November 2007 -

Phish Phood

This week in Asia, I almost lost a nipple, was chased by irate monkeys and may have eaten dog instead of Turkey this Thanksgiving.

I had only been here a week before making my first doctor’s visit. This is why you don’t ride a bike in hot pants! I was on a nearby Indonesian Island for the weekend, not widely inhabited, very hot and humid. With no athletic gear with me, I thought flip flops and the hot pants bathing suit from a previous story would perfect biking attire….NOT.

As the rear tire slid from underneath me taking a corner, the entire right side of my body glided across the path, giving me the worst road rash I have ever encountered. My top slid down to my waist and my nipple was severed to a dangling little mosquito bite. My elbow has the deepest wound-about 1.5cm deep (I have to start thinking in the metric system now), .5 cm laceration on my ankle and baby toe (See Carl, nature tried to get rid of that 6^th toe on it’s own.), and a nice light braising across my entire thigh – little blood freckles. I must have slid in monkey poo or something.

The next day I met back in Singapore with my relocation agent who urged me to see the medic, for fear of infection and some nasty blood poising they have in SE Asia due to the humid weather not allowing for proper clotting. Nothing a little Neosporin could not have fixed back in the States.

All around the mulberry bush, monkeys chased Kelly….

Outside of Kuala Lumpur there is a wonderful excursion called the Batu Caves. After climbing over 250 stairs there is an amazing Hindu shrine built into the limestone caves, overlooking the city of KL. There is a giant gold statue of a Hindu God, alters and figurines built into the caves. It is also inhabited by a tribe of monkeys. Mean monkeys - the kind that steal your young and sell them to the gypsies for bananas.

At first glance they seem harmless. They are cute little animals, not much bigger than a squirrel, with fingers and faces that resemble human babies. Some of the Malaysian children may be mistaken as monkeys. One is eating a coconut, one is trying to get the last few sips from a can of beer, one is on a gate ready to pee on un-expecting bystanders, and another is playing with a plastic bag as if it is a toy (how come monkeys never suffocate from plastic bags over their heads?)

If you try to photograph them, they show teeth. If you try to talk monkey-talk with them they squeal back and show their teeth. If you show your teeth back, they WILL chase you. The blond girl finds this out the hard way. Not only by one monkey, but his friends join in to chase me from all directions, as I am screaming and running in circles. Then I realize what I did wrong. One of the friends goes over to comfort the monkey I had the confrontation with, by giving her a friendly monkey hump – probably to show me I was imposing on his territory.

On my way out I meet an Indian man with an iguana in a cage that he has named Godzilla.

“You should put those monkeys in the cage instead!” I mention to him

“No, non, no, we are in their world. The caves were here for them first.” <Insert accent of Apu from the Simpsons here.>

I want to be a Bollywood Dancer!

Now that I have moved to my new home at Newton’s circus, Little India is just walking distance away. I love Indian food and I suppose after enough visits to Little India, I will be ready for the real thing. My engineers have recommended some fabulous curry restaurants to me, one of which I frequent because I love to watch their Bollywood movies!

Every good Bollywood film must have the following:

1.) A beautiful star & starlette that are sexually-charged, but can not even as much as kiss on screen.

2.) A family of bystanders that can break into dance on a moments notice in the background.

3.) Some dance moves stolen from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, except they are clad in Saris instead of wearing zombie outfits. Brittney Spears, Prince and Paula Abdul’s dance moves are widely plagiarized as well.

4.) A slow beach scene where the star will ride up on a white horse singing a love song to his beloved, who is obviously a virgin. As he gets closer, the camera angles will spin as they embrace, but will NEVER show any sex.

While I watch the Bollywood films, my muscles twich as I do buttox pinchies to the beat of the sitar. I want to break into dance with them. This also happens whenever an 80’s song that my pompom squad practiced a gazillion times comes on the radio and my muscle memory knows the exact beat in which to enter into a jump split.

So even though I do not know any of the words to my new found songs, I can do a high-pitched phonetic squeal, which only to me sounds like a Bollywood hit. One evening in Little India with a friend, I break out into dancing in the streets with my squeal, just to see if others will join in like they do in the movies. They do not. The Indian guys on the street think the white girl is crazy.

Since I have accomplished just about every goal I ever have set for myself in life, I decide to make one a little less unobtainable. I want to be a Bollywood dancer! My friend says it can never happen since I am not Indian, but the next morning I go to work and tell my Indian engineers about my new dream and they think it is a GREAT idea! Watch out Shah Rukh!

This summer I found it ironic how Paris, Nicole Richie, Lohan, and Owen can all jump start their careers with their stints in jail and rehab, while the news in Singapore was predicting the fall of Bollywood because two of their main stars could face prision charges for political activity, while a female Indian actress is being demoralized for kissing an American actor on screen. What is wrong with our pop culture?

Be Careful What You Wish For…

After setting my new dream of becoming a Bollywood dancer, Monday I came home from work to the Travel & Leisure Station’s week of India adventures. Anthony Bourdin was traveling there and eating the best delicacies. I changed the station to an Indian Soap Opera, than the next station was an Indian Idol competition that was more like Star Search. Tuesday I get invited to an Indian family’s house for dinner on Saturday night.

Wednesday I was interviewing an engineering firm for a project. As they were discussing their current projects, they informed me that they have just been awarded the Mumbai International Airport. Mumbai = Bombay. Bombay = the home to BOLLYWOOD! So of course I told them about my new dream! His response: “You want to work in Bollywood? We need to staff the project.” So my interview of him turns tables, but I am not quite yet ready for my dream.

“Talk to me in a year.” I said. “I need more practice.”

Saturday night was dinner with the Vermas, their seventeen year old son and his friend, Sandeep. The father is one of my engineers. The wife, Suma, works for the Indian embassy. The son looks like an Indian Ricky Martin, and Sandeep went to school for a year in Calgary, ya hey der. Suma made an amazing dinner, while the boys taught me everything I needed to know about Bollywood. They showed one of the newest films with cameo appearances from all the most famous stars – Om Shanti Om. It is about reincarnation and the circle of life. It was more like Saturday Night Fever with Hippies, then a Pirate scene mixed with Mesopotamia. I think they are stealing ideas from Sword Lake!

I did get inducted with my new Indian name – Kavita Keen. That is the closest Indian name to mine and it means poetry. Now I have a Fijian family and an Indian family. I finally went home around 1am.

Phish Phood

For Thanksgiving, a visiting friend and I ventured into Malaysia to go SCUBA diving. Wednesday afternoon after work, we boarded a five hour bus to Kuala Lumpur to spend the evening outside of Petrones Towers, then a bus on Thursday to Georgetown in Penang which vastly resembles Charleston, South Carolina with more Asians, then a ferry Friday morning to the Island of Langkawi.

In third world countries, there is a new theory I have discovered. It is the multiple of 1.5. Whatever amount of time they say a bus, train, or ferry is going to take, multiply it by 1.5 to get the real time.

Malaysians are notorious for burning down their rainforests. It is odd to believe that Singapore, a short causeway away, was once part of this country. In 1957, the governments made a rule that anyone on the Island of Singapore at 5:30pm will be Singaporean and all others will remain Malaysians. Entire families were torn apart due to the traffic jam that day (Taxicab driver, 2007).

So we also find out the SCUBA diving in Malaysia is not really that great on the West Coast, due to the fact that their former techniques for fishing included them exercising their skill with dynamite and blowing up the reefs. The only decent diving spot is a marine reserve.

The ocean is a welcomed relief to my bike crash wounds. For the past week, every time water or soap hits my skin, I have been in pain. In the ocean, I am floating in a gentle bed of saline solution, bubbling up the dried scabs and keeping them from itching. I can feel the healing.

My family and close friends know my two biggest fears in life. 1.) Carnival workers and 2.) the fish bitting the toes off me underwater. This is why you will never see me at the fair or swimming in water where I can not see bottom. How do I get the nerve to SCUBA dive then? Diving is different because I can see the fish and there are flippers on my feet, so unless they have a very big mouth, my toes remain. My relatively new hobby has allowed me to be brave with fish to the point that in Belize, I massaged the stomach of a 2m nurse shark.

Tropical fish are also friendly, happy looking fish as opposed to the Muskies mounted above the bars in Northern Wisconsin. They look like snakes with teeth. Tropical fish never bite people unless provoked. That is what I learned in diving courses. Well, they failed to tell me that the fish will not bite you unless you provoke them, or if you have scabs hanging off your body. As I swam into a school of pretty blue fish, they started biting at my elbow, ankles, knees, and anywhere else dead skin was hanging off my body. Asian Piranahs…they cleaned me up pretty well.

So I am back in Singapore now, ready to go back to work. Nipples do heal very fast and will reattach themselves. Happy belated Thanksgiving!