I'm still not caught up on all my previous entries, but I decided that I wanted to write here, and in the current tense. I'm not feeling well. Not sick, mind you, just not well. A spot behind my right eye that sometimes bothers me is giving me just the slightest bit of a headache, and I feel quite tired, though I slept nearly ten hours last night. Additionally, I am having minor stomach problems. Minor, though, just a bit of discomfort, nothing debilitating or disruptive to any of my plans. Enough of my whining though, I'm having 1.5 kilos of my dirty laundry washed, dried and folded for me for RM8 ($2.75)! Lunch (fried rice, deeply browned by some sauce with a fried egg on top and a can of Coke) was RM8 too. And my 1.5 liter of water was only RM1.50 (less than $0.50)! I'm also settling into my routine more of trying to combine actually living with traveling, which was a problem for me for the first week when I'd do everything in the world for two days, then not much of anything, then everything, then nothing. Now, I'm basically doing very little all the time! In the morning/early afternoon, I do very little Life stuff (writing, uploading photos, checking my emails, bank accounts and paying bills), then in mid-late afternoon/early evening I do very little touristing/sightseeing (mostly just wandering around slowly), then I have some dinner, maybe a drink, and then read or write for a while.
Really my biggest problem so far has been dehydration. Even though I'm usually drinking 2-3 liters of bottled water daily, when I'm walking around I've often felt a bit lightheaded. I'm also not sure I'm eating enough; it's very hard for me to tell when the food is so different from my regular diet (diet in the sense of the word meaning what I normally eat, not diet like Atkins,) and I don't know how it's being prepared, or often even what it is. Another problem has been my mood swings. Lately, I'm all over the place for no explicable reason. I snapped at my Mother on the phone the other day and then later, in the same conversation, got very excited and told her how much I'd appreciated something. Both incidents were about basically the same thing: two different people she'd told me to email for information.
On the plus side, I finished my gigantically heavy book and can now unload it, though I do highly recommend all 771 pages of "Drood" by Dan Simmons. It's a fantastic and deeply engrossing historical fiction narrated by Charles Dickens' BFF, Wilkie Collins, author of Woman in White. As you probably don't remember, or care, the Broadway production of Woman in White contains my theme song "All For Laura."
Also, more positively, I'm remembering that so much of the reason I love traveling isn't the many sights (which I was already getting bored of), nor the people (as so many travelers like to pretend,) nor even the food, but that it's those little funny things other people don't even see: the tiniest, yet almost pristine shrine in a filthy, dead end alleyway or a single gravestone barely larger than my book in a Fort where all the others have crumbled and/or been removed, or the way different cultures do the same things so differently.
Random Street Pics
As far as what I actually did today; naturally, just a little. Wandered more into the back alleyways and sidestreets of Penang, bought toothpaste, mosquito repellent and shower gel and tried Cendol, which looks like this:
If you're thinking to yourself "Wow that looks absolutely disgusting, even Laura wouldn't be crazy/dumb enough to try something like that," you would be totally correct about the former and sadly wrong about the latter. I was dumb enough to try it and it was horrible. It was the first thing I've tasted on my travels with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It was basically a lot of crushed ice, coconut milk, weird beans (similar to kidney beans), brown syrup and sweet pea noodles. I took two bites and threw the rest away.
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