Journal entry 1

Tuesday, September 7

Penang, Malaysia

I suppose it’s only normal when you take off on a long trip that you start to have doubts about whether or not you’re doing the right thing. Maybe not the right thing, but the smart thing. The OK thing.

Yesterday I woke up to my first morning in Asia ever. And I wailed. And wailed and wailed. Not because I was far away from home or lonely. But because I came to the conclusion (at 5am) that I should be back in San Francisco getting on with life as normal.

My brain settled down after a short while and stopped its crotchety thoughts. And after a cup of coffee, I soothed myself by saying to the voice inside that I was just jet lagged and had an achy back. And with that, I settled into enjoying Penang.

Penang is very wet right now. It’s monsoon season. Though, by all the books I read, it was supposed to be monsoon season on every other coast but here. Wrong. The locals say it’s freaky, it’s not normally as wet as this. And I’m not talking just a wee bit of downpour in the late afternoon. No. I was stranded at the airport on Sunday morning. As in, it had rained so hard that no one could get to the airport and no one could leave. It was only after waiting for three hours in the taxi line that I wondered how on earth we’d landed. I thought it best not to question that too long. A couple of us standing in the taxi line banded together and we found a rogue driver. He was willing to give the drive a shot. Word over the taxi radio system said that the water was three feet high on some stretches.

And so it was. I felt like I was actually living that footage that you always see on TV of freak floods in Texas. Where you see kids floating on inner-tubes and families dragging out all of their belongings to higher ground. And you ohh and ahh in your living room and then forget about it an hour later. At least, I do. Not intentionally, of course, it’s just that I’ve never seen crazy floods and so it’s hard to get a real idea of the damage caused by them. I got to know my taxi friends quite well as our car sloshed slowly through the muddy water. Turns out that I played field hockey against the girl sitting next to me in high school in the UK.

This morning it doesn’t look so wet. I’m sitting out on the balcony of my hotel. It’s still dark but I can see the sun just rising and only a few clouds. The dogs are woofing like crazy. I got laughing to myself yesterday: after having had a rabies shot a few weeks ago, I apparently think that every dog is rabid. Twice I crossed the road so that I didn’t have to walk by a bowser. Then again, I did the same thing when I noticed a bunch of monkeys eating garbage and climbing up and down the electrical poles (uhhh, isn’t that dangerous?). They scare me those monkeys.

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