Orchids, Bromeliads, and Pitcher Plants, Oh My!

After class today, one of my students (Alex) and his sister (Doreen) gave my roommate Emily and I a mini-tour of Penang (my island). We visited the Snake Temple, which I didn't really connect with in any deep, spiritual way... maybe it was the guy jumping up and down, trying to convince me to pay him 30 ringgits to take a picture with a sleeping snake... But it did renew my interest in having one of my new Malaysian friends give me a better (English) introduction to Buddhism than the one I recieved as a child (in Japanese), none of which I currently remember/understand. I bought tickets to one of my students' Buddhist Cultural festival (a Japanese sect, Soka Gakkai--any information guys?), which I'll report on in late August, and plan to attend a Japan Cultural Festival on Saturday. Also, our new friend Tony is quite devoutly Buddhist; he reminds me of my grandfather/Ojichan (Japanese) because he reads extensively about other religions almost in order to confirm his own. (eg when my Ojichan died, he was reading the Mormon Bible... quite possibly for shits and giggles) Alex and Doreen also brought me to a Vegan Chinese restaurant, where I tried Vegetarian Chicken, fish, Sausage, Duck, and some plain old tofu. I was ecstatic to finally find brown rice somewhere (usually I'me ecstatic to find non-fried rice)... apparently they are vegan as part of their Buddhism. I wish I knew more. :(

Ahhh, and now to the main delight of today: the zoo/orchid & reptile garden. If ANY of you come to visit me in Penang, we will go see it. The zoo itself is located on a hillside near Bukit Jambul (bukit = mountain) so is hilly and twisty in a wonderful way, so you round corners on rocky paths and find yourself face-to-face with a pair of stunning Bengali tigers (though they are not stunned--as I stood there with an open mouth inviting mosquito bites on the tongue, they continued to patiently chew their raw meat on bones...animal? I dunno.) There are pythons and cobras and vipers of the most obscene lengths, and sometimes unbelievable shades of tropical green and albino white. There were also soem turtles that were born in 1845 and 1862, just hanging out. The wall around their area was so low that I could reach over to pet them, which they kindly tolerated. There was also a lovely colelction of tropical birds, including a Malaysian jungle "robin" that could hold up its end of a conversation (if that conversation consisted of "Hello? How are you? Whaddya doing? What's your name? Hello?), oooh, but he had these marvelous ear flaps, la. I don't know what they might technically be named, but they look either like flower petals coming out of the sides of the back of his head (the bird was pitch black, and these flaps are bright yellow-orange). They also sorta resembled those earflaps on old-school flying goggles, especially when he hopped up and down and they flopped back and forth and up and down.

I'm really excited about everyone that I've met in Malaysia...even the people who frustrate me. OVerall, (oh, here comes a generalisation, my apologies to all Malaysians and the world), Malaysians are so kind and generous... such as the 4-foot, 2-inch girl (seriously!!) who shared her umbrella with me one day before I'd bought my own... this is in torrential downpour, we're crossing Hell's Highway, we both need to be running for our lives, but she's standing on tippy-toes so that I don't get wet and I'm hunched like the REAL Notre Dame hunchback, and we meander across...very...slowly. I was a little worried about my roommate Emily and the extraordinary delight that she takes in sitting, and drinking alcohol, and beaches, and relaxing, and some more sitting, it doesn't matter where. In some ways, I'm learning how to relax and sit. Well, that's a lie, but at least now I can sit still for the length of a movie...=) (Ben Conway, that means that someday we'll have to try to watch a movie again and I promise to stay awake and seated.) She's quite obviously American in a way that I'm not; people still pick out the Asian (and sometimes even the Japanese) in my face, or mannerisms (chopstick etiquette). It's also refreshing sometimes to be with someone who's very much like the conutry that you might miss just a little bit sometimes... especially someone who wants to drink, as I find that that is something that sets me apart from many Malaysian women... I must say that she is very well traveled and open-minded (which are pre-requisites for tolerating and being tolerated in a foreign country for a year...as well as by me), and her never-ending desire for sweets, cold beer, and a lounge chair on a beach are quite amusing

Francisco, our other roommate, is so wonderfully European... he speaks proper Spanish (lisping his way through sentences so carefully but at the speed of light) and eats an enormous lunch in the afternoon and an even more enormous dinner around 9~10pm. He manages to be very amused by my every-three-hour eating habits (very kind of him!!) and in return, I try to pack snacks and not complain when I think that my stomach has digested most of my internal organs and has currently worked its way down to my toes). (For those of you who have not spent expensive quantities of time with me, I am hungry from the minute I wake in the morning and for the rest of the day... all day long.) We've even re-named my tapeworm, since I forgot his old name... he is now "Ralph..." =)
Ralph loves Malaysian food but missed having access to European foods and Latin american foods and generally, varieties of foods. Recently, though, he has been making up for these losses by demanding tofu at all hours of the day. (tau fu = chinese for tofu) Also, if any of you happen to visit, Ralph would like to demand a bottle of good red wine... or even shitty red wine... maybe even Riunite (shitty but tasty). He doesn't suppose that you can sneak fresh blueberries past Customs so he won't try to get you arrested at the airport;)

Anyhow, Ralph seems to have taken over this blog, and would like to take this opportunity to demand dinner, as it's now 6pm here and it has been FOUR hours now since the last feeding. I'm glad he's a tapeworm instead of a Bengali tiger.

<3 Maribi