Tender

(Sorry about the wait – I hope it was worth it!)

Leg 6: Chennai, India to Penang, Malaysia

Have you ever woken up with a bazillion (yes, an actual bazillion) things running through your head, and instead of trying to fall back to sleep, you decide to get up because you’re unsure that there are enough hours in the day to accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished before going back to bed? Well, that’s what I had going in the morning. And it was a bit of a bittersweet day – it’s a no class day, but it’s the last one that we have until after Hawaii, and the next month is going to be brutally exhausting. I would have preferred to have spent the day relaxing and getting ahead of my schoolwork for the upcoming hectic weeks, but of course, that never came to its fruition.

As I was walking around the ship in the morning, you could tell that we just left India. The major walkways were still covered with cardboard and plastic sheeting. I was talking to one of the lifelong learners who has a cabin up on Deck 7, with a private outside deck, and she said that it was so filthy outside, that she was going to wait for them to get around to cleaning it, and that may not happen until after we reach Malaysia, because they’ll be too busy cleaning the rest of the ship. In Chennai, we docked downwind from, amongst other things, a coal-burning power plant, and between that and the ash from the fires littering the atmosphere, it all has to settle somewhere, and it might as well be on the ship. Needless to say, it’s going to take a while to get everything back to being shipshape. Even the ship needs recovery time from India.

Of course, the stuff that was keeping me up at night was Ambassadors Ball stuff. As time goes on and the ball draws ever closer, I wonder two things. First, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into, and I was exactly right – something that generally overtakes my life. And secondly, if I didn’t have the Ball, I would probably be bored to tears. Now that I’ve been able to manage my coursework with the Ball, if the Ball were to suddenly disappear, that would be a lot of extra time on my hands.

What we’ve got to start now is seating information. Basically, we’ve got to let people know when and how it’s going to happen. I’m sure this will not be difficult for the vast majority of voyagers, but those few who have a difficult time with this kind of stuff are going to need some hand holding.

In addition to starting to get seating going, that can’t happen until we run our raffle. Let’s talk about the raffle for a moment. The real purpose at the end of all of this Ball stuff, is to raise money for the Students of Service (SOS) charity fund on board. After all of the Ball’s smoke and mirrors have cleared, SOS is behind it all to catch our profits. I have no problem with that, I’m happy about it. And to raise more money, as well as solve the problem as to who gets to sit with the Captain and Tutu, in their two respective seatings, we are raffling off tickets to sit at these two tables. SOS last voyage raised over US$30,000 and everyone wants to top that. Aside from ticket sales for general admission at the Ball, this is how we at the Ball decided to additionally contribute.

Back at Penn State, our big fundraiser is THON, and money is raised for kids with cancer. When we’re raising money or doing work and we get annoyed, we remind ourselves it’s for the children and magically everything is better. Here, SOS doesn’t announce the charities that will be the beneficiaries of our work, so we don’t really have a face to put on what we’re working towards, so the annoyance is a bit harder to shake. That, and annoyance is sometimes a little trickier to shake just because I’m on a moving vessel, out of principle.

I had announcements put into the never read Dean’s Memo and into the oft ignored noontime and evening announcements. They tell us very little about anything on board, but half the time, we don’t know because of the covert way the information is put out there. It’s technically our fault, but that is a small percentage of information transfer that remains to be our fault. I don’t know if fault needs to be put on anyone else, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

And before lunch, I put in a request for tables for our raffle (with a lovely six hour advance warning…) and organized making posters and signs for the tables so that people knew what we were doing when they walked by on their way to dinner. Both items I consider necessary, and would have been done sooner, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

After I went into the dining room to have a lunch that I would call ‘tired’, I remembered two things, specifically that I was going to have two more lunches today anyway.

Set up before our arrival in India, I hoped that I would survive India and make it to our Ball Food Taste Test. I didn’t know what to expect about what we would be presented or how the food would be, but one thing that I know was vital was the fact that if the food was not good, there were going to be more serious issues than getting out of India alive. We’d have to redesign the menu and pray that the kitchen can whip out something better. That’s more work for us, so we decided that we were going to cross that bridge when we came to it.

They brought four of us into the inner bowels of the kitchen, a place we’re not allowed to go for assumedly safety reasons. They just say ‘no’ without a reason, and we have to come up with our own explanations. Anyway, they take us into the kitchen on Deck 5, but we have to take the escalator down to Deck 4, where the food is prepared. Let’s get this straight – the escalator is only in the kitchen. There’s one going up and one going down, and as far as I know, that’s all there is on the ship. However, there’s other places that we’re never going to be able to see, places like the morgue, and who know where that is or what mode of transportation it takes to get there.

In a little corner of the windowless kitchen, they had our dishes from the menu laid on the table before us. Here’s what we had: vegetarian sushi and shrimp cocktail for starters, shrimp and corn chowder, chicken Caesar salad, and for dinner Brazilian tenderloin steak, chicken yakitori, and palak paneer. What is palak paneer? I don’t know; it’s the one I didn’t try because it’s the vegetarian dish. It looked like a mound of green goop, but apparently it’s quite popular in the vegetarian community. The few others in our taste testing group decided that it was good and I’ll have to take their word for it.

All in all, the food was what I call shockingly good. Some of you may remember early in the blog, early like Puerto Rico, I was saying that the food is so much better than it is back at school. I’m here to rescind that statement from the record right now. The food was good, but only for about a week, and then it went downhill quickly. I don’t exactly know how, but I think they can only do a couple meals decently, and they were all in the first week, and have yet to be seen again. I know that the way a normal cruise ship works, much more money goes to food than it does on our trip. That should mean that we’re not eating as fancy stuff, not that the food tastes like the stuff that should be fed to the hounds.

I don’t know what they’ve done to the food, but the longer this trip goes on for, the more difficult the food is to eat. There’s just something about it that is not tasty and tough to force down the throat. In other words, you tell yourself that you get full quickly so that you don’t have to keep eating. I don’t know how to fix the problem, because I don’t know what’s wrong. What further complicates the problem is that the food they prepared for us for the ball was fantastic. It was great. I ate more at the taste testing than I did at lunch. Everything was great. Shockingly great. It makes me wonder that if they can do this food so well, how come the food we always get is so substantially sub par? It doesn’t make any sense that they just don’t try nearly every day of cooking. That said, we don’t have to change anything on the menu and I can actually take a deep breath and start promoting how great it’s going to be.

About an hour after the taste test, the dependent children that I help tutor had a little thank you party for all the work that we’ve done so far. The thank you party consisted of pizza and ice cream cake, which I was going to force as far down my esophagus as I could. I’m not going to turn that down because it may never come back around again. If I get one day of good food in me, it can go a long way. And when I say a long way, I mean about a day and a half.

The party was very nice, and I tried to recruit the kids to help me to sell raffle tickets during dinner for the next couple of nights. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll ruin the suspense for you: only one showed up, and then promptly left.

After the party, I walked around the ship a little bit, and it felt like a ghost ship. There was nobody anywhere. It’s like being on a ghost ship. What was billed as a reflection day from India has turned into a recovery day from the past few weeks, since our last uninterrupted day off, and I can’t take the time to ‘enjoy’ it as much as clearly most other people are.

As the afternoon fluttered by rapidly, the time came when I had to start setting up the raffles outside of both dining rooms. It’s really not that much of a set up, but when you need things like scotch tape and scissors, a precious commodity on board, things begin to get complicated, somewhat unnecessarily so. So, by 1730 (that’s 5:30pm) when dinner starts, I was sitting at my table downstairs with another table manned upstairs. And for the next thrilling two hours, I was signing people up for raffle tickets.

I would have thought that both Desi’s and the Captain’s table would be popular, but Desi proved to be far more popular, so the selling point for the Captain became that you’d have a better shot winning with him. It’s not necessarily that Desi is that much more popular, it’s just that the Captain is that unpopular. What started as a venerable respect for the guy deteriorated into a great disrespect for the Captain as time moves on, and his mouth gets him into trouble, and all incidents revolve around his wife.

We picked up her wife when we were in South Africa, and will be dropping her off back at her home in Hong Kong once we get there. The Captain is a British man well into his 50s, and she is less than half his age. This kind of thing, while common in Asia, isn’t looked upon so lightly on a ship of Westerners, mostly from the states. Albeit, American men are probably the biggest perpetrators of doing this, it still doesn’t make it right. So that’s one strike. Another strike came out in relation to the comments he made on Captain’s Q & A night, where he said that Hong Kong is his favorite port because that’s where he met his wife, although it may not be his favorite port in the next few years, meaning once his wife ages a bit, it will be time to move on.

Another strike against the guy came from when he talks about his second wife, with the current one being the third. He wanted to divorce from her, and she didn’t. When, in conversation with voyagers about this situation, he is quoted as saying, “she eventually died, rather conveniently actually.” Conveniently? Conveniently? Not only is this guy the scum of the Earth, he may have had his wife dealt with.

Lastly, this last one also came about in what we’ll call casual conversation. Apparently, the Captain prefers when his wife refers to him as ‘master.’ In fact, that’s only how his wife would refer to him if he always had his way. Needless to say, because of all of this, sitting at his table was not the most popular of options. In voyages past, when the only opportunity to sit with anyone special was just the Captain, I don’t know what we’d have to do to sell raffle tickets, because after a while, Desi’s were selling like hot cakes, hot South African cakes.

After I was relieved and was able to go grab dinner, which was world’s apart from the taste test that I had earlier in the day, and thanks to my three lunches that I already had today, I really wasn’t very hungry, yet I still ate about the same amount that I did almost every other night, except I won’t be as hungry for ten o’clock snack later. Then, I went back to help clean up, and after two hours in two dining rooms we garnered over $500, which I see to be a great victory. With three more nights of this, I’m hoping to hit $1000. I know the next two nights won’t be as busy, but I’ve still got high hopes.

After clean-up, I went over to another room that we had reserved to set aside for cutting out the invitations. Because the cost of cutting the invitations was so much additional money, we decided to cut them out ourselves. Our group had already started by the time that I got there, and because they were almost done, I didn’t help cut, I counted out the over 800 invitations that we had prepared. After counting, we cleaned up and I was the lucky guy that got to hold onto all of these invitations. I guess that’s part of my job description. All in all, after waking up with a bazillion things to do today, I actually accomplished them all, which I find to be wonderfully impressive.

In the evening, there was an event of entertainment happening in the Union. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, there used to be a television program airing on the MTV years ago called Singled Out, and it was some wacky dating show, and judging by the fact that it was on MTV, involved a moderate to high degree of humiliation. That’s why there were so few people that had signed up to participate in it. There was a decently sized crowd of onlookers, but the contestant was a guy, and the contestant pool was both male and female, which irked quite a few of the males in the contestant pool, and tried to eliminate themselves as soon as possible.

The whole thing didn’t seem to be incredibly organized nor did it seem to breathe any sense of knowing what they were doing. I didn’t stay for the end because I really didn’t care.

At this point, we’re a couple days away from Malaysia, and I’m excited. I’ve always looked at this trip to be divided as ports before India, and ports after India, and I’ve yet to put much thought into the ports after India, and now that India is over, I’m putting thought towards Malaysia and I’m excited about it. What I’m not excited about is losing sleep tonight. While it’s only a half hour, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You don’t feel the half hour the next day, but it will hit you eventually, and you just don’t know when. I’m hoping it will hit me some time when I’m asleep.

Today is now Day 56 of the trip, otherwise known as Saturday, March 31. With the passing of March, the second of our three and a half months, all the sentimental people start thinking that the trip is ending. It’s not ending – we haven’t yet hit half of our ports. The month of April is going to be incredibly taxing and fast-moving. So stop complaining.

Unfortunately, no class days only last for one day, and not more than one day. And nobody wants to be in class again. While we’re more than halfway done with classes, today we’re just trying to forget that it’s a Saturday, and we’re going to have classes today and tomorrow. Although, as I’ve said before, remembering the day of the week is actually quite difficult.

And as always, we have a new interport lecturer from Malaysia, and let me tell you, she’s just as boring and uninteresting as all her predecessors have been in Global. From what I hear, those sentiments are shared, but their opinion about these people outside of class is markedly different. I have tried and tried to find the interport lecturers and students on the ship. I have waited for one to come visit one of my classes, but I’ve come up with bupkis. Out of class, these people are said to be wonderful. I can’t vouch. It seems as if the reach of Global is enough to turn anyone into a tragic presenter.

As more Ball issues have cropped up since yesterday, I’m running around with those again, and I’m getting rather tired of it. I have other things, like naps, that I’m missing out on. And on top of it all, I’ve got a history exam tomorrow morning that I’m going to want to get around to start studying for. I’ve got my plan for studying, but that plan keeps changing as available study time gets shorter and shorter. Throughout my college career I have always vowed to never pull an all-nighter, and I’m certainly not going to start on this trip. While sleep is highly overrated, it’s not unnecessary.

If you’re familiar with maps, you know that India and Malaysia aren’t incredibly far from one another, thus our three day transit time. I guess they’re a little closer than the people who planned this trip initially thought, because in the middle of having lunch, they slowed us down again. Going slow is never fund because it doesn’t feel like we’re going anywhere, even if we are covering over 200 miles a day. I’ll let you do the math on the knotage.

Then dinnertime rolled around again, as did Raffle Day Part II! I set everything up again outside both dining rooms and manned the upstairs station this evening. I didn’t know how busy we would be, because theoretically, everyone that already walked by yesterday should be walking by again today, so it’s going to be a bit of a wild card. Thus explaining why I brought my laptop along with me, as well as my history textbook – I’m trying to prove that men can actually multitask. What I did not predict was the steady stream of people that would be purchasing raffle tickets. As a result, I have no results about the male ability to multitask because I was too busy with the raffle, which some would look at and say is a verification of the male inability, but I’m calling it inconclusive results.

I sat upstairs for an hour before I was relieved of my duties and I could grab dinner and prepare a short meeting to see what we were able to get as far as decorations go in India. If you’ve noticed a theme with the decorations for the Ball, it’s not going swimmingly. And that continues to be the way. So, in my continuing disowning of decorations, because it’s just not what I want to deal with anymore, someone else is in charge of all decorations operations from here to eternity. And they won’t be micromanaged because I don’t want to. I trust them, and we’ll go from there. The worst case scenario is that there are no decorations at the Ball. For me, there are worse things in the world than no decorations. At this point, if I had my way, there wouldn’t be decorations at the Ball. But somehow, even as President of it, I don’t think that decision will go through.

Also in our decorations meeting, we met to distribute invitations for the Ball. I wanted to do this in an incredibly organized and productive manner, but people took stacks of invitations and picked parts of the ship to deliver them to, and before I knew it, they were all gone, and I was sure that some people had more invitations than they needed, so therefore some people were not going to have nearly enough invitations, and they would come a-calling to me. I also wanted invitations to be put out after cultural preport, but that didn’t appear like it was going to happen either.

Cultural preport turned out to be a slideshow that was less than interesting, which by definition would make it uninteresting. All in all though, I’m really quite excited for Malaysia. It’s a country they’ve failed to tell us much about, so I’m going in a bit cold, and I’ll figure it out from there. I might just be excited at the prospect of going into a city with tall buildings. I haven’t been in one of those since I flew out of JFK back in the first weekend of February. That’s a little too long for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in cities. But Salvador, Cape Town, and especially Chennai just don’t have tall enough buildings. They’re all just not big enough for me.

Anyway, Kuala Lumpur, or KL as those in the know call it, the capital of Malaysia (the other capital of Malaysia being the M), is going to be fun. And while I learned nothing about it, or really the rest of Malaysia for that matter, they did give us three tantalizing tidbits. The first of which is that Malaysia has a local fruit known as a durian. One of the professors lived in Malaysia for a time, our Global studies professor, and he told us that eating durian is like eating custard – in an outhouse. Apparently it’s quite the experience. I’m still not enthused about eating much fruit in port as it is, so I’m not sure that I’m going to have the opportunity to verify his description. The second is that Malaysia is the most non-Western port on our itinerary. That’s all they were saying the entire time that we were in preport. That was every other sentence out of their mouth. After leaving India, and now going to a country that’s supposed to be more non-western, I’m second guessing what we may have got ourselves into. That parlays a bit into the third, best of all, is that for this port, we should tell people that we’re Canadian. I don’t know why we should be telling people we’re from Canada. They won’t tell us why. But if I were a betting man, because this country is predominantly Muslim, they think that we’ll be an issue. I can’t imagine that Americans are issues to all Muslims across the globe, but apparently the people running this ship seem to think so.

After preport, I went back to the room to study, and be available for what I was sure to be impending issued from Ball invitation distribution. I would be able to type out one or two definitions between each interruption. Sure enough, people were starting to run out of invitations, and I gave out the remainder of my supply, which means I had to start writing down which cabins didn’t receive invitations and then deliver them myself once the extras get returned to me, whenever that is.

They announced at the end of preport that the ship had received the Super Bowl. Someone must have mailed it in. So I went up and watched for about ten minutes. It was raining and the score was low, and we were fast-forwarding through commercials. That’s why I only stayed for ten minutes. That, and we’re losing another hour of sleep tonight, and I want to get up a little earlier to study for my exam first thing in the morning.

Overly tired is not a phrase that I would throw around lightly, but I was a mess in the morning trying to stay awake while walking to breakfast. The process of waking up is taking longer and longer to accomplish, and I’m just not getting used to it at all. I woke up earlier than normal for my exam and used that time to do my last minute studying for it. Don’t ever let anybody tell you that last minute studying is useless, it works; not all the time, but enough to use it for every exam I take.

The history exam went fine, it was more or less what I expected it to be, so I should have a score up around where the last one was. Then I went back to bed. I had a good 45 minutes before Global started and I wasn’t going to let that time slip by without getting some more shuteye, which I so desperately need.

Then, once I was back up for Global, was the interesting part of the morning. And in case you’re wondering, no, most mornings do not usually have an ‘interesting part.’ So Global starts with Dr. Matt up in front with a somber expression on his face, and the short story is that they’ve had a few people down in the clinic with advanced stages of leprosy. Everyone’s mouth drops at the news, and then we go through a whole song and dance about having to check our ears and noses to make sure that the tissue hasn’t become soft, because we’ve all got to check one another to make sure that we also haven’t contracted leprosy. So after everyone is put into a mild state of panic, the Dr. tells us that this is something that happens every Spring Voyage on this day, because it’s April Fool’s Day. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that’s some sort of violation in the Hippocratic Oath, possibly under the ‘do no harm’ heading. I’m unfamiliar with it, so I’ll have to research that later.

After the joke, there were then three kinds of people on the ship. The people that believe it was wrong for him to do that to us, the people that believe it was a funny joke, and the over 50% of people who were sleeping in through Global that morning. That number is on the rise and continues to rise as the day moves onward. After the fact, the overwhelming on the ship was the thought of ‘who cares?’

I treated Global that day like the radio, so I listened to it all with my eyes closed and tried to pick up other stations, but when you’re drawing in on the Straits of Malacca, there aren’t many other stations to pick up. I think I was conscious for more than half of Global, enough to take notes on some stuff. I’m sure I was hearing the important stuff, too.

I put my laundry out the day we were set to leave India, and I was quite happy that I would be able to get those clothes out of the room and washed, rather than keeping them in the room, but they didn’t come back until this afternoon, nearly three days after putting it out. I think that’s a bit of a long time to wait for clothes. I was beginning to run low. I’m beginning to think that the laundry department is getting a little backed up, so hopefully this isn’t an omen of things to come, but you never know.

For dinner this evening, I ate with my lovely extended family again, the lovely John Paul and Shannon. I’ve decided to start irking John Paul by calling him ‘Dad’ on the ship. He’s told me that that drives him nuts because he’s only 27 and doesn’t want to start thinking about having kids yet. As a result of his distaste for it, I do it every chance that I get, and it becomes exponentially more fun with each time that I do it. The best if when I do it in large groups of people. I get a kick out of that. He doesn’t. His wife Shannon doesn’t have a problem with ‘Mom’ so it’s almost not fun when I do it with her. If only he knew that.

Because I was having dinner with the family, I just set up the raffle tables for our final night and had ready, willing, and able attendants manning the tables so that I could have a break. After dinner, we finished the raffle, drew the winning names and tallied how much money that we raised. I was hoping for one thousand dollars, and we hit over $1100, so I was thrilled, and Students of Service, the recipients of the fruits of our labor, were also thrilled and actually shocked at the amount of money that we raised. I knew all along that we would do fine.

At preport we read the names of the winners, and then the rest of preport was a shadow puppet performance. Here’s the issue that I have: the shadow puppet stuff was good and all, but in the process, information was supposed to have been given out, and I feel like I missed a lot of it. I understand that they want it to be fun and exciting, but when the information is presented kind of quickly and indirectly, I can’t absorb it all, and I think everyone missed important stuff along the way. I’m sure I’ll figure out what we missed once we get into port.

Speaking of getting into port, that highlights a major flaw of preport. We’re not pulling into port in Penang. We’re dropping anchor in the harbor and then tendering to shore. (What’s tendering you ask? Stay tuned!) Of course, this whole process is going to be painfully complicated and confusing, but the details to help it move more smoothly were lost somewhere in the shadow puppets. Shadow puppets, by the way, are supposed to be the big deal in Malaysia. Who knew? But I’m slated to be at a performance tomorrow night, and I’ll be sure to report back on the performance.

After I tried to punch my way out of the paper bag that is my cinema paper that’s due after we leave Malaysia, I decided to go to bed shortly after preport because I was tired, and we were losing another hour before pulling into port in the morning. I can already tell that all these ports next to each other in Asia are going to be fun. We’ve lost 2.5 hours since India and we’re all feeling it. But, as always when we pull into port, we put our lack of sleep behind us and prepare to be engulfed by yet another foreign land.

Penang, Malaysia

They told us somewhere in the previous night’s preport that we would be dropping anchor in the harbor some time around 8, so I figured that my customary 6:30am pull-into-port wake-up time would be spot on. The alarm begrudgingly woke me up at 6:30, I rolled out of bed and out the back door of the ship. It was completely dark. There was no land in sight. And there were no lights from shore visible. And it was raining. I went back to bed for an hour.

I woke up again at 7:30, with attempt number two to welcome Malaysia. I made it up to the front of the ship just as we were pulling into port and the sun was rising over the jutting landforms. I’ve been very lucky with timing my rises, with the exception of the morning’s earlier miscue. It was actually a very pretty sunrise. I’d put it in the top five. And in case you’re wondering, so far, it’s out of six, and India is six.

Before they started us nuts with immigration, I called home, and I think I made the time conversion math correct so that we were both awake at the same time. This is the last time that I talk to Mom before I see her in Vietnam. I still can’t conceptualize the bizarreness of that reality, but I’m starting to get quite excited.

I have come to notice that in the time that we pull into port and are let off the ship, there’s not many people out and about, especially people on Email. So, I think it’s a golden opportunity to check my Email, especially because it’s usually faster in port. The trick of it all is that most people are not checking their Emails because they plan to in port. I also have that opportunity, but it’s never a guarantee, and I’d much rather see responses from letting people know that I made it out of India, rather than wait. It’s a crap shoot. If I don’t find an internet café in port, I hop back online with everyone else once we pull out of port in four days. It’s a well calculated decision.

After passing through immigration, which wasn’t all that bad, considering what we just went through in India, I met in the Union for my trip. This was a good deal because of the tender situation.

Allow me to explain tendering. Our boat dropped anchor in the middle of the Penang harbor, because there’s nowhere on shore where our ship can ably dock. As a result, there’s no pier for us to walk out and onto to get to land, so there needs to be some kind of method for us to be able to do that. This involves the use of what the ship folk call a ‘tender.’ In reality, a tender is one of the life boats on the ship. Two to three life boats were in use at a given time. We’ve often sat and looked out at the lifeboats as they sway back and forth as we travel, and wondered what it’s like to be inside them. Well, that dream was quickly going to become a reality. All passengers, large and small will exit the ship on an attached gangway and enter the tender as it docks alongside. Then, once it’s full, it jettisons us off to a small pier on shore. This is the only way to and from the ship.

Because my trip is one of the first trips to leave, we get to leave the ship first, ahead of everyone else who is going to have to fight for a spot on the next available tender. And it’s going to get tricky at times because tenders are said to only run once every thirty minutes, so if you miss it, you’re going to be waiting for a while. That would come into play quite a bit as our stay in Malaysia prolonged.

As my trip left the Union, everyone thought that the tendering process was cool and fun. We were getting in a life boat and heading off to shore with the aid of its non-impressive rotors. The trip was about five minutes on waters that didn’t compare to the water we had out on Seal Island in South Africa. There were a few intermittent waves, but if you blinked you missed them.

After exiting the tender at the pier, they led us through a building and out to the buses waiting for us. The trip was the traditional city orientation that’s offered, except this is an island orientation. Something that I was unable to research for lack of time, and something that was neglected to be told to us in our preports was that Penang is a city as well as an island, and the only way to get to mainland Malaysia is to drive across a very large bridge. And my tour would do all sorts of stuff still on this island of indeterminate size. It could be the size of Mauritius or Manhattan, and I wouldn’t know.

Our bus fills to the point where there are five or six empty seats, and there’s another bus behind us that we assume is less full and will take on the remaining few people still standing on the sidewalk as we drive by. If you remember correctly, something that was highly stressed back in preport was the fact that Malaysia is the most non-western port on the ininerary, and something else they told us is that this isn’t a country that likes to party and drink and finding places to do that will be few and far between. Within the first two minutes on the bus, we passed by a bar, and advertisements for Heineken and Budweiser.

But, after about three or four minutes into the lovely tour of downtown Penang, our tour guide starts furiously talking on her cell phone, and apparently, the other bus filled up and those empty seats on our bus were meant for those poor people standing out on the sidewalk, so we have to go back and get them. It’s kind of hard to openly moan about doing that, but you could feel the silent moaning on the bus that we’d have to go back. The city, like most cities I’ve been to so far, are mostly one way streets, so getting back to somewhere you’ve already been is a long and arduous process.

After picking up the sidewalk loners, we drove by the bar and the advertisements again, before seeing fun, new, and exciting scenery, we were off to our first stop. Ever since the elephant debacle in India, I’ve decided that I’m not going to reread the trip descriptions of the trips I’ve already signed up for. I know that we’re going to be doing something that I’ll like, and there’s no sense in knowing what’s coming, for fear of disappointment. Additionally, it’s like going on a whole new adventure, with absolutely no clue what’s in store. Only that I knew at one point, and at that one point, it seemed like a good idea. I think it’s an ingenious plan.

The first stop that we made was at a renowned butterfly garden. They call it a butterfly farm, but it was a garden. It’s also said to be the largest in the region. If they mean ‘island’ when they say region, then that’s really not saying a whole lot. The garden was just that – a garden full of multicolored butterflies. It was very pretty, and I took some lovely photos of butterflies, but perhaps the most interesting part of the garden were the varied signs that they had displayed around to tell us what not to do. There was no writing on them, so they were all very intricate cartoons of what we should or should not be doing. I actually found these to be far more interesting than the butterflies at some points, and I’ve included a few of these signs below.

I missed the time that we had to be back to the bus, so I wasn’t sure when exactly I should be exiting the garden to head out to the bus. Evenutally, I found someone else that knew, and planned the rest of my time in the garden. I wouldn’t call the garden gigantic, but if you’re a brisk walker and observer, you really couldn’t spend more than 20 minutes there, even if you tried. After a while, as pretty as it is, it tends to get a little on the repetitive side.

Anyway, there is one way in and one way out. The way in was very short and took us right into the garden. I thought the exit would be in a similar fashion and planned upon that in my exit strategy. Once the time came, I followed the exit route out of the garden, and into an interior section of other kinds of fascinating insects in incredibly small display cases and containers. There’s no way that these organisms and bugs could be comfortable in these spaces. There’s barely enough room for them to fully rotate around.

So there’s one room of all these live other insects, and outside of this room is another room of the dead ones. But it’s not just the dead ones in the other room, there are dead insects mounted on a wall that I have never seen before in my life. And I think this is the part of the world that I’m going to see them. They all had a bit of that southeastern Asia flair, and were then enormously gigantic. These bugs were so big that they could eat a human. I don’t think that I’ve seen bugs so large and with so many legs and eyes. They look like something that dinosaurs would have to step on to squash. If I stepped on these bugs, I’d lose my foot. Some of them, I’d look at and not be able to tell which end was the head, or rather where any of the ends on the bug were. But they were fun.

After the dead bugs room, there were no more exhibits, but that’s where the gift store started. It looked like it was just the hallway that was right before the exit, and as the time crunch started to get a little tighter, I had to walk faster through the gift shop. I would get through that room, and there would be another gift shop room. I think I counted four in all. I wasn’t even looking at what was around me as I was heading for what I hoped was the exit. I finally found the exit, and made it to our meeting point on time, with about four or five other people. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one that misjudged the size of the gift shop at the butterfly garden. Who knew that butterfly gardens were supposed to have such gigantic gift shops?

Our next stop, they told us, would be the Chor-su Kong Temple, otherwise known as the Snake Temple, because of the poisonous snakes adorning the altar. It sounded like fun. Again, not knowing the size of Penang island, I didn’t know how long it would take to get there, and our tour guide said it would just be a trip over the mountain. It was an hour away, over windy mountain roads and semi-scenic lowlands.

Again drawing on the statement that this was the most non-western country on the itinerary, we passed by office buildings that had some of the biggest American company’s names on them. Boeing, Intel, DHL, the list goes on. So far, and mind you this is just one island of Malaysia, Malaysia has turned out to be the most western country on the itinerary. I’m not jumping to conclusions yet, but that’s what this is all shaping out to be.

After driving about an hour, over hill and dale, to reach the snake temple, you would think that it would be worth the drive and we would get a great amount of time to spend there. She gave us twenty minutes. We were kind of annoyed and confused. Anyway, just as we leave the bus, we walk by a tree with a snake crawling across the branch. That was fun – more fun, it would turn out, than the entire snake temple.

Here’s what the snake temple turned out to be: an altar with two snakes on their own perch, almost moving. And on top of it all, in the temple, which I assumed to be Buddhist, was a room about fifteen feet by twenty, and was wall to wall with people. I’m not sure what they were seeing that I wasn’t, but I’ve seen much more exciting snakes than those two small little ones. They couldn’t have been more than a half inch in diameter. And that was it – the snake temple has two snakes, and one outside on a tree. I’m almost certain that there would have to be others around someplace else, but I wasn’t going to go around picking up and looking under randomly scattered pots.

I think in total, around the entire grounds of the Snake Temple, I saw five snakes. And I didn’t even need the whole 20 minutes. I was done just over ten minutes into it. I guess I can say I went to the snake temple, but it really isn’t saying a whole lot.

After the Snake Temple, they drove us down the road to lunch to a Chinese restaurant. I thought we might be going to a Malay restaurant, but I guess Chinese is all right. The demographic breakdown of Malaysia, incidentally, is mostly Malays as well as a healthy population of Chinese and Indians. They explained all the non-interesting facts about this in one of our Global studies classes, but I neglected to retain any of that knowledge.

Lunch was good. It surprised me a bit, and I’m not sure why, but it was good. The calamari was good and they gave us a nice number of dishes. For the first time this trip, they fed us by putting about ten of us around one table, and then kept bringing out platters and bowls of food that we would share from. All with a Lazy Susan in the middle of the table, except I don’t think that they call it a Lazy Susan.

The next stop on the whirlwind tour was at the Kek Lok Si Temple and Pagoda. This temple/pagoda was located on the side of a mountain, which was really more of a considerably sized hill, but an elevation increaser at the very least. The trick about this temple/pagoda is that to go from street level up to the temple/pagoda, you have to walk up a semi-narrow linear with lined with shops and stalls on either side of you, trying to sell stuff. As we were walking up the steps, I expected that the shops would die off after walking by them for a few minutes.

Ten minutes later, and still climbing up steps, there were shops on either side of us. Eventually, we emerged and arrived at the temple/pagoda. Here, I didn’t see any worshippers, and had stuff on sale inside the temple. I’m not incredibly sure about the validity of it, but I’m not the one to judge. Buddha and his bodhisattvas looked quite happy sitting there. As we kept walking around the temple/pagoda, we found that we could only go so far without having to pay extra. I didn’t feel like paying extra to see more of the same, so I turned around and took my time looking around what was here on the side of the mountain. I tried to pass the time with some tomfoolery:

Again calculating the time that I’d need to be back to the bus, I also inserted some time to allow me to look in a few of the shops on the way back down. Specifically, I’m looking for my mask from Malaysia, and I found a few shops on the way up that had some masks. Sure enough, I found one on the way down again, and I haggled my way to successfully acquire another mask. I was quite proud of my purchase. Finding a mask on the first day in port was quite a feat. Now I can relax for the remainder of my time in Malaysia.

As the tour was winding down, and seeming like it’s going to run longer than scheduled, negotiations began to happen. One group of girls left the tour at the next stop because they had to go catch their flight into Kuala Lumpur (KL) and a bunch of the rest of us were concerned that we wouldn’t have sufficient time to make it back to the ship to depart for the Welcome Reception in the evening.

What was decided once we got to the Botanical Gardens was that we would drop people back off at the pier and take those remaining on the bus back to the last stop of the day. Upon learning that the last stop of the day would be some place where Jodie Foster filmed a scene for a movie (I think they called it Fort Cornwallis, but it wasn’t an actual fort,) I decided that I was okay with being dropped back off at the pier with the rest of the group.

But, while still back at the Botanical Gardens, nobody was reading or paying attention to any of the signs that say not to feed the monkeys that roam freely throughout the park. And roam freely they do. I’ve really only seen monkeys in zoos, but especially in Asia, it seems like monkeys are as common as cats and dogs are back home, except they’re generally not kept as house pets, I guess.

These monkeys, which I called ‘rabies’ as I always do, seemed a little on the rabid side. Or maybe that’s just how monkeys are when you set them loose. I think we were in the park for fifteen minutes, and in that time, I saw one monkey furiously chasing another just across the path in front of me and up into a gazebo where they proceeded to have ‘relations.’ The male monkey finished, and then ran after the other monkey to have more ‘relations.’ Each lasted about ten seconds. I think that’s some kind of record.

We questioned our tour guide with reasons why we were taken to see the Botanical Gardens, as opposed to other sights in Penang. We didn’t directly question her about it, but the best that we could get out of her was that the gardens are popular in the early morning for people that like to go jogging. Other than jogging, that seems to be the only purpose of the gardens, that and as a monkey sanctuary. As a matter of fact, it’s really not like Botanical Gardens like you’re thinking, it was a pretty park. It’s a park with monkeys roaming around all the place having ‘relations.’

After we left the gardens, we were taken back to the pier about an hour and a half before the Welcome Reception tour was supposed to leave. At this point, having gotten on and off the bus all day in what was quite a hot day, we’re all just worn out. And I feel slightly ill on top of it all. I can’t figure out if it’s just me being tired, or if it’s something else on top of that. At this point, all I really want to do is get back to the ship and grab dinner.

Much to my surprise, there was a tender waiting for us right as we were pulling up in the bus, and we all spotted it and made a mad dash for the tender, because we weren’t about to wait a half hour for it. As I was exiting the bus, I was already looking out the window and planning the quickest route to get myself over to the tender before it either filled up or abruptly left.

I made it with time to spare. Actually, I made it with about a half hour to spare. For some reason, my tender did not want to leave. I guess it wasn’t time yet for it. What I’ve come to learn is that we all better hope that the ship doesn’t sink, otherwise it’s going to be very uncomfortable on these lifeboats for any extended amount of time. They’re crowded and smelly from all the people. And let me tell you, that tender ride gets old really quickly. What was so exciting in the morning has just become a pain now. Just get me back to the ship.

Once back, I went over to dinner and was still mulling around whether or not I wanted to go to the Welcome Reception. I really didn’t feel like going. I was really tired and was starting to feel lousy. I’m not sure what I was feeling, but my body was letting me know that something was up. Not taking my own advice to ignore peer pressure, I let my friends talk me into going. So without even a time for a shower to freshen up for my evening, I changed and got ready to go.

As time slowly moved on, I began to feel increasingly lousy and more tired. I second guessed my decision countless times, but figured that in the end, when’s the next time that I’ll be in Malaysia to see a shadow puppet performance. As luck usually have it, if I didn’t go, it would be the most unbelievable thing I could ever see in my entire lifetime, which means that if I do go…well, we’ll get there in a short while.

We hop back on the tender during what was quite an impressive sunset and tendered all the way back to the pier that I just departed. This is my third tender of the day, with another forthcoming, and I’m really starting to get agitated with this tendering stuff. It’s for the birds.

The Welcome Reception was held at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, and the thrill of the welcome receptions is usually raved about. If it’s anything like the Puerto Rico reception, I figured that we would be in for a real treat.

So far, on all the of the trips that I’ve made, whether it be on train, plane, boat (not ship), or bus, I have yet to be able to fall asleep while in transit. I have come close a number of times, but I’ve never crossed the threshold that so many seem to be able to easily get across – until tonight. It must be my increased sense of tiredness from the past few days of setting up the raffle, and the running down that I did today, combined with the heat and the fact that I’m not feeling well, it’s no wonder that I finally succumbed. We even got a little extended time on the bus, too. There were three or four buses on our trip, so I wanted to be on the first bus so that we’d be able to get back and catch the first tender back to the ship. As a result, the other buses were still back at the pier by the time we were already at the university, so we sat on the buses and waited around, and then went into the auditorium on campus and waited around there until everyone decided to show up. We ended up having to wait for a half hour. A fun-filled half hour at that…

Let me explain the photo above. Those are flat puppets that sometimes moved. They have sticks stuck into soft bamboo (or something like it) below. The most action that happened was their jaws moved. There was a sequence of about fifteen minutes where all that happened was jaw movements. There were other puppets and other things coming in and out, but it really wasn’t anything to write home about. I think ‘lame’ was the first word that came into my head upon its conclusion, which was abrupt at that. Basically, the puppeteer came out from behind the screen and said, “okay, that’s it.” Then we all clapped like it was good, or something.

Then they invited us on stage to see what was behind the sheet. I felt like I was going to see Oz. The way that the students are involved is that they played the intermittent music accompaniment during the puppet show. Behind the sheet they showed us how to play their instruments and what the puppeteer did during the show.

On the trip with us was the music professor from the ship, a Julie Strand. She’s done other things on our voyage so far that I have decided not to get into, but I just can’t resist this one. It’s so disgraceful. So the students are back there and they’re being really nice to us and showing us how to play the instruments. It was fun and a bit of a learning experience. Julie Strand waltzes in and shows the students how they’re playing their own instruments wrong and then shows them how they should be playing their own instruments, and not letting any of us get in on any of it. It was very rude and I can’t believe that she did that. I was ashamed and embarrassed for her.

It was also at this point, when we were up on stage, that I began to get worse. I felt woozy and like I wanted to sit down. I don’t think there was any nausea in there, but I was fading and I was fading fast. Eventually, I was zoning out and looking around aimlessly waiting for something new to happened. I checked out of the instruments that Julie Strand dominated and went back into the audience and sat down.

I think I was sitting down for about a minute before people started leaving and going outside for what we were told was dinner. I ate before I came because I didn’t know what dinner would be and I also didn’t know when dinner would be. By this point it’s about 9pm and I’m thrilled that I already ate for two reasons. First, the food wasn’t exactly a big spread, and it wasn’t even very good for that matter. I pretty much stuck to my staple – white, sticky rice. And we were eating quite late.

I felt bad for the people that didn’t have dinner previously. This dinner was certainly not sufficient. It was served under a temporary tent with plastic utencils and plates. It just seems like something that was thrown together at the last minute. After I finished my dinner, another word popped into my head and, not surprisingly, the word was ‘lame.’ That seemed to be a theme with this trip.

Once we were done eating, those of us who wanted to beat the rush back hopped on the first bus, whether we were originally on it or not, and then got our driver to take us back to the pier. Aside from wanting to get back to the pier first, we were all done with the welcome reception, and felt as though we were thoroughly welcomed to Malaysia.

I was thrilled to see another tender waiting when our bus pulled up, and I was even more thrilled that it departed just minutes after I boarded. That means that I get more time to sleep and pack this evening; two things that are vital before the big trip to Kuala Lumpur departs tomorrow.

I took some medicine while I was packing and then went to bed as soon as I could, which was still later than I would have liked, but I wasn’t about to tell myself that I’ll have time to finish packing in the morning.
As fate would have it, I was never meant to have a good night’s sleep. I groggily woke up at 3:30am when the medicine wore off. I think it may have been a combination of my hypochondriac nature and the fact that I was actually sick, but I got out of bed and went to the bathroom and stared at the toilet for a good while, just waiting to vomit. It’s been such a long time since the last time I vomited that I really can’t tell whether the feeling I have is nausea, or something completely different. It was far from pleasant, and one of the last things I wanted to happen before I travel halfway across this side of Malaysia.

Will I recover? What will happen in the morning? And will I even make it to Kuala Lumpur? I’ll answer those questions, and more, in the next posting, which you won’t have to wait nearly as long for – I hope.