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You've been in Malaysia too long when...

Well, it's soon going to be over and so I thought I might try to put together one last post here. Suggestions are welcome as it's by no means definitive ("You've been in X way too long when you can't come up with a single point for You've been in X too long when..."). Here it comes:

1. You've got a variety of lah, mah, meh, lor etc. in your lexicon and use them consistently.

2. You pop in a shopping mall just because 'they have aircon in there.'

3. You're outraged when they increase the price of petrol from RM1.40 to RM1.50 (~EUR0.33).

4. You always have a packet of Premier tissues on you.

5. You forgot why piracy is supposed to be bad when it's apparent how good it is.

6. You don't care about red lights any more...

7. ... and then you ask 'Can you help me?' when a police officer approaches you.

8. Your local friends complain they can't get any pork at their university and you fully understand.

9. You moan about when Roti Canai comes for RM0.60 when it used to be just RM0.50.

10. You no longer believe that “tall, DARK and handsome” is a collocation.

See also You've been in Korea too long when...

Rainbow over mountains

I started reading up on Borneo and Mt.Kinabalu and something extraordinarily big started growing in me. I'm asking myself. Why climb? People traditionally believed there are gods on top of mountains and it may be that to climb a mountain is to get that glimpse of God. To conquer the world and at the same time to realize how tiny and vulnerable we are.

I owe a lot to Malaysia as I've become a believer here. It's hard though to steer clear of any anguish after I've got such deep 'stabs of Joy'. Fion gave me a wonderful present and wrote to me that it's often hard to see the rainbow but we have to believe it's up there. This metaphor must be the crux of faith for any believer but an inner voice has me weep asking: “We long for the rainbow but aren't the clouds, the haze, the scorching sun, the rainstorms, the rainbow... aren't they, or aren't we part of the very same thing?”


I'm soon going to climb Mt.Kinabalu to get closer to the rainbow... and the mist, and the rain and the sunrise for that matter.

Love & Gratitude

'It makes you wonder, doesn't it? If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us.'

This was a singularly powerful line from What the Bleep Do We Know!? - a spellbinding documentary I was watching the other Friday night in Alor Setar after having gone through my regular round of early morning expectations, noon anguish, afternoon joy and evening enlightement:

Interview with Masaru Emoto

我 愛 你

Blind

One thing I didn't blog about despite its significance is my recent visit to St Nicholas Home for the Blind. I greatly appreciate the meaning of putting myself in someone else's shoes and always look for such opportunities. Hence I was glad I could at last attend the programme.

First, we got some training on guiding the blind and then practiced the skills with blindfolds on the way to a nearby shopping mall (incidentally, what's the British English equivalent for 'shopping mall'?). After that, we had a short session interacting with some severely handicapped children.


The boy on the picture was pretty amazing because his only means of communication was his hands.

Like myself? I think not

Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man's life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.

-- C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Well, what doesn't cease to astonish us here is that people can be and, in fact, are different from us in great many ways. I think it teaches a lesson that we should tolerate, or rather celebrate the difference and the diversity.