'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

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