Late reflections

A good friend of mine sent me a message saying that after reading the post on my incursion on the jungle, she was actually curious about my reflections following that. And now that I had a bit of time to ponder, I thought I’d share them.

* I had no such “their life is so beautiful and simple and how it’s supposed to be” moments. I am realistic enough at this point to see the good and bad in any life style and not to idealize things. Especially in this case, as the orang asli have a pretty unhealthy life style anyways – life expectancy among them is about 57 years!!! Don’t get me wrong, food wise they’re by far the healthiest I’ve seen in Malaysia – they basically rely mostly on vegetables taken from the jungle. Meat is reduced to a minimum and the unhealthy things I’ve seen were all biscuits of stuff that they buy. But unfortunately they take from the jungle also some less healthy habits. They all (and by all I mean ALL, even small children aged 4 or 5!!) chew on this thing that is called pinang. It looks a bit like this in its tree form, and inside it looks like this. They put it inside a leaf together with some white powdery thing (did not yet figure out what that is) and they chew it like tobacco in the old days. Now, the thing is, that pinang thing together with the powdery thing have some sort of chemical reaction and the result is basically a light drug…you really get a bit high. Your mouth is full of red (that’s the colour that comes from chewing it) and it’s quite bad for the teeth, as well as for the rest of your health. It’s also obviously quite addictive. Funnily enough, they actually believe that the thing keeps them young!! It’s a bit difficult to understand how they can believe this as all of them look much older than they actually are. Apart from the kids. The kids are seriously adorable!

* The whole experience made me feel how special Malaysia truly is. I will be honest, I love the nature in Malaysia but I can’t say I am in love with the country per se – I am not a big fan of its life style and I don’t like that feeling of everyone staring at me and considering me “special” just because I am white. So I definitely cannot see myself living here for a long time. At the same time though, I realised that in 6 months here I learned a lot of stuff about more cultures and types of people than I ever imagined! I actually understand much better now Muslims and Indians. And this visit brought me close to the life of indigenous tribes also. Obviously, I am not pretending in depth understanding but at least I get some reference points, some dimensions of perception if you will. I am still working on the Chinese part but even the fact that I mainly meet this group in tango, salsa and hiking activities, says a lot 🙂

* The spirits world conversation came up again. Only this time it came much closer to me and made me sort of make up my mind on it. I was never neither super brave nor super afraid of spirits or ghosts. I was brought up in a religious environment so stories of people possessed by the devil were quite a common occurrence in my life. I even saw such people in Romanian monasteries – difficult to believe anyone could fake such behaviors. But what I saw in this village was different. The fear was everywhere – absolutely everyone had things around their neck and hands to protect them from evil spirits. The shaman was highly respected and from what I understood had a busy schedule of healings and other ceremonies. And what was amazing was that our questions of “but why are you actually doing that? Why like this and not in another way? What does this mean?” were met with blank stares. What kind of explanations do we need? The ritual is being done because it has always been done like this and it has always had power over the spirits. So questions are completely useless and unnecessary. The following day was even better – we actually turned back from the jungle because of a strong wind that made the trees make loud sounds and bend a bit. All the locals became super super scared as it was obvious the spirits were around us.

We obviously had the conversation among ourselves (the foreigners) on whether we believe in ghosts. Aleks told us that the first 2 months he could not sleep very well in his center and he was telling this to his community. That obviously took him to the shaman (after asking him if he had pee-ed in the jungle – apparently that’s a very bad thing to do!). The shaman performed a ritual and gave him a talisman to wear around his neck. He has never had troubles sleeping since.

Tina (Slovenian friend) on the other hand, could not sleep well the first night we were there. When I asked her why, she went on “couldn’t you hear all the spirits?”. I must confess I did not.

So they sentenced me to a “you really don’t believe in this at all?”- to which point I could not say NO, but I realised that what I always believe is that it is the fear that makes them (whatever them is) exist. Whenever I have thoughts that provoke fear, I tend to believe that it is actually myself creating the fear, and that if I can just control the fear than whatever that is will be non-existent. I guess this means that I internalise it rather than externalising it. I guess that means I don’t really believe in them, though I’ve heard many weird stories so am not sure what I would do if any odd things were to happen to me.

* I had this very clear moment when I realised I will actually miss this a lot. It happened in the first night, before I fell asleep – I realised I will miss this feeling. Lying on mattresses on the floor in a building in the middle of nowhere together with people that feel now very close, though in the beginning you would have never said you could built such relationships again. Wonderful. It felt a lot like summers at my grandma’s (and that is by far the greatest compliment any experience can receive!:))

* I am remembering and thinking about my grandmother a lot lately. Talking about her too. Funnily enough, always in the present tense. I wonder what that means.

Role Models

Somewhat randomly I decided to do an activity on role models with my teenager and adult classes. This basically meant that I asked them to think about who their role model is and to make a short presentation on who that person is, what they did, and why they admire them so much. The results took me a bit by surprise.

It’s actually amazing how much you can say by a culture just by this small exercise. And no, I don’t mean this in a stereotyping kind of way. I just mean that people exposed to certain values and behaviours, will obviously display some sort of similar pattern. It goes for ROmania, the Netherlands and obviously Malaysia also.

The first class I did the exercise with was pretty straightforward and did not produce many surprises. It was my teenager class (13 to 16 year olds) – the more mature ones chose as role models their mothers or fathers (which was quite surprising considering that at that age you should be mostly fighting with your parents:)). The boys went mostly for football players – it was funny how they chose…they all went for captains of local teams and kept telling me that they chose them because they are “brave” :). For the girls it was quite diverse, with a predominance of singers. And yes, I did get one Taylor Swift too!

My main surprinse was my adult class. For two reasons:
– firstly, it got super emotional! Most people here chose relatives – parents or even siblings. Some of them talked about close family who had past away. One girl almost cried sharing about her mother. Another one was super emotional while telling us why she “adored her father”
– secondly, two of my adults told me they have as a role model the former Prime Minister of Malaysia. In all honesty, he does deserve some credit. He was a PM for a looooooong time, and during this period Malaysia did become richer and more stable, he built quite a lot of the impressive infrastructure that they have and he even basically had the idea of building Putrajaya (the city where I live and teach now, that was constructed about 20 years ago:)). Obviously, he also has the great merit of brainwashing an entire population, of prolonging a set of privileges given to Malays that were supposed to be abolished like 30 years ago and of basically creating quite some division among the main ethnicities of the country. For more detailed information on him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahathir_Mohamad. In any case, I doubt many people in Europe would ever choose politicians as role models. So it was truly surprising to hear it from my students.

The third class I did the exercise with is also a teenager class, but they all go to religious school. I guess I should not have been surprised by the fact that 3 of the kids actually chose religion related figures as role models – prophet Muhammad, one of the prophet’s friends, and a famous Malaysian ulama. An ulama is basically someone who is recognized as a scholar and a great authority in religious education. So he holds sort of “lectures” where he teaches about the Quran. One of my favourite students actually chose this ulama, and then told me he wants to become an ulama, hence the choice. I found it quite endearing.
Side Note: I know and I can see on the kids that religious school makes them in a way a bit close minded and reluctant to certain things that I would find normal. But at the same time I am always moved by how much they value things like “being kind, being generous, sharing what you have, being hard working”. I am not sure how many 14 year olds in Europe would mention these as main things that are important for them.
Going back to the role model part, quite a few of the students gave parents and siblings as examples. One girl gave me as a role model – which was truly touching and a bit embarrassing. I didn’t really know how to react or what to do with myself then. And I also had one student who chose Gandhi. This was a very pleasant surprise, especially as the education system here doesn’t really encourage knowledge about affairs external to Malaysia. SO the fact that someone actually knew about Gandhi was definitely a great plus. It also gave me an idea for my next project with the teenagers: Great Leaders 🙂

In the jungle, the mighty jungle….

Did you ever have one of those days that start off with you waking up in your nice clean bed in an air-con-ed room and that end up with you going to bed on a mattress in the only house made from concrete and having electricity in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere?

Well, with a bit of ups and downs, that basically sums up my Saturday!

This Monday we had a public holiday (due to a big Indian celebration), which basically meant LONG WEEKEND!!! YEEEYYYY!!! So there was the whole “what should I do, where should I go” dilemma.  And after some thought and consideration, I decided not to go witness the indian festival together with most of my other friends here (part of me regrets it but truth be told, I was seriously not in the mood for the crowdiness and hectic-ness that went along with it) and instead decided to visit one of the other CDOs. His name is Aleks (Serbian), he does the same job as I do, only that in a tiny orang asli (this is the aboriginal people here) village in the middle of the jungle. I managed to corrupt my volunteer and another friend also, so we all went to visit the jungle!

I must say that Saturday was a nice special day anyways. It’s like all the stars were aligning to make things good and enjoyable. In the morning we went to an event in our community – we were supposed to be there only until 10am, but we ended up staying until 1.30pm. There was breakfast and lunch, there was lots of nice conversation, there was sitting in the kitchen with the women, helping with cooking and finding out all the gossip, there was playing of games – we actually got introduced to their national games!! I actually won one of them by pure luck (it’s a lot like pool so I sucked at it massively!

As luck would have it, we also found out that one of my students (remember Diana from one of my previous posts?:)) was going to her homevillage in the afternoon. And the said homevillage was really close to where Aleks lives. So guess what? ROAD TRIIIIIPPPP!!! With Diana and her sister. And that was sooo fun! We started off with one of the hugest (and yummyest) mochas I have ever had…and here is the evidence! 🙂

After 3h of driving we kind of felt we were approaching Aleks’ village. We had turned from the main road to a tiny tiny tiny (and by that I mean seriously narrow road – still excellently paved though), on which we were the only car and we occasionally met motorcycles from time to time. There was no light (it was getting darker and darker by that point) and nothing outside except jungle! Huge palm trees, weird plants and us on the road 🙂 And who knows what other living creatures in the wild 🙂 Needless to say we were asking ourselves if that was indeed the right way. But it was! And we soon started seeing traces of life…wooden huts and some people who when asked about “teacher”, pointed happily towards the only illuminated house in the village. And there were Aleks and Tina waiting for us 🙂

And the evening was just starting! Aleks told us that we are super lucky – someone in the next village is sick, so we will get to see a live shaman led healing ritual!! Yeyy! (obviously we felt very sorry that someone was sick). So we all went on motorbikes (no, I did not drive one, I just hold on very very tight!!:)) to the nearby village. Where it all happened – the shaman did his thing which consisted of word mumbling, things being put on him and then him putting things on the sick person, more word mumbling, and various ritual type things being done. What was really funny was that while all this was happening, the guy who was sick was at the same time watching TV!!! Which was glorious because these people are seriously poor! There was nothing in that house but they had a flat screen TV!! (this village is a bit more well off than that of Aleks and they do have electricity there).

Anyways, moving past that – we then got fed with the best omelette in the world! (I actually thought we will all eat but they actually made dinner specially for us!!).

And then we proceeded to part 2! Which consisted of people playing some bamboo poles on wood – it made beautiful rythmic music and we got to do it too! Normally, they play that for 2 evenings from about 10pm until 3am. To chase away the evil ghosts that might come for the sick person again. We lasted only until 12.20pm. Those poles are seriously heavy! But the whole experience was truly amazing – you keep playing those things and you go into a sort of trance like state – all the sounds getting mumbled together, the chanting gets inside you and everything gets completely fuzzy and mixed up. At one point I stopped playing and had my eyes closed and they thought I was asleep. Apparently that is super bad for the sick person, so they started chanting even louder and pushing me to wake up!

The next day followed in the same atmosphere…they came in the morning and took us to one of their huts where we had some amazing breakfast. A huuuge banana (they actually call it horn banana), and some rather weird and unheard of vegetables, together with petai beans. IT was soooo delicious! Again, they fed us first and made us take tons of food. And then they just shared what was left (among the 15 of them!!). I felt sooo bad for taking their food but Aleks said they would feel offended if we give it back to them. In addition to this, the cutest kids in the world were part of the group which made things even nicer! (which by the way had probably never seen a camera before cause they were amazed that they could see themselves on the screen and kept asking f that was a mirror I had with me :))

We then walked through the jungle and to the field, where we got to another hut 🙂 We basically spend the whole day around there – playing with the kids, walking through the jungle, talking, eating more amazing food that they just picked up on our trails. IT was incredible! We would be walking through the jungle and our host would suddenly stop, go to a plant and say “makan” – meaning that it was good to eat 🙂 And later we had that for dinner! Lovely!

There was also the moment when strong wind came and all the trees started winding and making noise! All the locals we were with stopped, and started looking very worried and afraid. Aleks translated that “the forest does not want us here”…so we turned back. In all fairness, ghosts and spirits are a huge part of their culture. Everyone is wearing talismans and it is something that cannot be doubted. It can only be accepted, feared and learnt to deal with.

The Sunday evening was less exciting than the previous night. But still amazing. The kids and adults got used to Aleks holding a movie night, basically every night. These kids (and most of the adults for that matter) had actually never seen a computer before so the fact that Aleks is projecting movies on the big wall is something amazing! They all gathered and we watched The Jungle Book. And it was really amazing. The kids I teach are in quite a modern community – so they’ve seen tons of cartoons and they’re very difficult to surprise or amuse. But these kids were enjoying the cartoon so so so much! Laughing at every joke and funny song, and cheering along with the movie. It was so nice to see! And the adults too! They were a bit annoyed in the beginning that we were watching a cartoon but they got so caught into it! It was so nice to see! 🙂

This jungle trip was nice for so many reasons! And many reflections have been brought on by this experience – maybe I will at some point give an account of these also, not just of the happenings per se.
But I guess the thing that struck me the most was that the moment I arrived there I had a feeling of peace and relaxing that I only get at my grandmother’s place. The same warmth and atmosphere of good, of calm and of “life is simple and beautiful”. And I am just so so thankful to have found that here.

Also, the villagers told us we were the first white women to visit their village. Ever. 

Weekend happenings

This weekend I decided to take a different path than on other weekends and be active in different ways. So 
on Saturday I met up with some people for coffee and then enjoyed an afternoon in the mall (so Malaysian of me lah!) and on Sunday I went hiking with a MeetUp group (if you know nothing about MeetUp, here is all the info you need: http://www.meetup.com/). What follows are some events and reflections from this weekend.

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I never thought I would say this but I had one my best burgers ever yesterday in the MidValley mall. IT was huge, the meat was glorious and the fries were made out of proper potatoes. Happiness is at times so simple!

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Whenever I go in malls I wonder in the library. Mainly because the concept of nice small bookshops is basically non-existent in Malaysia, so that’s the only way to see, touch and feel books (so far I managed to find only one nice small bookshop in Penang – on my last visit though there it was closed L ).

Malaysian bookstores never cease to amaze me. Even the sections they have are quite telling over the general reading behaviour of the nation (mind you, there is not much of reading behaviour anyways but still). For example, in most bookstores the largest section would be Fiction. Here however, the Young Adult section is always the most sizeable, taking up at least one third of the exhibit space. I would love to say that you can find in it every appropriate teenage read from classics to contemporary, but unfortunately it’s either soapy romance or Twilight type fantasy stuff. Sad. The next section that amused me was Women Fiction. I doubt I’ve seen it phrased like this in other parts of the world J This was basically your run of the mill Sophie Kinsella and so on books (that by the way, I have enjoyed tremendously from time to time). I just love the fact that it just seems so unrealistic that a man would ever enjoy such a book (though they’re probably right on this one).

One quite annoying fact about Malaysia is that books are expensive (basically, same as European prices if not even more at times). With the exception of classics – you know, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Scott F Fitzgerald etc. Those are dirt cheap – However, for the whole duration of my staying there (which was about an hour I guess), myself and one other lady were the sole visitors of the section. Sad again. However, I got inspired and decided to buy as presents for my teenagers some of these classic books. I tried to pick for each something that fits their character and interests – I just hope that now or later they would read them!!! 

Last but not least, the fact that produces most sadness to me in libraries here is that the Malaysian literature part is so tiny. Seriously…2 shelves. You have the Asian Fiction part that is huge (mainly occupied by Chinese, Indian and Japanese in all fairness) and then the Malaysian titles are soooo little. I find it really sad that the country does not have a culture neither of writing, nor of reading. I am assuming that the former is because of the conditions also – I wouldn’t go as far as saying that censorship is in place, but you’re not going to find very strong outright criticism to current conditions either. So far, I managed to find 2 books that are quite outliers in terms of being more incisive and talking about current issues (both written by young contemporary authors), but overall there’s not much to choose from. One of the books that looked interesting on this occasion (a collection of newspaper articles written by a young dude) turned out to contain in each of its chapters a “and this is why Islam is the best religion on earth” caption.

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Sports equipment here is cheap and good quality. Dangerous.

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I finished reading “The Godfather”. I can now agree with Tom Hanks (“You’ve got mail”) – that book has all the answers you need in life. My goal is to now have a “The Godfather” movie marathon.

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This morning I went hiking with an online MeetUp group – they organise hikes every week (sometimes even twice a week). I kept wanting to go but schedules did not work out. This Sunday was the day though! It’s really nice cause people carpool also, so I could actually get a ride out (logistics is normally a serious problem here).

Hiking in Malaysia is a more difficult issue than in other parts of the world. Mainly because it’s so hot and humid. So you need to hike early in the morning to ensure you do not die of heat on the trail. MY alarm clock was set at 5.15 this morning. What with driving and waiting for everyone to  gather (we were in the end a group of about 35 people), we started hiking around 7:45 – 8. At 11:20 we were back at the car.

The whole experience was super nice. The trail was moderately hard – at times quite steep and slippery, nothing extreme but enough to give the feeling of a bit of a challenge. The people were very nice – lots of locals (mainly Chinese – I reached the conclusion that the Chinese are anyways the ones doing most extra stuff in Malaysia) and lots of foreigners also (who mostly live here and work in everything from the UN, to oil & gas companies, to sales, to asset fund management. And meJ). It was a large group but everyone was hiking in their own pace so you could choose what rhythm was most convenient for you.

What I love about Malaysian hiking is that sooner or later there’s bound to be a waterfall. Which means that when you feel super wet and sweaty and basically disgusting, salvation arrives! You go under it, get a shower with a massage (generally the current is strong enough) and you get reborn with energy. Which is what happened today also. It wasn’t the tallest waterfall but it was awesome – the bathing and the splashing and the pure enjoyment! Absolutely LO-VE-LY!!!

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Have a lovely week y’all! 🙂

When you feel you want to go running somewhere…not sure where…

Last evening I talked to my mother who is having pretty serious health checks done. Symptoms are not unheard of but it could either be nothing or it could be something very serious. As always with these things I guess.
This morning I woke up to find out about the Jakarta events and the police rising security levels in Malaysia also.
Both events have not created nice feelings in my stomach…

The Starbucks Girl

As some of you already know (because you have received an email where I was going on and on about my latest distress), I have been faced with sort of a moral issue lately. A moral issue that at the end of the day I couldn’t do much about, but that did cause very strong reactions in me, for some reason or another.

See, I work in an NGO. And this NGO has been facing problems lately due to donors reducing their funding. That’s not because we’re a bad NGO or we’re not doing our job properly, it’s just because there’s quite a serious economic crisis in Malaysia at the moment and companies are feeling it. Now, my NGO decided to try and smooth talk our sponsors. And one of the ways it chose to do so is to rename our center names (that before just took the name of the location…in my case we had Putrajaya Community Center) into names that would contain our donors’ name. Nobody (including me) protested to that because we went on the “whatever makes them happy and gives us more money” type of attitude. Then we found out the center names…I obviously got the Starbucks Community Center…just because it’s written in my stars probably. But anyways…I mocked away and decided to live with it the best I could.
The bigger problem arrived when I got to see the new banner that was supposed to be hung in front of my center…to summarize it, it’s basically as if we would be selling Starbucks at our center. The Starbucks logo is so big, the text is now in the Starbucks colors, the name of our NGO is so tiny, that it made my heart sink and hurt. I really felt intense physical pain. I tried to chill myself and waited because generally after shocks, it takes me a bit to get used to it and to process it and the horrible feeling goes away. However, this one didn’t. Two days later I was still getting shocks in my chest when thinking about the situation. Which is when I decided to write the email to the people, cause I figured external and more detached perspectives will help out.

And they did partly. I started focusing on all the good things the people were saying. It’s not what is hung outside that matters, it’s what you do there. It’s maybe even better because Starbucks is so well known (and definitely liked) in Malaysia. You should detach yourself, look at the big picture and carry on focusing on the students. The funny thing was when I went to administrator of the building with my new banner, so he could put it on. I put on my best smiling and happy face, but when he opened it, his face dropped and he was like “That is one biiiiig Starbucks sign!! I will need to check with our committee to see if I can put it up”:) Anyways, the committee saw it, decided to put it up but not in the most visible place…and now we have this wonderful thing at the entrance in our center:

You might wonder (like I did also) why this thing bothered me so much. I have been thinking about it quite a lot lately since I’ve been receiving various opinions on it and since it awoke such strong and physical reactions. The main points are the following:
–  I did not mind that we need to promote the donors. It’s quite normal and money needs to come from somewhere. So we are happy that they come from them. But the size of it all felt very very very displaced! If you take into account also the fact that my particular center gets more than half of its expenses covered by someone else, than it just feels completely bogus!
– the donors did not ask for such a thing. We sort of offered it to them. Which is fine but then why make it sooooo huge?
– I am holding classes about eating healthy and not drinking crap. And although in other countries Starbucks might be better, in Malaysia it is a sugar making factory. So it felt very far from the general messages we are trying to convey. 
– it made me feel like I was working for Starbucks. And if I wanted to do that, I would just get a job for it.

I cannot say that I’ve made my peace with the situation yet…at the moment I am just trying to not look too much at the banner when I come in 🙂 Any coping thoughts or suggestions are still welcome 🙂 But the students do help, so I am just focusing on that!

Zumba in Malaysia

This morning I experienced a new event in my life…namely, I went for the first time to a zumba class in my community! 
Now, why I stress the my community part, is because I live and teach in a full Malay community, which means everybody around me is Muslim. So I was super curious to see how a zumba class would look in such an environment (for those of you who are newer to zumba life, it involves quite sexy moves at times, lots of bum and belly shaking, and the lyrics of the songs are not the most appropriate ones you could imagine).

I anticipated correctly…it was super interesting! I had to wake up at 7am since that is the only time exercise can be bore in this hot hot hot country. Obviously all the women were dressed in long pants and long sleeves and were wearing the hijab – Respect for the jumping they did in so many layers!! I was very pleasantly surprised that there was a man there also…he seemed to be enjoying himself very well and of course, he was made to sit in the front (so he would not see anything should the t-shirt of a woman go up or something).

What I did not anticipate is how I would feel in the situation. Normally, zumba (and any type of exercise for that matter) is a place to let go, get rid of all stress and sweat it all out, without thinking too much about anything else. However, today, the letting go part was completely impossible. See…everyone was looking at me! Because I was white, and obviously non-Muslim, and hence special and to be studied. Moreover, the zumba here was way less curvy than what it is in Europe (they shake their bums way less…probably no surprise there! :)). However, I am used to the shaking of the bum, so I all of a sudden felt very restricted in my movements and possibilities.

Don’t get me wrong, overall it was a definitely positive experience, but as with everything else, expectations need to be adjusted. It did however get connected to something else I recently realised. During my recent traveling I was very surprised when in Langkawi (island in the North and our first stop after KL) I felt a sense of freedom. Of no boundaries and no judgement. It surprised me because I had not been conscious of it before. I guess without completely realising it, I do feel constraints in my community – in the way I dress, the things I talk about, the way I am perceived. Only going somewhere else though, did I become aware that they actually affect me.

Happy New Year Y’all!

I know this post comes rather late after the change of the years, but I have a good excuse! Since 18th December, when my blonde Diana arrived, we’ve been traveling around Malaysia, in a trip that has contained everything – good food (Malaysian and Romanian); good booze (again, Malaysian, Romanian and from other parts of the world as well…we never discriminate when it comes to drinking!); beach, jungle, rocks and waterfalls; laziness and hiking; old and new friendships; Awww and Ohhh and Ahhh moments.

I will not bore you with the details of our wanderings – the photos on facebook will reflect it well enough, I’m sure. I will however share some of the things that happened or were talked of or just randomly passed my mind while in our various locations.

* It is possible to meet your soul mate in Malaysia! She might be from Slovenia and might resemble you tremendously! And no…it is not my soul mate that I am talking about, but Diana’s. And not a romantic soul mate either – just a person that seems to be part of you somehow. It always amazes me how two people can just hit it off immediately and realise they have the same beliefs, convictions and general guidelines in life, even though their trajectory so far has been completely different. Lately, this strikes me a lot. I first got to witness it with my change of volunteers – my old and new volunteer overlapped for 10 days, one is Indian Malaysian and the other French, and yet it was like they were sisters! And something very similar happened with Diana and Tina. It’s just lovely to see. And also lovely to know that whenever such people will meet again, the connection will definitely be there again, without much effort on either side.

* Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it. This one I’m gonna leave as such, with no further info, just cause it’s more for me rather than anyone else.

* Island life is amazing, as long as there’s mountains on it also! I’ve always chosen mountains vs sea, with no regrets whatsoever. This time in SE Asia though has made me appreciate a lot though a nice beach and clear water. So much so that I have reached the point where I’m ok with spending 3 days in a row just relaxing on the beach and not doing much else (before, I could not believe I would be capable of that). And I was almost thinking that I’d converted. But when, after such laziness, I got to go again next to rocks and waterfalls with cold water, I just got this feeling of “oh no…this is definitely where I’m supposed to be!”. So no worries mountains! You’re staying my number 1 choice!

* Malaysia is beautiful and it should be visited by everyone! Langkawi and Penang are both amazing and I only wish my center would be based there. Though that might not be so productive for my work 🙂 Also, I realised again how big the impact of a place can be. In this period Melaka (which is a town about 2h south of KL) has become sort of my refuge city. The place where, if things are bad and annoying, you go and you just know…all will be good again! This time around, it was the same. After a very annoying journey, just stepping out of the bus made me feel immediately more relaxed and open to everything. I still wonder if it’s the places themselves that do that or just our associations of them. Oh..speaking of associations, Diana and I decided that the word for KL is heterogeneous (based on the whole Eat, Pray, Love thing of associating words with cities)

* Karma is one amazing thing! Karma has been mentioned a lot during this trip of ours, because in a weird way, without much prior planning things just worked out! People have come together (I thought I was traveling just with Diana, but we ended up spending only the last 3 days on or own :)), fun was had, random occurrences brought us to amazing places, logistics came through, all these type of things that would normally stress you had a weird way of coming together. I am just hoping to keep that open, let it go feeling for as long as I can 🙂

* Christmas in a warm country is just not Christmas. Which was probably for the best. If it would have felt like Christmas, I would have missed my family like mad! Like this however, I managed to enjoy the moment to its fullest (sometimes maybe a bit too much:)). As a consequence, our Christmas presents to each other were rounds of cocktails on the beach. Not too shabby, some might say. It was a bit weird though cause they were putting up a very “tourist oriented Christmas celebration” which consisted of something very similar to New Years….fireworks and everyone hugging and going Merry Christmas at 00:00. We had a bit of a “Guys…that’s not really how you’re supposed to be doing it” moment but we let it slide, since we appreciated the effort 🙂

* Holidays are awesome! And people are what makes them awesome! 🙂