Penang, Malaysia 4/23-4/29

I know this is from a month ago, but it gives some background on the blogs that are about to be posted...all in due time.  A lot has happened...

In checking in with myself, I feel a gray wobbly stale sense of me. I feel flat a little bit, like a drone, just moving along,waiting to settle into this fantastically unknown life that I'm about to have. I always have this problem of waiting and bypassing whats in front of for whats further in front of me, but right now I cant seem to break the mold. In longing to find that happiness that everyone told me I would find, I remind myself that I haven’t laughed in a while and that being alone is sometimes the thing that makes time go by the slowest. Then I feel my body start to steel over and I become numb to the outside world, afraid of people I shouldn’t be afraid of, trying to escape delicate conversations because I'm tired of them and I want real friendships, not trivial ones that last for 2 days then you pledge to e-mail. This thing is hard to accept, that life is just moving forward and my problem I think is difficult to explain because the happiest times in my life I associate to places, not people or things or emotions, but where I was when I felt them. Because I do that, no other place matches up to that one place. I feel like Malaysia becomes a blur, a second in comparison to that one place, the place in my heart, and then I realize that it wasn’t the place - it was me in that element, my freedom, my preposterously explosive desire to fill myself up at every turn. It was my friends, my loves, the culture, my profundity, my scholasticism, my elasticity. This realization makes me feel want to cry sometimes because I was 19 and reckless and I still cant get myself to feel that way again.

I had purpose in this place, I found love, I found friendship and academic stimulation, I found language and I found my voice. I still wasn’t completely translucent to my self-concept, but I was getting there and other people saw the change too. I became enlightened to another place and another world that allowed me to say that I didn't like the places or worlds I had occupied before. I'm getting a slight feeling that now, the older, more apparent me may find that mature version of that in Thailand. But, I think I'm ready, and I think that my struggles and achievements so far through my passions found and lost again, my jobs and my personal triumphs have led me to this place in Thailand and I can make something incredible out of it, if I just stay open to it and allow myself to be flexible. Flexible and strong.

Lessons in bar burning and local weapon making

Perhentian Island Part II - April 17 - 23

We sat on the beach, sizzling under the shade of the umbrella and wondering how the hell that happened, when we saw it. The men in red shirts. We wondered how and when they would come again. Booze-slingers couldn't last long on this island and it had been about a week, we'd heard, since the red shirts had been there to tear them down. Just last night we were at one of the beach bars, enjoying a night of British company and warm rum drinks on the sand with no chairs. The drink of choice here is called Monkey Juice and it tastes like flavored rum but really its 25% Arak. No one, not even locals, really knows what it means and we heard that recently someone died from drinking it, so Elissa and I sipped slowly and checked in with each other. Just another notch on the strange belt. The island has now started to take on a hazy glow, like my eyeballs have been singed enough that everything is in sepia tones; not the good sepia tones of 1930s recollections, but the bad sepia tones where you'd expect clowns to pop out of the gutters. Anyway, back to the red shirts. We had heard that last week they came with their equipment and hammered one of the bars to the ground. On the island, along with no electricity, there is supposed to be no alcohol sold. It's government property and the government seems pretty rigid. A few nights after that, the foreigner whose bar/wooden shack it was rebuilt it and had a huge party. His dedication to the cause was incredible and would be awe-inspiring if it wasn't saturated with getting foreigners wasted.

So, the red shirts came back, this time with a vengeance. Elissa and I, and the whole island, were sitting on the beach enjoying our shade tans when a huge fire burst out a few yards in front of us. Unphased and sepia-mouthed, we wondered what it was. We noticed a smoldering pile that was the bar that we were at the night before and saw the red shirts pulling at the other bar with hammers and throwing it into the fiery pit. The emanating heat was unbearable but we were transfixed. We tanned and watched the bars burn down, watching the locals and the government chat and smoke and laugh. We were utterly confused and calm, under a spell that I would choose to never really be under again. We didn't ask, no one who was watching was surprised. That night, as though nothing happened, the exact same bar was rebuilt and the party continued. It looked the same and felt the same, leading Elissa and I to believe that we had imagined the whole thing.

After the bar burning, Elissa and I were hungry, so in a movement with the rest of the tanning bodies, we got up for lunch. This meant walking a few yards on the hot sand, sitting on plastic tables and chairs, and waiting. All of the restaurants on the island have the exact same menu, down to the same laminated story about how the Perhentian Islands came to be. Creepy. As we ate, we saw a group of about 7 local men following two tourists. Then, a fight broke out between the two groups, the locals obviously having the upper hand. We all just sat and watched, bleached out by the sun and unable to move because of the heat. Fists flew and cries for help were heard, women started screaming and rushing out of their warm indoor stores. The tourists walked slowly, too hot to run from them, until the locals grabbed planks of wood and broke them over the tourists' backs. Elissa and I ate and watched, unable to say anything that would bring justice to what was happening. Finally, an elderly guy stepped in the middle and broke it up. We found out later it was over a snorkeling mask that had been left at the shop. Two nights before, a tourist got beat with a bamboo stick so badly his arm got broken and his friend got knocked unconscious. All because he touched the locals' head, a huge cultural mistake to make. I decided I should leave.

Perhentian Islands: Part I

4/17-4/23

My five or so days on the Perhentian Islands were like being in the 7^th Season of Lost. At first it seemed like paradise, like everything I would need to survive in this tiny tiny place that would sustain me for as long as I wanted to stay there was there. But then I started to notice bizarre things, as though as much as the island could give me everything I would need to survive, those very things would take away from the experience. When the peak of that came, I decided to leave on the first boat ride out of there. Even Poseidon was like, “girl, get out!”. My exiting boat ride was a grandiose display of the ocean's fury as we drove the fastest I have ever driven on the rockiest seas I have ever been on and for the first time ever I felt a boat swerve. The ocean shook us to a point that even Jonas, my gap year baby faced German friend, who just the other night exuded an amazing amount of confidence for a 19 year old, looked at me as though to say, “Shit, my family doesn’t know where I am right now”. The girl next to me held her stomach, while her “Kentuckian” boyfriend (ugh, only I can do that because people here know where California is and I hate the option of pronouncing myself as American, which is what he did first) laughed at her. I almost yelled across the hissing ocean-spray, “Dude shes pregnant and she doesn’t want to tell you because clearly you’re not the father-type.”

There were lots of thoughts running through my head as I prepared for this boat ride to be my last. I knew the Island wanted to keep me there to extend my contract, and I would have to learn how to hunt half-tailed cats and massive monitor lizards (the only animal life there, besides the drunk people) to survive. I thought, “at least I'm not pregnant, at least my like jacket is bright orange and I LOVE that color, at least I’m wearing a life jacket, at least Jonas sometimes smiles at me in between looks of terror, at least my shoes aren’t getting wet, at least I didn’t eat breakfast...I wish my sunglasses had windshield wipers. I wish Sebastian were here, he would love this.”

These thoughts kept me sane.

Regardless, we made it and we were fine. I don’t know how pregnant girl is but then again, I don’t even know if she's pregnant.

I realized, after scouring the beach for my friend that I was supposed to meet, that I don't think self-dependence comes easily. Its different from independence because independence is perceived and judged from the outside in, but self-dependence is something only the self can know about. Only I will know how really dependent I felt on my piles of life that I had back home, on my loves, my friends, my house, my work, my family, my constructed life that I created that was consistently depositing Becca into other people's selves. Only I know that feeling, and I know when it creeps slowly and suddenly, and often sullenly and desperately back into me like an addiction that I haven’t had in a while and I feel my love for me drain out. This transformation happens...my body locks up into almost a robot-like state and I start to do things out of habit. I can't say no, I always apologize, I get angry then I revert and smooth things over, I can't be alone without feeling that brown Sunday at 3pm feeling. It's like I'm falling into life with nothing to hold onto and I feel nostalgic and poisonous at the same time, like my skin is turned over. Maybe that feeling is fear. Maybe I'm feeling it right now because when I feel it is when I'm unsure and say “maybe”. Whatever it was, it was with me on the Island when I felt I had to find this girl, Elissa, when I couldn’t find my own place to stay, I couldn’t do my own thing, when I couldn’t be alone. But that all changed later.

We went snorkeling one day like pawns in this endless war of man versus environment The island is full of dead coral and fishermen having to go further and further out each day to catch fish, of trash and no trash pick-up. I felt I was contributing to that by indulging in this eco-unfriendly day-trip. About 8 of us went and I lathered on the SPF 55 and wore a t-shirt, some long lost memory of me deep fried on a boat haunted me but I couldn't quite place it. And I was burnt from laying in the shade the day before. Malaysia's elements are doing a great job of hunting me down. Our guide couldn’t speak that much English, but he could whistle, laugh, throw things, and say “shark”. He wore an outfit that I've seen people wearing to Church, khakis and a long sleeve dress shirt, and he went snorkeling with us. It was a slippery slope from here on out to full-blown Twilight Zone. We went to about 6 places to snorkel, each place full of dead coral, feces, oil, and garbage. Oh, and beautiful fish who looked like they were suffocating. All sorts of purple rainbow fish, Nemo fish, yellow fish, triggerfish, little silver and yellow fish that would swim right up to me and swim away when I blinked.

After we swam with the dying fish, we went to Shark Point. For some reason, we all felt fine swimming with sharks, not even knowing, due to Tour Guide's limited English, if they ate people or not. We all hop off the boat at Shark Point, and immediately, one of the guys, a fellow States-ean, hops back on, shouting expletives and refusing “to go back in there” after seeing a massive (5 ft long) shark. I start to get excited. I follow Tour Guide, who has one of the girls attached to him because she cant swim and for a brief moment I pause and think about how many laws back home this is breaking, and how much I didn't sign any papers before going on this trip.

Regardless, me and a girl from New York think we are extremely confident and swim behind tour guide, not seeing him grab a small fish from the water, rip its heart and guts out and wave it around bleeding through the ocean. This inevitably attracts the sharks who look like the real life version of the shark in the Little Mermaid, and I, of course, am Flounder. They swim all around us and paralyze us with fear, which easily and thankfully melted away when they saw something more interesting than fish blood and foreigners and we were able to go back to the boat.

For dinner the night before I ate barracuda, and would later eat stingray and lobster, most of which I saw snorkeling. I still don’t know how I feel about that. Its like eating fried chicken while going out to see if your chickens have laid eggs. I cant tell if its the circle of life or if its disgusting. Or if it's tourism creating this awkward push-pull phenomena of preservation and knock-down drag-out consumerism that has yet to be remedied for Malaysia. I was, and am, disappointed in myself for not being more eco-minded, and for that I apologize to the island.

The Cameron Highlands

I know it's been a while, I'm going to do my best to back track...

4/15/11

What I did while I was here– realize that I am alone, hike in the rain and fall in love with my love of rain, learn more about rain forests and love that I love having this strange knowledge of flora and fauna, and meet people who I would later on run into continuously and invite to live with me. And have these thoughts...

Thoughts of broken heartedness, letting go, and mortality have been swirling around my head all day. Almost all the women I've met here are traveling alone, and they have that glint in their eye of recovery, of love lost and love for themselves found. I found it difficult today to get through the whole day. To ease the pain, a woman told me that although the hardest part is letting go, it is also the most rewarding. I began to see her point, to look around and see that everyone here has had those moments where they have had to let go of something, either a lover, a friend, a parent, a concept or a thought pattern. Something within them has decided to change. But not very many people look at that and use self-soothing as a way to erase the pain, they just wait for that one morning where they wake up and see that the pain is gone. I can't do that anymore....all those mornings when I've woken up and thought, “maybe this is the day, maybe today I won't feel the pain” have just turned out to be that slight physical euphoric moment before the hangover of yesterday's trauma sets in. Now, though, I feel like I am healing. Like no matter what happens, I have to learn to be ok. I am definitely not there yet, but I am gaining knowledge from these women by talking to them, by looking at their bravery and envying it, by asking what hurts them and what makes them better. Although they always say the thing that motivated them was this desire to experiment with themselves, to see how far they will go, I think what their real desire is is to have that moment where they can let go – and then have that feeling become addictive and unstoppable. Letting go of heartbreak, accepting it as heartbreak and walking through the pain, then leaving it and realizing that you love yourself more when the pain isn't there – that's a beautiful yet cold and lonely iceberg to be at the tip of.

I found something that ignited a lost passion inside of me.

Plantations. I went to the tea plantations that have made the Cameron Highlands notorious and was stunned by their beauty; then profoundly moved by the sight of the Indonesian and Bangladeshi men and women working in the fields. These people make little to no money, depending on how many tea leaves they can cut...almost exactly like the impoverished migrant banana workers in Costa Rica. Something boiled within me as I saw them and watched myself watching them on a tour I booked and paid for with other people who remarked on the impeccable views and delicious tea. I asked the guide, “what happens to the leaves after they get picked?”. They get sorted by hand, part of the “8 hour work day” of the laborers, and then carried on their backs to the bottom of these gigantic hills. Then they go to a factory, where the leaves get rolled and dried and then I stopped listening. I got filled with disgust, filled with heat and passion, filled with a desire to learn more about what happens here and why the tour guide gently glossed over my tons and tons of questions. Where are the other factories? Where are the real factories? Where do these people live? Who does the contracts? How do they get paid, once or twice a month? We went to the factory and I felt like I was at a zoo, only watching people. I wanted to cry. I saw a man, a small, Indonesian man, there behind the glass and he looked at me and I looked at him and he had this look of pure despair in his eyes, pure sadness. I can't even begin to explain the guilt that bubbled up within me, the fire that I felt had been stamped out after my passionate love affair with banana plantation workers' rights years ago. This man kept his gaze locked on me. I felt like a dog with my tail between my legs as I walked into the next room and the group of tourists swelled to watch him work. I came back when they left and looked at him again through the glass. He opened the door for me to come in, to enter into his world, to walk into his factory but I couldn't bring myself to do it (mostly because of the security guards). I motioned to him that I wanted to take a picture and he nodded, and looked at the camera, then looked down, and back up at the camera. I will never forget this man, his eyes, the way they go back for years to tell me how much he probably misses his family and hates watching tourists watch him like a caged animal imported into in a foreign country, putting tea into a machine to be drunk millions of miles away in sidewalk cafe.

Pictures!

Hello everyone who reads this,

I think I've figured out how to post pictures on Web Albums (or something).

Here is the link for photos of my first week here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/114379609394765551921/KualaLumpurMelakaAndPortDickson?authkey=Gv1sRgCMut766yluyucQ&feat=directlink

You have to copy and paste it I think.

If that doesn't work, will someone let me know?  Thanks!

My cerulean heartbeat

Malaysia's beauty equates only to that of my dreams. Flowers drape from chandeliers and lights hang from the already mystical looking trees. Nature is fighting back and slowly winning, climbing up massive towers and wrapping itself around the concrete as if to suck the life out of it. I need some of that, some more nature, a more symbiotic relationship with myself. I feel like here my heartbeat is cerulean (I am trying to expand my color vocabulary), as it pumps out neon signs and round faced woman behind head scarves, prayer calls and public transportation I feel totally and 100% transparent, sort of gliding through this country, slipping in and out between conscious levels as I become aware of my alone-ness and slowly emerge from feeling lonely. Some moments are hard so far, when my heart aches to be filled with memories already created, like my mind has been overwhelmed with new visions, new temples to rest itself, new merchants to trade with, new museums and people to learn from, that it automatically reverts back to safer times to escape trauma. The thought that I am gone for a year hurts me sometimes, but then I reconsider reconsidering that phrase. I chose this. I chose this time, these new things, I chose to leave, and I am not gone. I am here, and my grandmother (my goddess) years ago drew a circle around this very place that I would be today, making it safe for me to feel these feelings, for my heart to bleed blue and for me to turn my skin inside out like the fishies and cow heads that I saw at the market the other day.

I hate sitting with emotions. I want to cuss myself out when I force myself to do it, I want to black out and feel other people's emotions, their terrible and empty insides, instead of having to traverse my own Amazon...the piranhas of my memory are very snappy recently and I would much rather canoe out than let them nibble on my already feasted-on body. It's like I literally have to take all that I know, all that I have and throw it on my back and walk step my step to the emotional landmarks that I want to go to. Metaphorically enough, I got rid of some of my extra baggage today. I really thought I was going to miss Grey Shirt and Blue Tank Top, but then I let it go. I have to do that, I suppose, and sometimes it sucks, more than eating entire baby fried and salted fish for breakfast. Yup, it can suck more than that, even when that fish is accompanied with rice and peanuts and fire (aka spice).

So, sometimes, when I eat spicy food here, I feel like I might die. It's not a sudden death, nope, it's calm, cool and collected, much like Malaysians are. Like repelling into hell blindfolded. That's how Asian spice here is. Not like Tapatio and Cholula spice, which, compared to this, is just pogo-ing in and out of wildfires, breathing in ice air each time you jump. And definitely not like African pepper spice, which is like sitting in a jacuzzi full of fire balls and watching your epidermis slowly fade away. This spice is much worse, but the thing is I love it. And I love it for breakfast, even though it sucks. How does that work? This spice makes me laugh because people will put a small plate of jalapenos next to my plate of devils' breath to cool me down and it works. It makes me laugh because, like my experience here in general, I will be going along, thinking my green and orange and brown meal is totally fine and delicious and then WHAM! I drank all my lychee drink before I got my meal and now I can't breathe. To make that analogy more clear, so far in Malaysia, I have had at least 7 experiences where everything has been great (“It's only a one hour bus ride”) and then all of a sudden WHAM it becomes 5 hours with 2 connections. And I drank all my water in the first hour. And I have to pee. I love it! How can I love it? It makes me feel raw, it really makes me feel like my skin is inside out. And I can't fight it, I cannot do anything about it, and I have nothing to do. It's the most surreal feeling.

My first day in Kuala Lumpur!

 

4/10/11

In the stillness of this first morning, I have found peace. I woke up today at 6:30, surprisingly late because I fell asleep at 9 after a long...I don't even know how many days of traveling. The cool darkness of the Malaysian gloominess spoke to me, as just the dirty buildings and slums that are the foothills to their reigning hotel mountains groan and sweat in the humidity. I am, so far, absolutely in love with this place.

I tried to nap yesterday but ended up just taking some time to myself before asking Ria, the front desk guy, where to go to eat. He promptly said the place next door which looked too expensive, so I asked him where his favorite place was to eat and he said, “go right, right left”. Ok. I emerged from low-hanging trees and careless motorcycle drivers to find market stall after market stall, swaying gently beneath the mammoth buildings that are people's decaying homes. I couldn't figure out if it was the type of place where people walked in the street or not, so I did what other Malaysians do until I got honked at. This place was incredible, an onslaught of sensory material. No matter how much of a smelly soccer mom I looked, walking around in my tennis shoes, smiling like an idiot with my camera out and ready, I was united and unafraid. I walked up to a food stand and stared at piles and piles of sea animals barely alive inside their sea shell homes. Typically, I would walk right past something like this, afraid to be approached and to have to gently say no, I don't want to eat I'm just curious as to what the hell this is, and have to leave their sad faces behind. Or I would let my travel partner do the talking while I study the trees or the colors in people's outfits. But I wanted to know more about these animals on ice. Had I been at home, I would have collected the empty shells and placed then in my room as a beautiful jewelery holder and not even worried about the poor blob of meat aimlessly and homelessly floating around. But this was something special. The most intricately designed shells and fish- smooth ones, brown ones, thin ones, red and white ones, ones with pink meat on the inside, whole fish with no skin, whole fish with all their skin but no skin on the head – had me captivated. The adolescent restaurant “host”, if you will, asked me if I wanted to sit (in plastic chairs lining the busy street, inches away from a cars' side mirror when they pass). I said no thank you, but proceeded to ask him a million questions. His face lit up! My face lit up! Cultural exchange! I giggled, not with him, but with the words he was saying. I pointed to a twisty blue and green coarse shell and said “what is the name of this?” “Snail”. Oh. So I pointed to a red and white small conch looking shell, waiting for him to tell me its name was conch menoris of the red and white sands of the Malay Sea. “Snail”. Ok. I pointed to a green and brown long skinny one with meat hanging off it and said confidently, “snail”. He vehemently shook his head and said with a slight air of pretension, which I love to hear slipping out of 14 year old's mouths, “No, that's bamboo la-la”. I had to laugh. Of course! Bamboo la-la. They can BBQ it or simply fry it for me if I'd like. I pointed to my stomach in an effort to explain that I had just gotten here and already thrown up all the airport food I'd consumed, so maybe later. He smiled and I went on my way.

I continued on, taking pictures of the fry your own jellyfish stand and random balls of other stuff stand, and a prickly fruit that looks like something you could play a fun sport with. I settled for an aggressively charming restaurant host that already had my table set up by the time I walked into his jurisdiction. His female side-kick, with a cigarette hanging out the side, of her mouth showed me pictures of the food and I saw the dish that looked most appealing and bland for my recovering stomach, “spicy chicken noodle soup”. I asked for medium spice. My food was delectable. I got so frustrated with myself because I wanted so badly to eat with my chopsticks but then I couldn't shovel it in my mouth like I wanted to. Which in the end could have been a good thing, because the medium spicy still felt like my noodles were served to me in a light fire.

Around me, I watched Malay men pushing strollers and carrying babies, and women selling food, smoking and walking carrying fresh lobster. I saw families in the slum apartments above me changing baby diapers and living their daily life and I felt like a total outsider...a sponge soaking up everything this place could possibly offer me, noticing tiny little quirks that I find hilarious (some people call me “sister” here, which has happened almost everywhere I've gone). I love it, from the way women wait in lines at the bathroom, by waiting in front of the stall they want to go into and not waiting for the next one to open up, to the way my mind tricks me into thinking that babies are driving but really, the steering wheel is on the other side of the car. I am here, I am filling up.