Ex-pat essentials

There are still many Orang Asli, the indigenous natives of peninsular Malaysia, living in the jungle and we visited a village in the Taman Negara. I take aim at a teddy bear target with a blow pipe that the men use to hunt monkeys for food. Everything is made from natural materials and the darts are coated in a poison sourced from a rain forest tree.

In the last blog I included an excerpt from The Travel Addict’s Puzzle which noted the bizarre thrill of experiencing an alien culture as an outsider, but back in town we are not just skimming the sights but are immersed in the way of life. So if living and not just passing through, what does the modern ex-pat need to hang onto from his or her own culture in order to maintain that perspective and fully appreciate being in a foreign land?

1)     Mustard: I put a jar of Old English on the table the other day and Liz remarked that it was well travelled. I actually remember being very pleased with myself at finding it in a shop in Nanjing, and so I must have chucked it in the packing for Siberia before it came with us to Malaysia.

2)     Crossword: I get Liz to print off the Guardian prize puzzle for me and, when I am with a group at the golf club and I can’t follow them speaking Malay, I can busy myself with the puzzle instead of sitting there looking completely stupid.

3)     Internet: There is a danger that this makes life too easy and allows us to avoid the challenges of life abroad. We use it to watch UK television, keep in contact with friends and family, download books and even get driving directions. Has it made the world too small?

4)     Booze: Living in a Muslim country we perhaps could change our habits but there is a strong tradition of the gin soaked ex-pat which is important to preserve. The government attitude is that if you want to do things which we disapprove of you must pay us a lot of money in tax, and so the non-halal section of the supermarket sells beer, wine and spirits at a price. Consequently, while Liz is busy at work I have to make regular trips to the island of Langkawi which is duty free. A tough life as shown below.

Eating out

Malaysia is rightly noted for its food but at times something different from the simple eateries serving chicken and rice in various forms, which is pretty much what is on offer in our small town, is required. For Liz's birthday we sought the comparative cosmopolitanism of Ipoh, the state capital of Perak, and ended up in an Irish pub.
This reminded me of passing through Kazakhstan's oil rich town of Atyrau and the following excerpts are from Chapter 8 of The Travel Addict's Puzzle:

I’m not sure what to do about money. I suspect that no one will want Kazakh Tenge once I have left the country, but I may not have enough for lunch and I don’t really want the embarrassment of having to rush to the ATM to pay the bill whilst making incomprehensible gestures, or frantically patting all my pockets searching for cash, which is a routine known in New Zealand as the Australian Hakka. I do manage to find some kind of supermarket and satisfy myself that I can spend any excess Tenge there, and so make a visit to one of the many holes-in-the-wall, and now it is time for lunch.

I can’t decipher anything on the menu but hear mentioned ‘business lunch’ and say that I will have one of those, whatever it is. It is alright but nothing memorable and the waitress keeps trying to get the table lamp to work despite my waving her away. I am unable to raise Liz on Skype but have a conversation with my brother-in-law in England.  I can imagine exactly where he is sitting, in a completely different world to the one that I currently inhabit. This must surely be another reason to travel; the ability not to immerse oneself into an alien world but to skim it- to live it but at the same time to belong elsewhere and to experience the bizarre thrill of the physical world and the emotional being in complete juxtaposition. Before I leave I unplug my re-charged little computer and turn the table lamp back on for them.

In the distance the sun is glinting off golden domes which I first mistake for a mosque, but these have the pinched tops of cake decorations my mother used to use or, for those who never sampled my mother’s baking, of confections such as St. Basils in Moscow or the Brighton Pavilion. The subtle difference in the shape of the dome reflects the divergence of belief; while Moslems revere Jesus as a great prophet, they don’t buy into the Holy Trinity bit, and maintain that there is only one God, which rules out divinity for Jesus Christ (and Mohamed). Of course not everyone has had the advantage of early schooling from Irish nuns, who were able to simply solve the conundrum of there being three-in-one by reference to a picture of a shamrock. With God-the-father in Heaven and Jesus in Palestine I was left with the assumption that it was the Holy Ghost who hailed from the Emerald Isle. As the Christian church survived its first 300 odd years without the idea of Jesus being divine, there is perhaps less difference between these two enormously powerful religions than the media would have us believe.

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I still have loads of time to spend in Atyrau and find what claims to be an Irish pub. This is a worldwide phenomenon and I have come across them, with names like Molly Malone’s or Nelly Dee’s, from New Zealand to China. They may even have them in Ireland. What they are trying to do is replicate the unique institution of the English pub, which is also found in Wales but not in Scotland or Ireland, other than as another attempt at a copy. It may be that they think calling something ‘Irish’ adds an extra layer of romanticism, or else the whole thing is an invention of Guinness marketing, which is quite a plausible explanation for the phenomena. It can never work of course because the English pub is a part of, and grows out of its environment. You might just as well dismantle London Bridge and rebuild it in a desert in Arizona (which for some unknown reason was actually done). The English country pub is something that I still have faith in and something that I miss in New Zealand, where they are just not quite the same.

It is just opening and I am handed a menu. The beer is so expensive that they can sell it for half price in Happy Hour, from 6 o’clock, and still no doubt make a good profit. It is 5.20 pm and the waitress seems to accept my suggestion that I stay sat outside reading until the prices become more reasonable. I wonder if this place explains the large number of banks in town as you would need to negotiate a personal loan every time you needed to raise funds to buy a pint of Guinness. At one minute past six I am at the bar, feeling very thirsty and ordering half a litre of their cheapest beer. They charge me full price. I object and they explain that while my watch shows the official time, and is correct for the train I need to catch, local time is an hour behind. I drink my beer and find my way back to the supermarket where I invest the remainder of my Kazakh Tenge in bread and cheese.

The Travel Addict's Puzzle paperback can be found at www.createspace.com/5714720 or from Amazon as paperback or e-book.