Hello!
Well here i am in the iternet cafe, they cell cyber cones, cyber bread and cyber wings! Basicaly the colest cafe in the world probably! And they sell almond snickers, which is basicaly one of the only reasons that i frequent it...
Goodness i think that its possible that three weeks have gone buy since i last wrote? Sorry! If it makes you feel better i think ive written even less frequently in my diary, though not for want of expereinces.
We spent last week living up at the nursery about 30 minutes out of kuching. It consists of 6 greenhouses, all housing different species at different stages. Peter who seems to do most of his work there took us around on the first day and told us what he wanted us to do, that was about the only part of the converstaion that wasn't in latin, he speaks fluent plant! Alice and i give him continual looks of blankness, and confusion, we're never sure if he is refering to parts of plants, species, familes....all very confusing. We spent the first day throwing away lots of plants, which confused all of the other workers and then the following days collecting enough mother planst of each species and then throwing more away, and then potting, and then......the job that Peter obviously prized as a big treat. This was to collets one of every species of aroid, drag it up a great many steps and then wheel barrow it to the compost heep and plant it in massive terocotta pots. Peter's pride in this lies in the fact that it is the biggest collection in Asia. But the thing is that they all look suspiciously similar, i mean realy similar, also the locals are obviously just as confused in his hording of them as we are, because one of them told us that he cooks the plant and feeds it to his pigs! Apart from this the week was alot of fun. However there are a great many creepy crawlies residing in the jungel that we had not encountered before. Not only were we ravaged by mossies, and trampled by the worlds largest ants, but we also had to avoid the 'INLAND PRAWN'. Aptly named by my self due to its shell of armour on its back. It's black and red and absolutly massive (i tell no lie), and has picers and lanky yellow jointed legs - 1000 of them to be precise! Even Miles one of the guys who works up there yelled when he saw one, and the told us in a very consilidating manner (more for his benifit than ours i hik possibly!) that if it happened perchance to bite us he thought prehaps that we might cry for two days! So not only did the inland prawn cause us a bit of hassel but when we were working at Tims nurssery he told us that unfortunatly a giant black cobra had taken up residence just behind where he was starting us off. How very gerous of him! He then told us to run if we saw it very fast, but if it bit us to be very clam and walk slowly to the snake bite kit! Not only this but also that it rears up and is much longer than me......v.pleasant!
While we were there we were staying with a family, they lived i a house at the nurserie and we were living up stairs under a tin roof and on floorboards! But on a plus side we did have mosquito nets that were purple and blue and a winne the poo pillow case cover. There was also a choir of frogs right out side our window that generously and free of charge, seranaded us at night.
Alice and i have mayed up multiple games to keep our minds entertained while we work, as all that it realy required is our hands and patience! So far we're quite enjoting the word games, making up storys, rhymes, songs, cartoon characters our favorite being the 'forest fiend', who like the frog we found could camoflage himself to rescue animals! We have also learnt the lyrics to the dysne songs, all the british prime ministers back to gladstoe and disralie, and a couple of shakespears sonnets, not to mention the hour of french that i make alice do! Any more suggestions would be most welcome....were running out of ideas slightly!
We had many compliments on our singing when we went through every musical singing all the songs init that we could remember.
While we were there not only were we fed an enormous amount but we had to also wash in a bucket and pee in the forset so it was quite nice to return!
This week we have been catching the good old bus to the lab to help the ladies pack all week. Our figers now look like we have resident prunes attached to our finger tips! The man at the bus station was very suprised and a little infuriated to find we were still here he said he thought we had left. alice and i have a sneaking suspicion that he might have brought the whole of his village last week to meet us, but we never turned up! Any way were back on class terms now all smiles and good mornings!
Last weekend we went with Ralphs freind Paul to the caves near Bau. This was one of the best trips ever. Not only were the caves spectcular dripping with stlagtights, moss, and bats, but also Paul is an absolute legend. Being Chinnese we were realy learning from and expert when it came to taking photograph of ourselves and the caves at their every advantage. There were multiple cries of 'no here' and 'take a photo'! Not only this but Paul also has a habit of drving on the wrong side of the road, so we spent a lot of the journey there and back swerving from one side of the road to the other. At one point however Paul decided that the right hand side was deff his favorite and stayed there, at this point his chinnese canadian freind, who had spent the large part of the journey singing old british songs to us and expecting us to sing along with 'my bonne lies over the ocean', told Paul he realy should be on the left hand side of the road, and what would our parents say if he killed us, Paul completly misunderstading replied flatly 'no were going to the caves' and continued around the corners on the wrongside, despite the on going argument between the two of them! However we did get there and back in on peice, despite stopping once while paul considered taking a bit of the mountian (i kid you not) home to his garden, the Canadian insisted it was stealing but Paul was not swayed by this argument at all saying he paid his taxes if he wanted a bit of the mountain he could take it. He also asked if we could manage to save any plants for him he would be very grateful!
This week despite the eternaly wet hands has been excellent as well. We got up breath takingly early to go to the market before work two days in a row, where we brought a kilo of prawns (which i had to shell in the evenig while alice pretened, i expect to sleep!), veg and fruit, not to mention the Indian pasteries which we brought two bags of for our breakfast and the girls at the office. However ours were obviously substandard as the next day they brought in some even bigger tastier ones for us! this week its been blissfully sunny and yesterday we spent all afternoon by the river reading and guzzling ice creams.
I'll put all the pictures up tomo, i tryed to do it at work but the computor doesn't like it,
lots and lots of love
Bags
P.S
any games and id be gratful.......!
Friday, 9 February 2007
Tuesday, 23 January 2007
'The Cockroach and Other Tales'
Ohhhhhh my goodness im SO tired! We have to catch the bus in and back from work every day, but the one in the morning requires that we get up at 6.30, which is breath takingly early and im not particularly good at it, but on the plus side it means alice and i can partake of a second breakfast at 'cili padi' (resteraunt downstairs), which is ultimatly worth the early rise..
We have mayed a few aquaintances on the bus rides, one is a man at the bus stop who carries popcorn around in his shopping bag, and takes great delight in inviting his friends to come and meet us/stare at us. We may start charging for this privaledge, especially around Chinese new yr..... He has offered to take us to a waterfall, but on the off chance that he might bring half of his local community to stare at us we may have to/deff will pass on the opportunity! alice and i are getting quite used to the staring business, we no longer blink an eye when while we wait for our bus in the afternoon we cause a traffic jam on the little rd, as cars one by one stop so they can have a really good, long, detailed stare at us! We're as good as celebs here!
The bus rides themselves are quite exciting the driver seems to be locked away inside some metal cage at the front and there is a ticket conductor who stumbles up and down, as the driver's wild steering causes him to be flung about. We quite often dont really make it around corners, and the windows fall down the whole time letting in floods of rain most of the time. the best bit of the ride is when we come back into Kuching in the afternoon. the first section of the road is coated in sleeping policmen, this causes the bus to rise up in the air like something has possesed it and then crash back down to earth with such verocity you can quite understand why we're the only people on the bus with teeth (at the moment, 4months of this and maybe we'll join them!)
The second bathroom nightmare occured last week......ohh yes another one, it is by far the most fated bathroom in the whole apartment/building i think we can presume! So there i am in the bathroom yet again getting ready for bed, i brush my teeth, think about washing my hair the following day and reject the idea (alice and i have given up washing ourselves just clothes and dishes from now onwards), after the brushing of my pegs has finished i spit and reach for my face soap, out of the corner of my eye i glance something black near to it and so i glance in the direction that my hand is swooping at a far to rapid pace i realise when i see a gigantic cockroach on top of it! I scream, for i almost enclosed the beast in my hand, but this doesnt deter the rascal! It continues to sit atop my soap nibbling and carsesing it....yuck (yes i have washed it since)! So in comes alice to the rescue, and together with me chanting a death chant and alice armed with the cockroach spray we kill it. this in itself is not an easy task though, the spray does little but make it move about , eventually however if fell of a ledge and we managed while its hairy jointed legs scrambled in the air to kill the beast. However due the lack of dustpan and brushes the creatuer is still on our bathroom floor hopefully acting as a warning to the rest of the chooclate brown cockroaches in our building to stay away. It is also a mystery how it got in as it is far to big to fit through any of the holes aparent in our bathroom, however we have sprayed them all just in case!
Food wise we have quite excelled ourselves, now theres a suprise. the first lesson we learned was if you experiment only do it with one dish at a time, jelly fish and pig intestine have never tasted great on their own and deff never will together! the smell of the intestines, sent us into fits of giggels as soon as it arrived, eyes closed and mouths opened hoping to god we didn't loose control of the chopsticks and drop it on the way towards us we tried it.....VERDICT: not bad, but the smell was enough to make you never eat it again, in your life! the jelly fish arrived coated in its chilly sauced splender. 'make sure you get a bit of the jelly fish' i nievely say to alice 'it looks like they've added a lot of noodels to this dish'.....hahaha its all jelly fish and when people in the past have said to me its bouncy their lying bouncy is not enought of a word to describe the insufferably cruchy (but impossible to make a dent in), rubbery tastless dish. Lesson no. two, tenticles are the worst, steer clear! After the mixture of the two, i gagged and was almost sick, alice and i decided that we unfortunatly didn't have enough room for the white fungus pudding we'd been soo looking forward to, shame!
However that is the only bad meal we've had, yesterday alice and i had such a feast, nasi goreng(fried rice, absolutly out of this world) it had little bits of things in it, kang kong (kind of spinichy veg) in garlic, prawns which are about triple the size of anything you see in england, in a salty batter, you eat the whole thing shell and all, Alice doesn't like the head which is excellent as i think its almost the best bit! Then the best bit of the meal a silver plate (i kid you not) with a crab on it and spicy bee hoon( tiny wee noddels), we felt like queens, easily enough food for three, but we finished it, price 6 quid.
The best thing about the chinese has to be that manners at the table is really not a problem, after all they've given you two sticks and an oversized spoon to eat with, why should they care how you manage the eating! You can eat with your nose in the food on your plate (not uncommon) and side spitthings like prawn tails out! Its quite a spectacle!
It basically rained for three days, but now at last its sunny. but as a result of going from hot and wet to cold and air conditioned alice and i are both suffering from colds and coughs although we've read enough cures for them in our work to easliy cure ourselves. On friday we're going to do our first bit of work in the nursery, which should be good. today and yesterday has been spent helping the girls to pack the plants. I feel like the ladies who pick crocus stamens for safron, we have to remove the tiny dead leaves, shorten already tiny roots and wash them all in a dingy little room. But the plants them selves are amazing, tiny little pitcher plants (the ones that eat insects) and casia's. The girls ( well, women/mothers) are also really sweet and make sudden exclemations like 'we're all married' or when I left the room, to alice 'how tall is she?' . Not only this but also all of a sudden this afternoon they burst into absolute fits of giggles and just pointed at alice, i mean i know shes weird but still....!
lots of love bags
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We have mayed a few aquaintances on the bus rides, one is a man at the bus stop who carries popcorn around in his shopping bag, and takes great delight in inviting his friends to come and meet us/stare at us. We may start charging for this privaledge, especially around Chinese new yr..... He has offered to take us to a waterfall, but on the off chance that he might bring half of his local community to stare at us we may have to/deff will pass on the opportunity! alice and i are getting quite used to the staring business, we no longer blink an eye when while we wait for our bus in the afternoon we cause a traffic jam on the little rd, as cars one by one stop so they can have a really good, long, detailed stare at us! We're as good as celebs here!
The bus rides themselves are quite exciting the driver seems to be locked away inside some metal cage at the front and there is a ticket conductor who stumbles up and down, as the driver's wild steering causes him to be flung about. We quite often dont really make it around corners, and the windows fall down the whole time letting in floods of rain most of the time. the best bit of the ride is when we come back into Kuching in the afternoon. the first section of the road is coated in sleeping policmen, this causes the bus to rise up in the air like something has possesed it and then crash back down to earth with such verocity you can quite understand why we're the only people on the bus with teeth (at the moment, 4months of this and maybe we'll join them!)
The second bathroom nightmare occured last week......ohh yes another one, it is by far the most fated bathroom in the whole apartment/building i think we can presume! So there i am in the bathroom yet again getting ready for bed, i brush my teeth, think about washing my hair the following day and reject the idea (alice and i have given up washing ourselves just clothes and dishes from now onwards), after the brushing of my pegs has finished i spit and reach for my face soap, out of the corner of my eye i glance something black near to it and so i glance in the direction that my hand is swooping at a far to rapid pace i realise when i see a gigantic cockroach on top of it! I scream, for i almost enclosed the beast in my hand, but this doesnt deter the rascal! It continues to sit atop my soap nibbling and carsesing it....yuck (yes i have washed it since)! So in comes alice to the rescue, and together with me chanting a death chant and alice armed with the cockroach spray we kill it. this in itself is not an easy task though, the spray does little but make it move about , eventually however if fell of a ledge and we managed while its hairy jointed legs scrambled in the air to kill the beast. However due the lack of dustpan and brushes the creatuer is still on our bathroom floor hopefully acting as a warning to the rest of the chooclate brown cockroaches in our building to stay away. It is also a mystery how it got in as it is far to big to fit through any of the holes aparent in our bathroom, however we have sprayed them all just in case!
Food wise we have quite excelled ourselves, now theres a suprise. the first lesson we learned was if you experiment only do it with one dish at a time, jelly fish and pig intestine have never tasted great on their own and deff never will together! the smell of the intestines, sent us into fits of giggels as soon as it arrived, eyes closed and mouths opened hoping to god we didn't loose control of the chopsticks and drop it on the way towards us we tried it.....VERDICT: not bad, but the smell was enough to make you never eat it again, in your life! the jelly fish arrived coated in its chilly sauced splender. 'make sure you get a bit of the jelly fish' i nievely say to alice 'it looks like they've added a lot of noodels to this dish'.....hahaha its all jelly fish and when people in the past have said to me its bouncy their lying bouncy is not enought of a word to describe the insufferably cruchy (but impossible to make a dent in), rubbery tastless dish. Lesson no. two, tenticles are the worst, steer clear! After the mixture of the two, i gagged and was almost sick, alice and i decided that we unfortunatly didn't have enough room for the white fungus pudding we'd been soo looking forward to, shame!
However that is the only bad meal we've had, yesterday alice and i had such a feast, nasi goreng(fried rice, absolutly out of this world) it had little bits of things in it, kang kong (kind of spinichy veg) in garlic, prawns which are about triple the size of anything you see in england, in a salty batter, you eat the whole thing shell and all, Alice doesn't like the head which is excellent as i think its almost the best bit! Then the best bit of the meal a silver plate (i kid you not) with a crab on it and spicy bee hoon( tiny wee noddels), we felt like queens, easily enough food for three, but we finished it, price 6 quid.
The best thing about the chinese has to be that manners at the table is really not a problem, after all they've given you two sticks and an oversized spoon to eat with, why should they care how you manage the eating! You can eat with your nose in the food on your plate (not uncommon) and side spitthings like prawn tails out! Its quite a spectacle!
It basically rained for three days, but now at last its sunny. but as a result of going from hot and wet to cold and air conditioned alice and i are both suffering from colds and coughs although we've read enough cures for them in our work to easliy cure ourselves. On friday we're going to do our first bit of work in the nursery, which should be good. today and yesterday has been spent helping the girls to pack the plants. I feel like the ladies who pick crocus stamens for safron, we have to remove the tiny dead leaves, shorten already tiny roots and wash them all in a dingy little room. But the plants them selves are amazing, tiny little pitcher plants (the ones that eat insects) and casia's. The girls ( well, women/mothers) are also really sweet and make sudden exclemations like 'we're all married' or when I left the room, to alice 'how tall is she?' . Not only this but also all of a sudden this afternoon they burst into absolute fits of giggles and just pointed at alice, i mean i know shes weird but still....!
lots of love bags
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thursday, 11 January 2007
The first couple of days
Hello,
So here we are (alice and i) in our little office which we share with Ralph and Dr Hien..... We are sharing a computer, not all of us obviously that would be tricky, but alice and i which is actually extremy tricky! Alice does the mouse and i do the typing and short cuts on the keyboard. She is awful because the mouse doesnt work and zooms all over the screen in nobodies control, i am however THE worst i keep doing things and thinking ive done them to find nothing on the screen has changed. I was not made for working on a computer , actually neither of us we keep disolving into peels of laughter and yesterday uncontrollable hysterics, im sure that we are utterly disturbing their work! Yesterday Tim the jungle man, brought alice and i a hand of bananas, so we finished the day in the office with that, very nice.
Now to the flat........
Well Patrick the human Res guy very kindy (presumably because of our age) gave us a flat in extremly close proximity (above) three nightclubs and an all night restaurant! this means we have to go to bed early to get in as many hours before 1-30 as we can, this way when the booming tunes start, and the bedroom starts vibrating we at least feel a little refreshed, and less resentful of being woken, and kept awake for about 4 hours on the first night, which was the worst. We now have a fully furnished house, equiped with everything from blender and a knife ladden chopping board, (which im sure will come in extremely handy both with food preperation and when we have an argument!) a fridge and a bizarre washing machine which we used last night (prehaps why we overslept this morning!). We also have two beds now! Yippee! Except i still found Alice crawling sheepishly back into mine (admitidely the double) at 2/3ish this morning....maybe because she was cold (yes it is extremely hot but we have aircon and her bed is below it, plus although we got delivery of the bed it is lacking any form of covers. although it did come with some exceptional cool childish sheets, which is prehaps why alice wanted to sleep on it?!), but never the less outrageous! and in my defense of having the double, shes too short to warant all that space......
So the first night, typically the hardest one, but in a special way for us! At 1-30 the booming tunes started and we were in no way prepared for that, so at some point i got bored of lying in bed making conversation and so i went to the loo, bad mistake, it was flodded! The cistern was overflowing but to begin with i was more than alittle worried about alices bathroom habits and whether i was going to manage 6months of them! We eventually fixed it with our new washing line and a call home to england (the only excellent thing about different time zones!). Also in the morning when we went to mop up the puddle it had all evaporated this means that alice and i are now inhaling loo water everytime we breath....very pleasant! Alice also developed a habit that night of walking into cupboards and walls with out her glasses on.........
Over all its excellent the weather isn't too rainy although last night we had a tropical storm whilst eating lobster, and an oyster omlette in a food hall on top of a carpark! We've been eating like kings. Yesterday for break(fats) we tryed Laksa a spicy noddle soup with meat and fish, absolutly bulging with chili (there was a lot of sniffing around the table, and a little bit of crying from alice...but we ignored her!). We eat alot of the time in food halls. this is a large space or open air room owned by some one, they supply the drinks and then lots of people with food carts rent spaces, so there are huge selections of food to choose from inside them, we've had koolo mee (another noodely speciality, which had liver and somefishy rondthing that was hollow in the middle...i dearly hope it wasnt and eyeball) and pig leg, where we got the skin (not hard and crunchy but soft and tender, and sqidgy) also....very good!
The people out here are planning our trips to the jungle and excursions its all getting very exciting! Oh and aparently you have to wear long pants in the jungle! i think they meant trousers but you never know!
More later, we should do some shared computer work.....!
Lots and lots of love bags
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
P.S make sure granny sees this...........
So here we are (alice and i) in our little office which we share with Ralph and Dr Hien..... We are sharing a computer, not all of us obviously that would be tricky, but alice and i which is actually extremy tricky! Alice does the mouse and i do the typing and short cuts on the keyboard. She is awful because the mouse doesnt work and zooms all over the screen in nobodies control, i am however THE worst i keep doing things and thinking ive done them to find nothing on the screen has changed. I was not made for working on a computer , actually neither of us we keep disolving into peels of laughter and yesterday uncontrollable hysterics, im sure that we are utterly disturbing their work! Yesterday Tim the jungle man, brought alice and i a hand of bananas, so we finished the day in the office with that, very nice.
Now to the flat........
Well Patrick the human Res guy very kindy (presumably because of our age) gave us a flat in extremly close proximity (above) three nightclubs and an all night restaurant! this means we have to go to bed early to get in as many hours before 1-30 as we can, this way when the booming tunes start, and the bedroom starts vibrating we at least feel a little refreshed, and less resentful of being woken, and kept awake for about 4 hours on the first night, which was the worst. We now have a fully furnished house, equiped with everything from blender and a knife ladden chopping board, (which im sure will come in extremely handy both with food preperation and when we have an argument!) a fridge and a bizarre washing machine which we used last night (prehaps why we overslept this morning!). We also have two beds now! Yippee! Except i still found Alice crawling sheepishly back into mine (admitidely the double) at 2/3ish this morning....maybe because she was cold (yes it is extremely hot but we have aircon and her bed is below it, plus although we got delivery of the bed it is lacking any form of covers. although it did come with some exceptional cool childish sheets, which is prehaps why alice wanted to sleep on it?!), but never the less outrageous! and in my defense of having the double, shes too short to warant all that space......
So the first night, typically the hardest one, but in a special way for us! At 1-30 the booming tunes started and we were in no way prepared for that, so at some point i got bored of lying in bed making conversation and so i went to the loo, bad mistake, it was flodded! The cistern was overflowing but to begin with i was more than alittle worried about alices bathroom habits and whether i was going to manage 6months of them! We eventually fixed it with our new washing line and a call home to england (the only excellent thing about different time zones!). Also in the morning when we went to mop up the puddle it had all evaporated this means that alice and i are now inhaling loo water everytime we breath....very pleasant! Alice also developed a habit that night of walking into cupboards and walls with out her glasses on.........
Over all its excellent the weather isn't too rainy although last night we had a tropical storm whilst eating lobster, and an oyster omlette in a food hall on top of a carpark! We've been eating like kings. Yesterday for break(fats) we tryed Laksa a spicy noddle soup with meat and fish, absolutly bulging with chili (there was a lot of sniffing around the table, and a little bit of crying from alice...but we ignored her!). We eat alot of the time in food halls. this is a large space or open air room owned by some one, they supply the drinks and then lots of people with food carts rent spaces, so there are huge selections of food to choose from inside them, we've had koolo mee (another noodely speciality, which had liver and somefishy rondthing that was hollow in the middle...i dearly hope it wasnt and eyeball) and pig leg, where we got the skin (not hard and crunchy but soft and tender, and sqidgy) also....very good!
The people out here are planning our trips to the jungle and excursions its all getting very exciting! Oh and aparently you have to wear long pants in the jungle! i think they meant trousers but you never know!
More later, we should do some shared computer work.....!
Lots and lots of love bags
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
P.S make sure granny sees this...........
Saturday, 6 January 2007
The re-trial.....
Alrighty lovelly people so here we are at the fore front of technology .......THE BLOG.
Janey i hope that your are especially pleased?! It took me ages in fact as i couldn't work out what my username was and so in the end i had to make mum a blog called the 12 lovelly pigs to work it out, very confusing.....and yes im sure she'll be making regular postings on all 12 of her lovelly pigs....
xx
Janey i hope that your are especially pleased?! It took me ages in fact as i couldn't work out what my username was and so in the end i had to make mum a blog called the 12 lovelly pigs to work it out, very confusing.....and yes im sure she'll be making regular postings on all 12 of her lovelly pigs....
xx
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