Lot, Lazy Days

Tuesday, June 9, 2009--Kuching (Continued)

It was frustratingly slow at the cyber cafe when I updated the blog yesterday. It's strange that I have had good connections until these last two cities. And Kuching is the capital of this state and the biggest city in it. It should have a great connections.

I stopped at a food center on the way back to my room and ate a fried noodle dish that had tofu, beef, and peppers in it and a fried egg on top. I drank iced Chinese tea with it.

I headed for the coolness of my room and lay in bed reading. I finished the book that I started 2 1/2 weeks again when I arrived here--an 800-page tome entitled Europe Central and written by William F. Vollmann. It is a series of stories about people on the German and the USSR sides of WWII and tells the story of the war from their perspectives. The first 150 pages bothered me, because the stores were about an artist and a musician and Vollmann put too much effort in trying to tell their stories by relating them to art and music concepts. I gave those first pages only 2 1/2 stars out of 4. But the rest of the book was fantastic. He went directly to story telling. It was so detailed and so vivid. Those last 600+ pages I give 4 stars out of 4! I highly recommend the book and encourage any reader just to keep chugging along through those first 150 pages, because it will pay off in the end. The book won the National Book Award in the U.S.

I ended up staying in the room all evening. I ate some peanuts that I had in my bag rather than going out for dinner. And I watched the news on TV and a National Geographic program about the use of Crittercams.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009--Kuching

For those of you who knew and loved him, Arne died 5 years ago today.

I went to the Sarawak Museum today. Actually, it is a complex of museum buildings, most of them being old colonial buildings clustered on a hilltop. I spent almost 2 hours going through them seeing the exhibits. Much of what I saw I had already seen in other museums or already knew from my readings. But their model of the typical longhouse had something none of the others had included--the skulls of the enemies they had killed as a headhunter hanging from the ceiling rafters!

I am feeling a bit sluggish today. Yesterday morning, I felt a raspy feeling in the back of my throat from sleeping under too cool a breeze from the air conditioner during the evening. All day, I thought I might be getting a cold. Well, the feeling is still there, but not worse. Yet my whole body feels sluggish. I hope it is just temporary and that I will be fine tomorrow.

I sat on the riverside and read from my new book for a while today. I was waiting for the sun to shift to get good photos of the river and the buildings across the river. I stopped at a small eating place and had chicken-rice for lunch. Unfortunately, there were too many bones in the chopped chicken, so I don't feel I got much to eat. The passion fruit juice I had was great, though.