me. It sucked and left me feeling useless and frustrated.
I have learned that I spend way too much of my life frustrated. And as anyone who knows me can attest, I don't deal with frustration very well. The frustration here arises mostly from the language and cultural stuff. People here will bump into you without thinking, push ahead of you to get on the subway or into the elevator, personal space simply does not exist as concept here... and so on. It is not that they are rude. They're simply not; because what qualifies as rude over here is just different. However so much of our reactions are built in, and visceral, so when someone bumps you, you get pissed, without thinking. Unless you manage your reactions all the time, you end up cranky, quickly. The problem is that you cannot possibly manage your reactions all the time, you can only do it when you become aware of them. And you usually only become aware when you've had 5 bad experiences in a row and you're about to smack someone. So it's a mobius loop of emotion in a lot of ways. Sometimes I just don't want something to be a learning experience, I don't want it to be an opportunity for cultural understanding. Sometimes I'm tired and hot and sweaty and I just want to order some fucking noodles and go home and eat.
The other thing that's been an interesting learning curve for me is figuring out that I spend a lot of my time doubting myself. It's quite crazy how hard my brain works to undermine what I'm doing. Even when I have a great deal of evidence as to how well things are going, and how well I am doing in a given situation, I still walk around in this miasma of self-doubt. "not enough" is my psyche's underlying theme.
Of course you move to a new place like this, the chances are you will spend a lot of time doing stuff wrong, so your brain has a huge amount of accurate evidence that you are crap at stuff. I've noticed that my brain does some weird logic thing where it goes "you are crap at this stuff, therefore you must be crap at all stuff". It's a sneaky and subversive piece of software that loops in my head sometimes, and it has been particularly noticeable here.
I came here for the adventure of it all of course. But the other reason was that I wanted to do a bit of a reboot on some aspects of my life. Particularly my career because, let's face it, it was crap up until now. But walking around in a funk about being not good enough, layered on top of frustration is not a conducive mind-frame for that kind of work.
Don't get me wrong, I love it here and I am enjoying myself. Eric and I are amazed that in the middle of the stress and bullshit we have not killed each other, or even had a serious row about any of this stuff. And yes I am getting out and enjoying myself in this city. I had a lovely birthday at a Karaoke place, I have been into (and in) a couple of weddings and I have started to make friends here. So by no means is it all doom and gloom. I just wanted to banish the negative stuff from my head and the only way to do that is to get it out.
Right now we're going to Malaysia for a week starting this coming Saturday, then we're back for Christmas. I figure that I'll start seriously looking at the career stuff then. And Eric will be well enough that we'll probably be able to properly get into this city in a way that we have not yet. And I'm sure everything will turn out fine.
I may blog again before I go on Hols... but if not, I'll chat to you all Christmas week. For those on Facebook, keep commenting and saying 'hi'. Everyone else, comment here, or email.
it's 7.21 AM Hong Kong time, which puts it at 6.21am EST. At this moment Lucky is in his crate, hopefully a bit stoned on Gravol, on his way to the airport in Toronto. He's about to wing his way to us. We're nervous. Neither of us could sleep well last night. This has taken more arranging thatn OUR trip to Hong Kong, I think Napoleon invaded Russia with less planning.
I'll update more when we have it. Wish the we lad well. Say a prayer to whoever you think listens (St. Francis of Assissi?).
Right, well if you read the blog you'd know that I'm a 39 year old freelance writer with a dog and a husband from Toronto. You'd also know that I've just moved lock, stock and DVD collection, to Hong Kong. Eric, (my loving hubby), Lucky (the Bichon), and I are starting a new life (for a while anyway) in the sweaty tropics
