Road Trip Victoria: The Swiss Visit

Guten Tag! Wie gets es dir? Hatten Sie ungeschutzten Geschlechtsverkehr?

Translation (taken from the Lonely Planet German phrasebook): Good day! How are you (inf.)? Have you had unprotected sex?

Okay, maybe so that's not the typical German greeting, but hey, I'm still getting the hang of it.

(Note to potential men wanting to use Geschlechtsverkehr in a pick-up line: It is the medical term for sex. As my visitors so kindly pointed out, if you ask a girl for Geschlechtsverkehr, chances are, you won't get any.)

This past week has seen the Swiss invasion of Victoria, and we have had the pleasure of hosting Claudio and the aptly named Victoria from Basel, a town at the border of Switzerland and Germany.

It was always going to be a very interesting visit right from the outstart as we had no idea what they looked like, so K and I went to Tullamarine with only their flight details in our hands - Air NZ. Arriving 09:40.

I will not detail here how we finally met them up, but let's just say they were cleverer than I was, and had Googled my picture online. (If you search for my name on Google, you will see my picture on N's blog, and also some other hits that will take you to pictures of orangutans.)

They stayed for about seven days, and we had the pleasure of showing them around and trying new things for ourselves.

Amongst our whirlwind tour of Victoria (the state, not the girl) was:

Yum cha at Plume in Highpoint (with Claudio happily eating chicken feet!)
Dinner at Soul Mama's
A walk along Williamstown
Lunch at Rose Garden's
Vic Market where they went crazy at the deli section
A drive along Brighton beach, finally catching the beautifully painted beach storage houses
Dinner at Bismi's followed by icecream at Balha's pastries
Gelati at Il Dolce Freddo, several times!
Pizzas at pizza @ metro (Pizza by the metre)

I think that the highlight of their visit, though, was the trip to Healesville Sanctuary, where we spent at least an hour just looking at koalas, which was their must-see itinerary here in Australia.


Heals-ville: (From top left, moving L-R) A kute koala; a dumbfounded dingo; me in a previous life - a lazy lizard; the heartbreaking pictures of ailing kangaroos in the Animal Hospital; a real-life python, mercifully on someone else's hand; the same python being affectionate; a skink (what a cool name! Right there is my first child's name - Skink Cheok!); the wonderful Birds of Prey show.

After I managed to pull them away from the slothy koalas -

[hK's Quick Fact of the Day: Koala comes from the aboriginal word meaning 'No water.' ie. 'I was going to take a shower but koala.' (That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.)

But seriously, they get all their water from chewing on eucalyptus leaves.

You are not allowed to cuddle koalas in NSW and Victoria, but you can do so in Queensland. Because they are beach-surfing koalas. (I am absolutely making that last line up, but I hope you have a happy visual of a koala on a surfboard in your head!)]

- and we managed to see the other attractions such as the majestic Birds of Prey show, visit the Animal Hospital to look at all the poor animals affected by the bushfire, see the enigmatic Lyrebird (which could mimic the sounds of everything - machine guns, chattering monkeys, different birds - a liar bird, if you will) and also attend the revolting Reptilian show.

Fact: Snakes are not slimy to touch.

They are slimy to lick.


The beautiful beach houses of Brighton; the cheeky Claudio and Victoria.

Claudio and Victoria were really easy to get along with, and we shared many laughs despite the seeming language barrier. They even got us all gifts, W, K and myself (I got the German phrasebook!) and they baked us this wonderful thank-you cake on the night where we cooked at home. (I made my specialty - stepping out of the kitchen and not getting in the way of K cooking up a storm! Hee hee!)

It was with heavy hearts that we said our Auf Wiedersehn's, as they had the rest of Australia to see before heading off to Asia. They took a train up to Sydney, armed to their teeth in Mamee packets (which we introduced them to!) and goodies from the deli visit in Vic Market.

I will sign off with some helpful German phrases:

If someone offers Gehen wir ins Bett! (Let's go to bed!), it is always helpful to tell them you have a Kopfschmerzen (headache).

Wo sind die Schwulen- und Lesbenkneipen? (Where are the gay venues?)

As you can see, Ich bin nicht high. (I'm not high.)

Promise.

Other People's Love Stories

(With a heartfelt thank you to all my friends who have had the courage to share the story of their lives and their loves, in all its beauty and complexities, with me.)

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She stands in front of her bedroom mirror, and bends forward to reach for the moisturiser. Her hands unscrew the top of the container and she milks some moisturiser into the palm of her hands. She makes slow circular motions onto her cheeks, and her reflection mimics her movements in an opposing fashion.

Just at that moment, her mother walks into the room, holding a book, and she plops herself down on the bed behind her.

Hot lah, her mother complains. Here got aircond, she continues. The book makes a noise as it is opened, and her mother's eyes start tracing it absently.

Her fingers on her face slowed down their circular run as she caught her mother's image in the mirror. This simple event was actually extraordinary, because Mum never came into her room without reason. There had to be something more than the thrills of cooled air to have invoked a Parental Visitation.

There was a pregnant silence and the briefest of stand-offs before her Mum cracked first -"You can burn all the 'papers' that K gave you."

She was unsure of how to respond to this sudden retrieval of a name she had banished to the Recycle Bin of the Windows of her mind. K was such an old love story, such a distant memory that it was almost disconcerting to hear his name fill the air.

K was the boy every mother wanted their daughter to bring home. Respectful, earnest and a doctor by profession, Mum would have married him if she didn't.

Theirs was a complicated romance. Being her first relationship, she went into it with her head fully in control of her heart. All her values had taught her to take it slowly, and to allow herself more time before committing. He misconstrued that as a slow rejection, and distanced himself from her, secretly finding his way into the arms of another lover.

Mum never knew this side of the story or how K came back to divulge that he had never really moved on completely from their relationship, after being confronted.

The 'papers' Mum was referring to were the numerous cards and love dedications that K had penned to her in their courtship. The 'papers' had sat untouched in a corner since K got married to someone else last year; she keeps them not so much because she yearned for a relationship lost, but rather as a reminder of that period in her life.

'Burn all those papers, you know. Ah, burn. Burn. Burn. Burn in that big pasu out there.'

Mum was referring to the big flowerpot in the front where they used to burn dry leaves and other such refuse. Her tone carried both the disappointment of seeing her daughter losing such a good catch, but also the protectiveness of a mother who feared her daughter was single right now because she hadn't gotten over him.

She was unable to read her mother's intonations, much less her mind, but she firmly knew in herself that the marriage last year was the death knell of that relationship and she had long since moved on from it.

Which was why she wasn't sure what would have transpired recently that warranted her Mum's bizarre intrusion into the sanctuary of her bedroom, evoking a name that had not been heard in the household for a year.

She flipped a few more pages.
She squeezed out more moisturiser into the palm of her hand.
The silent dance continued.

'He's a father now.'

That was it? All that mystery and tension because K was a father now? She had given up on him already after the marriage, and she couldn't understand how his being a father now was of added significance.

It was as if Mum actually harboured some absurd hope of them still ending up together despite his marriage to someone else. It was as if being a father now evaporated whatever slim chance they had of him coming to his senses, realising that it was her that he actually loved, divorcing his newly-wedded wife and then eloping with her to a foreign land.

She was still trying to follow her mother's train of thought when Mum abruptly said, "There are many more fishes in the sea."

There was a finality in her voice, possessing a certainty as if it could shape the future, but the clumsy timing of it left her daughter more confused if anything.

With that her Mum gets up and leaves the room, the book clutched in the hand that had never touched her daughter before in reassurance.

She applies more moisturiser to her face, processing her Mum's choice words that still hung in the air. She almost laughed at how bizarre this whole episode was, given that she had gotten over the relationship for at least a year, but the silence gave birth to a niggling feeling which she could not escape.

The end of the relationship was not exactly amicable, and a tiny part of her loathed the fact that he had stormed into her life, sweeping her up in his love, only to move on in the manner that he did.

It was her first relationship in this game called love, and no one had ever taught her the rules of engagement or warned her not to fall too deeply.

She closes her eyes and hears him, the old wounds throbbing again, ever so slightly. His promises still rang in her ears, whispered words like "You are the one" and "I will wait for you", heavy in its sincerity, but ultimately empty on its delivery.

She remembers treading on eggshells after that, cautious to the smooth tongues of future suitors; holding her love in her hands, quivering in its fragility caused by his clumsy handling of it.

She takes a deep breath and looks in the mirror again, shaking the self pity away and slowly smiling at a familiar face that had moved on from him, whose wounds time have healed.

The first cut is the deepest, but the scars no longer ached.

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She smiled wistfully at me from across the table as she recounts this story, and I smiled back, and I fully understood how our relationships and love stories would return to influence us, no matter how long ago we wanted them to seem.

Reuniting My Thoughts 1

It was meant to be a wedding, but there were enough people there to call it a high school reunion.

There were four tables of us, equalling almost twenty five of us, with respective partners and better halves. Twenty-five. That's almost a whole class of us.

Eleven years separated the last time we saw of each other, as we said our goodbyes on the last day of school. Who was to know that goodbyes carried the permanence of a decade with them.

=========================

High school reunions are a funny thing. They are a great opportunity to catch up and meet people you have not seen in a long time.

These weren't just any ordinary people - these were your friends through many long mornings and tired evenings at school, these were the people who shared a huge portion of your memories, these were the librarians, and sportsmen, and prefects, and school gangsters. Whichever role you were scripted, we each played our roles to perfection.

But a high school reunion removes all that. It is like you're meeting up again after the performance - the after-cast party, if you will. Here, everyone has shed their skins they wore in school, and moved on into the real world. And it is our foray into the real world which exposes how sheltered we were in our school days.

Suddenly we had to fend for ourselves in different ways, and things that we placed such importance on in the past like the length of our hair fringes, the number of permitted colours on our watches, whether or not our school shoes were white - these were all trivialities in the real world.

Things that mattered now were our jobs (or the lack of them), our love lives, our health, our children. These were the questions that you exchange when you meet up at these reunions. We have moved on beyond our roles, and meet up now as men, grappling with day-to-day issues common to all of us.

=================

Reunions are a great time to catch up and reminisce. We sit down and regale stories of a distant past, remembering things both painful (which time has healed) and beautiful (which time has amplified) through rose-tinted glasses.

Sometimes I marvel at the wives and girlfriends of my friends, who patiently sit and listen with interest (sometimes feigned) about their partner's exploits in school.

Stories will slip out that will leave their mouths opened in horror, or breaking out in smiles; helping them see a younger version of their partners and how different they are now to the roles they played then.

Reuniting My Thoughts 2

Time would have been kinder to some more than others. Some of us would have put on massive amounts of weight, while a lot of us were unchanged. Some of us were married, and some of us still revelled in the freedom of singleness.

Some of us were hardened by work, and had lost our adolescent enthusiasm for life, as evidenced by the tired looks in our eyes, and our inability to afford even a polite smile.

Some of us would have moved on from school, and some of us, would have remained:

He comes over to our table, mustering up enough courage to say hi to us; we were friends, but not all that close.

He says hi to one of us on the table, and the rest of us look away politely. His conversations carry a tone of compensatory overfamiliarity and awkardness about it.

The friend he is speaking to on our table asks the cursory questions.

So how's life?
How's work?
How's your wife lah?

The last question triggers something inside of him. You could see it in his body, as he recoils a little defensively and postures himself for an attack.

His choice of weapon is interesting - shocking truth.

"You know ah," he says, "I am the record setter in our batch."

"I am the first among us to get married, and the first one to have a baby."

"And now, I am the first one to get divorced."

There is a moment of silence on our table that seems to last an eternity. The preceding awkwardness is now magnified ten times.

The friend he is talking to is quick to apologise. "Hey, I'm sorry lah, man. I really didn't know."

"Okay what," he tries to say dismissively, but his nervous gulp suggests he was still coming to terms with it.

"Eh, I'm really sorry. How long ago lah?" my friend asks gently.

"Two weeks now. As I said, I am the one to set the record in our batch, what." His lips thin into a line, as he attempts a confident smile, instead tinged with sadness.

-----------

Later, another friend returns.

"So I was out having a cigarette with him, lah, you know, and he was complaining about how he felt really left out here."

"I mean, he kept comparing himself to us, and how he was never really as smart as us, because we were all in the science stream, and he was from the arts stream."

"All of us are like professionals, while he's stuck selling handphones. And I was like, 'No what, I was from the science stream and see, now I'm unemployed, what! Aiyah, I told him, we are all human lah... Different people with their own lives and their own sets of problems.' But you could see that it still bothered him."

I looked across at their table, and I could see that he was trying to compensate for his perceived failures and lack of self-esteem.

He was the loudest among all of us, he tried to outdrink all of us. He would lead the yam sengs and made the most noise, trying to silence the emptiness he felt inside, trying to drown out the little boy who was told by the school that he was not smart enough and would never amount to much.

The little boy, who believed them.

Who wanted nothing more than to drink his way into happiness and to remember as little of tonight as possible.

I am saddened that sometimes we continue reading from the script that we were given in school, and keep playing it out in life.

To Those Who Wait

To all those who click my blog address simply because it is saved onto your address bar, by force of habit.

Who read with ennui and frustration when the same entry turns up. Who then click to another saved address before the page even finishes loading.

I understand. You see, I am like you. And I thank you for your patience. :)

It's been a busy week and a half for me, with friends visiting from Switzerland and having gone up to the country to do some night shifts as well.

I'll be writing soon again, so thank you for reading!

Ben's Wedding

Random Memories: Fourteen Years Old

"So you know lah, I've got a new girlfriend all now," he said to me one day in class.

Ben had sat next to me for the whole year that year, and had watched me and consoled me in my tears after the whole World Cup Betting Scandal of 1994 in my school.

"So that day right, my mother so funny you know."

"She was standing at my bedroom door and looking at me lah. Then you know what she say ah? 'Ben, now that you got girlfriend, ah, don't love mummy anymore lah!' So funny lah she! So I mah stand up and go and hug her lor!'

'You'll always be the number one, Mum! Huh huh!'"

Ben laughed his trademark chuckle, and his boyish faced lit up, and you could see both the boy newly in love, and the good son trying to reassure his mother of his love for her.

===============

Congratulations to both Ben and Angie on their wedding!

Ben (who occasionally reads my blogs) it has been an absolute pleasure growing up with you, sharing in your easygoing attitude towards life and laughing at your jokes all these years!

Exercising My Demons

Giveaway signs that you're back in Malaysia:

#14. As you're trying to enjoy your dinner outside, you're mobbed by i) a pirated DVD seller, ii) a donation collector, iii) a lottery ticket seller, or iv) all of the above, at once.

# 39. The books in the bookstores are fully wrapped in a clear plastic wrapper to prevent people from reading them for free.

# 52. It never rains. It floods.

# 68. You pay up to 50 sen just to have the pleasure of peeing in a public toilet. (Rumours are that you can pay up to ten ringgit in KLCC. There, the toilets flush their urinals with champagne. Or the tears of poor people. Either one.)

Random Memories: Your Whole School Life



The exercise book was one of the prevailing memories of my entire school life. There was something wonderful about the feel of the covers of these books - the rough hemp-like exterior, bearing your school logo on the front, with the standard underlying:

Nama (Name) :_______________
Kelas (Class) :_______________
Perkara (Subject):_______________

And then on the back cover, you had a variety of things, like the multiplication tables, the Rukun Negara (the Malaysian National Principles) or your school song.

There were two main types of exercise books - the ones with the ruled lines (Perkara: Karangan, Bahasa Melayu, English Literature etc.) and the ones with the boxes (Perkara: Matematik, Matematik Tambahan etc.).

The younger you are, the bigger the space in your exercise books. Big ruled lines and boxes for Standard 1 which progressively got smaller and smaller as you aged, culminating in graph paper in Form 6 (the ultimate in small boxes!). No wonder your glasses got thicker through the years as well!

I remember some friends, in an effort to save money, used to write in the smallest writing possible to save from buying too many exercise books. They often got scolded for this, and I felt bad for them, because this miserliness was out of necessity. Write small, or miss a meal. I choose to write small.

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Exercise books, of course, were meant to be for schoolwork only. But schoolwork was strictly for those with a lack of imagination.

Every student with a bit of creativity could turn his normal exercise book into one of many art forms:

1) An endless source of origami paper. [Look, a giraffe! Look, a rhinoceros! Look, a piece of crumpled paper! (my modern-art origami often divided the critics.)]

2) An endless source of paper planes. (see 1, above. Look, a flying piece of crumpled paper!)

3) An RPG game book. All this required were two lines drawn in the middle of the exercise books from the first page all the way to the last. Your friend had to choose between the two paths, one which lead to their deaths (represented by a drawn tombstone reading R.I.P., or a bomb, or skulls and crossbones, or a loveless marriage) or to safety.

Given that there were a standard 52 pages to every exercise book, the mathematical chance of you reaching the end safely was 1/2 to the power of 50, which meant that by the time you finished, you and your friend would have repeated Standard Two four times.

4) Empire. This was all the craze in our later years in school, when we finally got the tiny boxed mathematical books. Two opponents would pit their wits against each other, one would be naughts and the other would be crosses.

The main objective of the game was to trap as many of your opponents naughts (or crosses) in a trap formed by four of your own naughts or crosses. It was a game only the very intelligent mastered.

(I, on the other hand, drew my naughts and crosses into pretty little rainbows.)

5) The pencil race. You took a pen or pencil of differing colours and you and another student pushed your upright pen against the exercise book in a manner that would make a scrawl, literally.

The idea was to push your pens to make the scrawl lines as long as possible, to reach the finish line, where the winner was rewarded with the grand prize of - a dirty exercise book.

6) Graffiti along the margins of the book. Brilliant! All the exercise books have margins, wasting about 1.5 cm of precious writing space for unneccesary things like putting in numbers.

I hated to see the space go to waste so I would doodle incessantly on the margins. Each individual doodle was a work of art, and for years I hoped that teachers would spot my genius along the margins rather than on the pages themselves.

My Standard Five teacher had a keen eye for talent, and finally called me up one day for my due recognition. I take it a full facial slap means "Well done! Your drawings will one day grace the halls of rich men with too much money and not much taste."

Only time will tell, although I'm sure that my doodles will sell better once I'm dead.

Such is art.

Other People's Stories

'So, right, I have this uncle up in I., and he has, like, thirteen daughters and one son. He's quite well known up there in I., actually,' he said.

'What?' This was new to me. Thirteen girls and finally, a boy! I have heard of four, maybe five daughters in a family in search of a son (or conversely, a daughter) but thirteen!

'Yeah, we used to call the mum the mum luluhawa (Malay word for weather) 'cause she always expand and deflate, like the atmosphere.'

We both laughed.

'And we thought he would turn out gay, you know, what with thirteen sisters and all! But he actually turned out straight. Not bad, you know!'

And I marvelled at the thought of having thirteen sisters, and was surprised at the prejudices we carried just one generation ago.

=================

'And then right, there was this other uncle lah, who lives with my grandmother one. I really can't stand him, man!'

'He was actually trying for a son as well, and had three daughters in a row when he was advised to take me, his nephew, as his godson, to increase the likeliness of him having his own son.'

'But then he had another two daughters, and somehow he blames me for it. Up till today, when I go to visit my grandmother, he will blatantly ignore me.'

'My mum, who is his sister-in-law, has tried to come up with excuses for him - how he only has daughters and probably can't relate well to a son-like figure. But then I have seen him interacting with my other male cousins, what! No problem! It's just me that he won't even talk to!'

'I think he's still feeling resentful towards me when it is not my fault. I was too young to even protest the decision of being made his godson!' '

'Well, two can play at that game, and I will talk to everyone and outrightly ignore him as well!'

I watch my friend and try to imagine what his uncle would look like; attempting to picture the face of a man who has harboured superstitious hope, resulting in bitter resentment all these years towards an unwitting and unwilling godson/nephew.

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20 "Don't call me Naomi," she told them. "Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me."
Ruth 1:20-21, NIV

Naomi means pleasant, Mara means bitter