Karma (21-22/01/09)

WEDNESDAY 21ST JANUARY

Up and about bright and early after watching President (of the world) Obama's inauguration until Christ knows when. The bus was an hour late, so although we had to be outside from 7:30a.m we didn't have any breakfast, so I was starving and mardy (this is a word) until 10:00a.m. We were forced to sit on the back seat of a tiny minibus while all the Asian passengers got nice comfy seats. It would have been a lot easier for two of them to sit where we sat. They're tiny and I'm hardly anorexic. After a quick stop we were then moved into another minivan, this time it was 3 of us squashed into a tiny space. The bus driver was a complete and utter cock. He was shouting and bawling, telling us to do this and that and hurry up. If he'd have given us a bit of a helping hand it wouldn't have gone unnoticed, but he never. When we stopped to get on a third bus to get to the border, I was unloading my bags and with technical precision hit the driver in the bollocks with my rucksack. Good. Serves him right for being a complete knob all the way there.
The final leg of the journey was over the border and to Penang island. The border crossing was the easiest I've ever encountered. It took less than five minutes, including having to unload our bags that weren't even x-rayed. It would have been easy to smuggle whatever you wanted, the guards were on wind-down waiting to clock off. There were only four people on the bus, me and Louise, and two Canadians. These were, without doubt, the two most miserable people I've had the displeasure of meeting. One of them didn't even speak until about an hour before we arrived, we'd been on the same bus for almost 3 hours.
We finally got off the bus at 9:00p.m, and then we had to put our clocks forward another hour. We were hot, sweaty and in need of a shower. The first guesthouse we found we stayed at, all we were bothered about was getting out of a manky clothes. After a quick feed, we went to bed, hoping for a more productive day tomorrow.

THURSDAY 22ND JANUARY

We moved guesthouses first thing today. We need air-con, Malaysia is so humid. We had breakfast and then had a relaxing stroll around the town. It was still too hot so we ended up going into the local shopping plaza. Air-con-tastic.
We spent the best part of three hours walking around the Malaysian version of the Trafford centre. Most of it was just rubbish shops full of knock-off designer wear and overpriced electronics, I thought it was supposed to be cheap here for that sort of thing.
In the evening we went out for a nice meal and watched, in my opinion, the greatest pub caberet act in the world ever! They sung in Bahasa(official language) , one of many Chinese dialects and English. However, like many Asians they have difficulty saying r's, v's and w's. When they sung something that was on the karaoke in English, and they couldn't say it they just made it up. Pure pub act class. Later on we went back to the plaza and watched [*REC]. It's that Spanish zombie film, it's not that new but it was the unedited version and it scared the living shit out of me.
Went back to the guesthouse and changed my pants. Went to bed.