The following took place between July the third and July the seventh, 2010.
ummmm... Saturday after the mock graduation ceremony thingy(which went pretty well, I even got some award which I probably didn't deserve, hopefully they never find out how often I sleep in the library between classes), I had to rush home and get changed for my flight to Penang.
It took about 40 minutes to get to Senai. As soon as I got there I tapped my butt pocket and felt nothing. No bulge in my back pocket that wasn't a butt cheek.
I had forgotten my wallet. Wee.
Went back and got it(thank my parents for that). The gates were set to close at exactly 10pm, I reached the airport at exactly 9.57pm.
Ran like mad through an unnecessarily long tunnel.
Just as I reached the information counter, a voice on the P.A. system went, "Last call for Mr. Subhash Nair."
Shite.
Ran through airport security, who went easy on me despite me looking like a terrorist and/or communist.
I got to the plane just in time, they shut the doors behind me, and the entire plane erupted in noise. t'was the sound of 25 loud college students in a tiny airbus.
It was my first flight in 13 years. The last time I had been on a plane was back in 1997. I remember that last flight vividly. There was a lot of air turbulence, and the Christian Indian women behind my seat were praying to their lord Jesus Christ to save them, while my dad just asked them to calm down cause it was just turbulence.
I think it was those two Christian Indians that permanently labelled religious people, in my mind, as irrational. So really, I'm blameless.
Or maybe not, I was too busy trying to have my lunch during the commotion.
The flight to Penang was unbelievably quick. Barely 30 minutes in the air(not counting liftoff and touch down).
That's what JB looks like from 10,000 feet above ground at 11pm. Like an oil spill in an ocean.
That probably stands for Malaysians Always Salute Batman.
I know you can barely see it, but that's a picture of a shophouse with an aquarium as its window. Pretty cool if you ask me. But you didn't. =(
Here are somore pictures of random stuff at night in Penang. (on Penang? it is an island, isn't it?)
Isn't this the most random speed limit ever? sixty five km/h.
Chowrasta is probably the coolest sounding name of a place in Malaysia. It almost means something if you say it to someone who speaks Italian but lives in Jamaica(again, could it be on Jamaica, if it's an island? Goddamn, where are the grammar Nazis when you need them).
It's like saying goodbye to a Jamaican, seen?
And here's a very unimpressed van!
Penang has some pretty cool number plates.
Penang has some pretty cool number plates.
Almost all of them are abbreviations of some sort.
Private First Class!
Reflexology involves sucking in Penang.
Well, it's sorta artsy.
Anywhossel, you heard right, we were outside Hard Rock Hotel, Batu Ferringhi.
And we were supposed to sneak in 2 by 2 into the 3 rooms we booked. Didn't really work out. While everyone was having a swim outside, I thought it was best to take a nap instead(plus, the hangover wasn't helping).
Around 7pm(I was surprised we hadn't been kicked out of the hotel yet) we left for Georgetown for the most epicest meat fest ever!
Ok, fine there were some veges, but really, 6 different types of chicken and about 5 other meats? + it was all you can eat, so that was a plus.
Seoul Garden. Finally, something Korean that isn't epic fail.
Ok, fine there's also that Kia Forte that looks pretty decent.
OMIGOD, i just read a review, and the Forte is designed by a guy who worked at Audi. And in case you haven't noticed, I kinda like everything about the new A4, no wonder the Forte looks almost familiar.
Where was I? Oh yes, after the meat buffet, we took a walk down the beach, which was, i dunno, beachy I guess.
Found a lovely looking Audi A4(there's a picture on Gabs' fb profile) and then took the bus back to the hotel.
Allofasudden, 2 phones start ringing simultaneously, and a few messages pour in. Our rooms were being raided!
Without going into details, let's just say we came to an agreement with the Hard Rock staff that involved us nearly putting up for the night here:
Probably the doggiest looking place in Penang.
We took the last bus down to Holiday Inn and headed back North from there, looking for a cheap place to stay.
After scouting along the beaches of Batu Ferringhi for about an hour, we came across... Hard Rock Hotel.
It looked like it was going to be Baba Guest House for us, but then we found someplace more epic.
Boomerang Lodge! It was dirty, cockroaches in the bathroom and ants right where the floor ought to have been, yes, and the mattresses were about as thin as the latest iphone, but it was cheap and it was willing to take in more than 2 dozen teenagers at 2 in the morning, so that's what mattered.
Just having the opportunity to do something as silly as lying down in a sarong right where the tide hits at 3am was good enough. For me. At least.
And here's a creepy looking piece of driftwood that I took a piss on after a couple of beers. I swear it was talking to me.
I also got to spend the entire night on a beach. Even slept off at one point and woke up to a slightly awesome sunrise. Not because the light woke me up, but because I had sand in my ass.
In the morning, we still had our deposit to collect from Hard Rock. So we headed back up there on foot.
Although Hard Rock had been a bitch to us, I will admit that it was kinda cool. Almost artsy, but too... pretentious, I guess. Trust me, I know pretentiousness when I see it; it's in my veins.
Anyway.
While moving from Bus 2 to Bus 3, something happened. It's the sort of thing that make people believe in miracles, because it darn near seemed like one after the walk of shame out of Hard Rock the night before.
Without getting into details, a friend who's father has friends in high places made life easier for just about everybody.
It's like this.
You've probably heard of (if you're in Johor) Setia Tropika and Setia Indah. Well, the General Manager of Setia Holdings, the mega company that owns both those little towns was that friend of a friend's father!
And he was such a nice guy too!
If the night at Hard Rock had proven to me that capitalists were assholes, this guy was doing the complete opposite.
He had no obligation to(he looked like a very busy man), but he actually got his entourage to get our tickets and boarding passes, then drive us to his country club in the hills overlooking the airport (all 25 of us + luggage in a convoy of 3 or 4 cars), get us all lunch at a posh chinese restaurant, and let us rest and relax at the games room and sauna.
And I got to use a Play Station 3 for the first time. Would you believe it? Their country club has a kids room with a friggin PS3! Too bad it was some weird kiddy game called Ratchet and Clank. If only it was Uncharted or Killzone. =(
We got to the airport just fine, and since it was a day flight this time, I got a coupla nice pictures.
Up in the Air.
On the plane, I finally realized that I was above the layer of clouds that always seemed unreachable and what that represented. Man over heaven. Man over God.
That's about it really. We've overtaken nature in pure awesomeness. Now to come to terms with us being part of nature. =O
Don't worry, I'm kidding, religious friends. If you're book says were not animals even though we eat, shit, sleep, fuck, and walk just like most animals do, then go ahead believe that. After all, the ability to rationalize must mean that we're different, right? Well rationalize this, how come a bird, with its ability to fly is not more than an animal, if most other animals do not fly?
I should be more specific with that since some insects fly and so do bats(and batmen), but you probably get what I'm saying, and if you don't then nevermind, you probably also think the earth is flat anyway.
God dammit I got distracted by God again.
We got to KL pretty late. Nikko Hotel was absolutely amazing.
But was absolutely expensive as well. If I had stayed an extra day, I would have had to beg my way back to JB.
The room was gigantic, and despite being priced a lot lower than Hard Rock, it was absolutely luxurious, and they gave us complimentary apples! And they also weren't so tight around the anus about us having 4 people to a room.
There I got a gigantic burger and 20 bucks worth of RM1 notes! Amazin!
We were supposed to meet our other group of friends at Bintang Walk, so we took a taxi there(5 of us). Then we were instructed to take another cab to Reggae Bar. So we did that. But it was all the way in Chinatown. And it was pretty creepy looking. Full of obscene, loud music and foreigners. It was obviously the wrong Reggae Bar. We were then told it was Reggae Bar, Bukit Bintang, not Reggae Bar, Chinatown.
The taxis that followed were kinda like Hard Rock. They weren't so liberal with stuffing 5 people in. So we had to pay double with 2 taxis. Goddamit.
Anyway, stuff went down in Reggae bar, I ended up not paying for my drinks, and on the way back, we ended up on Stonor Street! Awesome, except a bunch of Stonors(and drunks) were to stoned, and drunk to take a proper picture:
After being forced into a Mcdonalds(I actually yelled "what's up muthatfukas!" upon entering) we all headed back to our rooms in Nikko.
Bathrooms there were weird though. The buttons are almost touch-screen like. Except there's no screen, you just have to touch them.
Oh, and the toilets were amazingly Japanese. They had these knobs with little pictures of little butts.
Three of us were testing out the knobs. I twisted it to "open", and suddenly this plastic piece slowly comes out. We all gazed closely and came a little closer to it. Suddenly, a jet of water:
It was hilarious. I nearly had my face sprayed with butt-cleaning water. (hopefully the same as regular water).
There was also a nice high pressure shower and a man sized bathtub.
The room I was in didn't have a very nice view, but I was told one of the rooms had the twin towers in sight.
I went home the next day.
Massive flooding round the temporary bus station in bukit jalil.
There's really nothing interesting to say here.
I almost didn't take notice of how free freedom felt. Not 2 years ago, the furthest anyone ever trusted me to be was 5 meters from an older relative, I almost choked thinking I was all alone in a big city, having to look tough with my beard to avoid being mugged on the way to Bukit Jalil while simultaneously trying to figure a way there and making sure my playlist didn't wander off to the few gay tracks I was forced to save on my phone.
This may seem odd, but I often use video game soundtracks as soundtracks to my own life. Just like Katt Williams' Everyday I'm Hustling.
Yeah, I don't understand black comedy neither. But like Katt, I think a soundtrack is pretty cool. It makes things like sitting down in public look like you're on an adventure. Or something.
For most of last year, my soundtrack was either:
Whenever stationary.
Or, if I was walking, then it would switch to:
See? Imagine how much more exciting everything was with that playing in the back of my head!
I still use the first soundtrack for whenever I'm stationary. But my moving soundtrack has been upgrading.
Now, I'm not kidding at all on this one. I listen to it in my car, on the bus, everywhere.
This next section, you probably don't have to pay attention to. I'll highlight all the irrelevant text in red, so you know when to resume reading.
I got my dad's PC after years and years of waiting. Well, not really. I wasn't waiting, this PC had always been a little unstable, despite having some pretty decent hardware.
So anyway, I got it, and after a few harddisk failures, it's up and running and almost feels homely.
Homely, because I've installed Company of Heroes. =D
That's right. After FOUR years of playing Company of Heroes on medium to low graphics, I finally can flirt with the Ultra Settings. (Isn't it weird, even this PC can't seem to take it on absolute maximum. That just shows how much thought was put into the game, the developers made it in 2006, but made sure the technology was at least half a decade ahead of its time. If I'm not mistaken it was the first game to support Direct X 10 on the PC. Direct X 10, of course being released a quite awhile AFTER the original game.)
This is maybe the 6th post(or the 600th post) in which I say something nice about Company of Heroes. I was talking about how I used a few game soundtracks as my own, but I've never been able to do that with Company of Heroes' soundtrack.
It's too god-like. It's the game soundtrack to epicly pwn all game soundtracks. It's shorter than most, but it builds up the moment it starts, and doesn't have those gay moments where the soundtrack kinda dies down for a minute, then kicks back in. It doesn't stop. It just pushes all the way and then dies off slowly. It's perfect.
Ok, I'm done.
Anyway, I got to the bus station(can you believe how distracted I just got in that last section? Jesus!) and took the first bus to JB.
Which, thank my lucky stars, was a desperate executive coach with about 5 passengers. They sold me the ticket for 30 bucks, which is about what I was willing to pay for a regular bus ride home. Except this wasn't a regular bus.
It had airplane-like massage seats! Seriously, this bus seemed more like an airplane than the planes I took on the Air Asia flights.
Any way, blah blah blah, generic lesson learnt from the trip, generic moral of the story, generic emotional line.
Wow, would you believe that that was just what happened from the 3rd to the 8th? It's already the friggin 17th!
All that seems like such a long time ago, cept the soundtrack business, that's always with me.
um.
here are some more pictures.
A Malaysian BlackBerry.
And Kua in a blacked-out King Surf.
Oh, and right after that Penang-KL trip, I got back and got a scolding from everyone for being an incompetent fool and missing the July intake. So I took the bus back to KL to sort that shit out. I applied for IT at Monash, but am now having second thoughts.
(I just got the offer letter, but the deadline's a month away, so I still have a little time to mind-search.)
For some silly reason, I decided to take the train back to JB. Probably cause I knew the public bus route to KL Sentral, but not to Bukit Jalil.
It's perfectly alright if you soil the toilet intentionally.
Oh yes, before I forget, I went and saw Toy Story in 3D. My first 3D movie, and really it was only slightly impressive. Mayhap I should have gone and saw a more action packed movie.
And Nike better start paying attention to their ads.
Spot the "CONED BRA" anyone? No one? OK.
Also, I've found Jesus. He has returned to us. As
A pick up truck. Yeah. Left out that detail in the bible didn't they?
I also picked up a nice looking fake watch from Petaling Street one day when I was in KL. After upgrading the strap to a fake Adidas nylon one, it looked like a watch from my dreams.
This picture does the watch no justice. It really is a cool looking fake watch.
Ok. That is ALL. Been writing this post for 2 weeks now. Time to get back on a regular update schedule.
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