Not a Typical Malaysian lah : Diary of a Traveller

The Girl ( or Bratty Twatty Bitch) on the Train, part I

Brighton beach

OK. It’s not OK. It’s not OK to start your story with OK but I will start it with OK, OK.

A skinny teenage girl in tight skinny jeans (just like everyone else here) gets onboard in Lancing station. She plonks her skinny ass onto the seat across the aisle from me. As soon as her ass touches the seat, her right foot is up on the seat opposite her. And stares at her phone. Just like the woman, in her late 40’s or early 50’s sitting diagonally across from her is doing, staring at her phone screen. She seems trying to ignore the white sneakered foot that lands in the seat next to hers. She focuses hard on her phone screen.

On the other hand, a middle age man sitting opposite me is shooting daggers. I can almost hear the woosh woosh sound of air being sliced by his momentary glare. I’m holding my breath. Then exhales in relief as he closes his eyes. He’s letting it go, I think. Not even ten seconds later he opens his eyes, stands up, walks to the skinny girl. Oh no. Another scene, another drama is inevitable. I just know. I can already foresee.

“Would you mind taking your foot off the seat?”
She looks up for a second and back to her phone screen, totally ignoring the man. Lol. What a twat. What happens next, not even in a blink of an eye, because I swear if I blink my eye I will not see. The middle age man pushes her foot off the seat. Whoa!!! Did he just do that? Then he sits in the seat where the skinny girl just rested her foot before. My heart just skips a bit. God, this is going to get ugly. Bloodbath even. Haha.

Immediately the skinny girl curls up on her seat and transforms herself as a victim of assault.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me you weirdo.”

She repeats the line over and over and plays her character as victim quite good I must say. Then she moves to the seat diagonally across from me. And parks her foot on the seat next to mine. What an arrogant bratty little cunt. Only if I am allowed to whack this twat……

“Please do not put your foot on the seat,” I tell her. Neither in a motherly nor in principally tone. Just natural, whatever natural tone sounds like.

“What do you care?” she retorts. “Seats are dirty anyway. And door handles are dirtier than seats because of so many hands touching them,” she continues.

The middle age man across the aisle from her chips in.

“Shoes are dirty & full of faecal bacterias etc etc. Would you sit on the floor if you don’t care?”

The skinny bratty bitch is on the phone now telling whomever, may be a friend, at the end of the line,

“This weird old man touched me because I put my foot on the seat.” Pauses.

“I don’t know. He’s just weird.” Pauses.

She glances at the man. “He’s old. 40.” Pauses. Then another glance.

“May be 50.” Ouchy gouchy. That’s a 10-year jump after her second glance of the man. 😂

Skinny bitch: 1. Middle age man: 0
Lol…..

***2nd chapter to follow

The Pavilion, Brighton

Save our Unsung Heroes; the Bees

Rosemary & Bees =================××==========

Butterlies, moths, birds, bats and bees, especially honey bees are the most important creatures to human beings but given very little, if at all, credits. Without them, we humans are gonna be screwed big time.

Have we ever thought that, while chomping on our favourite vegetable or fruit or any kind of food, it’s all because of them? We won’t get to eat cucumbers, avocado sandwich, garden salad, cherries, almonds, barguette (or bread if barguette sounds too snobbish), meat, rice or any food at all without them. And yet very few of us appreciate the guys who make it possible for us to continue enjoying our favourite delicacies.

They work, for free, on pollinating avocado flowers so that we can enjoy our $20 avocado salad at our trendy local cafe. They pollinate clover & alfalfa that are fed to cattle to enable us to continue enjoying our juicy, melt-in-the-mouth, $50 tendeloin steak. Every single oat grain, sultana, sunflower & pumpkin seed, almond, strawberry, dried apricot, low fat milk & honey (yes honey) in a bowl of our healthy muesli breakfast are made possible because of our unsung, unpaid, unappreciated saviours.

So guys, please everytime we enjoy our food, let’s send a thank-you note to our friends who are tirelessly pollinating fowers at the very moment. Even though they’ve been our saviours for millenials, we are also their number one enemies. We poison them. We steal their habitat. We pollute the earth. We destroy the ecosystem. We heat the planet. All these activities are killing them. By killing them we are killing ourselves. Let’s save bees & the gang to save ourselves.

p/s: Photos courtesy of Colin Roberts

How “Civilized” People Destroy the World

Some 15 or 20 years back, the pre-Facebook & Co. era, I did voice my view that the Americas (north & south) + the now-called Australia were not supposed to be colonized by the barbarians from the Old & Sick World & be called the “New World”. They were big lands inhabited by the Natives or First Nations or Aboriginess, free of “destructive-capitalistic” people not for no reason.

Perhaps the most important of many reasons was to absorb CO2 emissions from the “Old World” & supply us with fresh air. And food. Imagine the Amazon Basin, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the Grand Banks & the Great Barrier Reef a few hundred years back. And look at what became of them today.

The Amazon, the lungs of the earth is being burned. It is burning at an alarming rate that will cause the entire world to be hotter than ever. With Bolsonaro, a climate change denier as the caretaker, it is almost as asking a thief to look after your money.

The Burning of the Amazon Rainforest

The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta once fed the entire world with its highly fertile flood plains, while at the same time played the role as one of the world’s biggest sanctuaries for plants, birds, land & aquatic animals, is amost gone. The BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 nearly turned the entire Mississippi Delta and the area affected almost unhabitable. The tragedy was the largest environmental disaster ever recorded.

One of the millions victims from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010

What happened to the Grand Banks off the coast of Nova Scotia is another very sad story in humans’ greed. It once was abundant with fish that supplied us with cheap protein now barren of aquatic lives. Overfishing was the culprit.

While typing this story, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the sanctuary and breeding ground for fish and other aquatic lives are dying. As of today in September 2019, scientists believe that about 90% of the coral reef are dead due to global warming, water pollution and overfishing. How sad is that.

The corals of the Great Barrier Reef, before and now

All these areas were once guarded by the native people. They were the guardians of the nature of the Americas and Australia that helped keep the climate change we caused in the Old & Sick World in balance. But look what happened after the “destructive-capitalists” arrived from the Old & Sick World. Not only did they exterminate most of the Natives, First Nations & the Aboriginies, also known as the guardians of the nature, they destroy most of the New World, just like what they did back where they came from.

They upped their reputation to another new level by being the most evil villains in history, the “Climate Changer”. Australia, USA, Canada and Brazil are guilty, as the statistical data show, but not charged. It’s because they rule the world. Even the spokespersons of these gangs of criminals, when reminded of their crime of warming the globe, cockily fired back, “What global warming?”, and continued scorching the earth.

Not only they deny the crimes they have committed and continue criming (my invented word), they push away the victims of their acts, the climate-change refugees. They even label the refugees as invaders. How very dare they.

To birth or not to birth? A moral dilemma.

Greta Thunberg. Be like her. Or if you can’t, please throw your support behind her.

I always question why people keep making babies and more babies. My six sisters are the targets of my questions and also to poke fun at. I call them human rabbits. I have always been an opponent to their love to manufacture babies because:-

1. I am afraid that they don’t have the financial means to send their children to college and end up like them – never been to college.

2. I don’t want to be uncle more than 40 times. I have been 35 times uncle already.😂

3. Kids are noisy and annoying. I kid you not.🙄

4. There are already 7.5 billion human beings on earth. While earth can only sustain 4.5 billion (ideally), it’s an over-crowded place.

Their responses to my objections are:-

4.1. Children are God’s gifts. We can’t refuse them. Well, I guess it’s not polite to decline gifts handed over to us by God themself, is it? 🤗

4.2. Who’s going to take care of us when we get old if we have no children of our own? Yep. Children are our future – as caretakers.😉

4.3. Because we have husbands. Eye-rolling & lmao.😁😁

4.4. Children are sustenance or good fortune. Mind-boggling. For me they are the opposite of good fortune. They suck you dry. Not to mention annoying. 🤔

With 7.5 billion people on this planet and they constantly are adding to the number, it means nothing to them. For me it means:-

1. 7.5 billion stomaches to fill every few hours
2. 7.5 billion bodies to clothe
3. 7.5 billion humans to house & shelter
4. 7.5 billion people in need of education, medication, transportation & travelling around & about
5. 7.5 billion with all their needs and wants.

After ticking the boxes above, the direct impacts are:-

1. Loss of habitat, destruction of ecosystem & biodiversity from deforestation (at the rate 18 million acres per year) & pollution.

2. Followed by extinction of flora & fauna. We are losing between 10,000 to 100,000 species (that feed & heal humans) per year.

3. Global warming/climate change that causes more damage to the planet & its population. I’m talking about climate change, not weather change as what Donald Trump is talking about. This guy is a nut case. Bolsonaro as well.

4. With global warming comes disasters either natural or man-made. The like of Wilma, Katrina & Maria are getting superpowerful year by year.

5. Wars & conflicts between humans. Just turn your tv or news feed on. It’s mostly about wars & conflicts.

With all the negative impacts from 7.5 billion people, my question is, are we still going to add more humans on the already over-populated planet? We all have our own reasons (like my sisters’) or not at all, to have children. Like it or not, everybody contributes to the negative impacts listed above. Only that the magnitude of impact varies from one person to another.

Ex President of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, my hero.

All parents want and hope their kids will grow up to be somebody. If they turn out to be like nature warriors, I can’t be happier. Hat’s off to you as parents. Love and my full support to you Greta. Hat’s off to Mr. & Mrs. Thunberg. Or if they grow up to be heads of state like the former President of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, I will raise my fist in agreement. Or even if you don’t raise a somebody but they turn out to be a good kid, I still like you.

Don’t be like this man. Please do not support him.

But, if you give birth and raise a glutton for meat and dairy products, then I loath you. Your kids can cause so much damage to the ecosystem and contribute to climate change. The fact is beef and dairy industry is the main cause to global warming.

Also, what if you give birth a “Me me me, I want want want more” twat?

What if you give birth to a would-be bratty entitled dicks? Or kids like me – preaching much on climate change but still being an accessory to global warming? I still eat meat once in a while. I still drive petrol-powered car. I still buy things that I don’t need. Oh well….

The biggest cause to global warming. No, it’s not their fault. It’s our fault for loving their meat, their milk, cheese & butter.

Eccentricities. We all have our weird side

Label me eccentric. Call me wierdo coz I:-1. Like to sit at the same spot on the sofa. Reason: i only need to tidy one spot up2. Sleep on the same side of the bed, even alone. No reason. It’s my side3. Do not eat breakfast. Reason: not hungry in the morning. Sometimes I ate breakfast when there was cornflake. Not anymore now. That’s why I feel it’s healthier not to eat breakfast than to eat cornflakes for breakfast. Innit?4. Only drink water for breakfast. Not that i don’t like coffee or tea but too lazy to make tea or coffee. Now i drink ginger + tumeric + lemon tea. Too much work mixing this drink but it repels gout attack. I get lazier to mix all these items. I drink water with a tea spoon of sodium bicarbonate these days.5. Normally eat toast or cookies or anything that crumbs over the sink. Reason: crumbs would fall in the sink instead of on the floor or table. Less work wiping crumbs off the floor or table. I’m lazy. Now I hardly eat toast.5. Wash eggs in running water before placing them in the fridge. Thinking of where they were from inflicts fear in me that salmonella will run amok fridgewide. I also wash veges & fruits & drip dry them before storing in the fridge. It’s not just to rid them of the dirt from the farm but dirt from thousands of hands that have been touching them since leaving farms till they find their way into my kitchen. I wash lemons and limes too. Same reason.

Washed

6. Mostly in undies or none at all when home alone. Less clothes to launder 😊😊😊. Save water, electricity & environment.7. Think that it’s immoral for human beings to keep breeding. More humans means more deforestion, global warming, extintintion of flora & fauna, pollution, depletion of natural resources, destruction to ecosystems etc. I’m sorry but the world is overpopulated.8. Strongly feel that it’s fair that air fares should be based on our body weight plus baggage. It’s undeniable fact that the heavier we are the more fuel we burn.9. Believe that money is the dirties of all things that we love. Reason: see #5 above. It’ll be too much work to sanitize it. After all i’m lazy. That means i have to pay with credit cards whenver possible.10. Enough lah…. don’t want to bore u all with my eccentricities

First World Solutions to First Nation Problems

1st Nation: I need to work on my limbs by climbing up trees.
1st World: No. Ride a bicycle. Better still, join gym club.

1st Nation: I’m going swimming in the river/lake/sea.
1st World: No, it’s dangerous. Go swim in the pool. We’ll build a pool, fill it with clean water & add lots of chlorine for your save swimming.

1st Nation: I’ll build a hut near the river/lake/sea.
1st World: We’ll build a mansion by the water, with swimming pool. We’ll chop down big trees that block our view & replace them with nice lawn.

1st Nation: I’m growing my own crop, fruit & vege around the house.
1st World: No no. You’ll ruin the look of your property & properties in the neighbourhood. We won’t allow that. You must put lawn around your house with beds of roses, hydrangea & dahlia to make your house look lovely.

1st Nation: I’m walking to the grocery store around the corner.
1st World: Why walk when you have car? And why shop at that local shop? The hypermarket 20-minute drive from here has everything from all over the world.

1st Nation: Please let us stay in our ancestral land. We’ll take care of the nature, for all of you, free of charge.
1st World: You either get out of here or we’ll kill you. Your zero carbon & methane footprint, self-sustainable living with nature and your guardianship of nature are hindering our Capitalistic ambition to fuck the world over.

1st Nation: Your solutions to First Nation problems are giving me headache.
1st World: Oh dear…. here’s Valium & Prozac and a glass of wine. It’ll cure your headache.

Who dares to take up the challenge on #ClimateStrike like I do?

Development is measured by changing the landscape. Bulldoze an area and replace with bigger, taller or longer man-made structures. Jungle turns to village to town to city to metropolis.
“Development” and “progress” are defined by Capitalists. For humanists, environmentalists or socialists, development or progress are defined differently.

My lunch. Many times dinner too

I live in the middle of capital city Kuala Lumpur but pretty much ‘off-the-grid’ style. I changed my diet. My lunch and many times dinner too, I have a bowl of oats, some seeds, nuts & dried fruit thrown in. I add warm water plus a little bit of coconut milk to it. It might be the best & healthiest bowl of lunch. Many times it is my dinner too. Then I wash it down with a glass of lime/lemon or sodium bicarbonate water. Oh I don’t like eating breakfast. So it’s only lunch & dinner for me mostly. I’m trying to save the world, not by skipping breakfast but by trying not to eat meat or dairy products. But can I? The answer is a BIG NO. What I eat is mostly non-organics because I can’t afford organic food, to start with.

And I feel as if I am the only person trying to save the world. While I am consuming a bowl of vegan lunch, THEY, my neigbours next door, upstairs, downstairs and half the world over are chomping away a quarter-pound beef burger from McDonald’s, greasy & spicy beef rendang or peri peri chicken. My upstairs neighbours might be enjoying half a kilo of melt-in-the-mouth roast beef in red wine sauce, carrot, red cabbage, potato and red wine. All imported from Australia, probably. And before that, they breakfasted on toast with butter from New Zealand, strawberry jam from the UK, coffee from Colombia or tea from India with milk from Australia. Their breakfast and lunch alone used more than 25,000 litres of water and contribute 50% to the elements that cause global warming!

I don’t flush the toilet every time I take a leak. I flush only after finishing the “other” business. THEY might be flushing after every time they use it. I brush my teeth with the same PLASTIC tooth brush for the last five months. THEY might be changing PLASTIC tooth brushes every month.

I don’t have any products for facial cleansing regime. THEY might have all kinds of products in PLASTIC containers that contain micro PLASTIC beads for washing, exfoliating, masking etc. I have to admit that sometimes I use aloe vera from my garden for my face. Or lime/lemon. But mostly I just can’t be bothered. Too time consuming.

Hazy Kuala Lumpur, a few days before the haze worsened. Picture taken from my apartment.

My shower is very brief. If the day is cooler, I turn the boiler on for some warm water. Otherwise it’s cold shower. I don’t use soap or shower cream or shampoo. I spend less than five minutes in the shower which translates to about four or five litres of water used. Meanwhile THEY might spend ten to twenty minutes in the shower, drain about 50 to 60 litres of water. Many of THEM combine shower with shower gel & shampoo that contain Sodium Lauryl Sulphate(SLS). All beautifully packaged in PLASTIC containers. I can’t remember the last time I used razor blades. I don’t go to salon for haircut. For the last twenty years I chop my hair myself.

I don’t have any kind of gel or cream for my hair. I only have facial moisturizer cream which I use not just for my face but for my hair and skin as well. If it’s good enough for your face I’m sure it’s good enough for your hair and body. Meanwhile, THEY might have gel for hair, moisturizer for face and different type of moisturizers for body.

And to photo-shop their faces, so many items are used. Moisturizer, foundation, eye browser, eye shadow, eye liner, highlighter, lipstick, lip gloss, concealer, blusher and whatnot which mostly contain palm oil and chemicals. I don’t use any kind of perfume except roll-on deodorant. My underarms can emit very unpleasant odour. So a-RM10 ($2.50) Rexona deodorant is good enough to not offend those around me.

If I am at home, my typical clothes are no clothes at all. It’s the advantage of living in the tropics. Less clothes worn means fewer clothes to wash. More water saved. Less chemicals and LSL-powered detergent, packed in PLASTIC containers, is used. Electricity bill is lowered. Less fossil fuel burned. But I don’t think that’s the case with THEM.

The downside of living in the tropics is that the heat can be unbearably hot. Fans are my weapons to beat the heat. I avoid turning the air-conditioners on unless in rare cases of el nino running amok. To sleep at night I have all the windows open and fan on. However, THEY – my neighbours might fight the heat with air-conditioners at full blast to cool the interior of their homes. In doing so they are heating my home and the world by burning more fossil fuel. Heigh ho.

So there! I can’t win against the world. The world that’s ruled by capitalists. Their rules are easy to observe. Spend. Consume. Spend more on what you don’t need. Eat more meat and dairy products. Bake the world. I am sounding holier-than-thou much, ain’t I? Let’s all be holier-than-thou…

12 noon, 9 Sep 2019 taken my apartment in Kuala Lumpur. The haze gets worse from forest burning in Sumatera after the picture taken

Beach o’clock in Mumbai. Too bad its Beaches aren’t for swimming

F**k. After two days in Mumbai I’m down with cold. My body temperature goes high. My chest gets heavy. I cough incessantly. It must be the Mumbai air. Gotta find something to blame on, hey:-) It’s just too foggy and smoggy. I stay in bed the whole day while Ben goes out exploring the city. Urghhh… I hate to be sick. Well, who likes to be sick anyway?

Late afternoon Ben comes back to the hotel with paracetamols and antibiotics. Bless him. I still feel bad the next day but I’m not wasting another day in bed. We go out.

My walks get a bit blurry. I’m feeling very rough. What a nasty fever and chesty cough, especially when on holiday.

Still, I’m not sure when I’d be coming back to Mumbai. So better make the most out of my rough day strolling the beaches around Mumbai.

We start with Dadar Beach. It used to look like a huge dumpster a few years back. But after a year-long clean-up effort in 2016-17, with 400 tonnes garbage fished out of the water and beach, it now looks much better for a stroll. Or sit down, watch the wave coming from under the Bandra-Worli Sea Link Bridge. I’d still not gonna swim in its water anytime soon, though.

On the same “fevering” day, we wade through Mumbai’s notorious traffic to its famous Juhu Beach, the playground of the rich and famous. We don’t spot any though. Or may be we just don’t know any rich and famous person.

Juhu also fell victim to human follies in treating seas and oceans as dumpsters. And dumpster it became. Luckily civil people were still around. They rallied the cleaning up effort.

The effort paid off. Tens of thousands of tonnes of garbage collected from the water & its 6km shoreline. Today it looks swimmable. And I see some people playing in the water. Only that I still won’t go playing in its water so soon.

Juhu reminds me of Kuta in Bali. The waters and sands are almost similar in colours, murky-ish & darkish respectively. And the wave is like “Kuta Wave”. The only difference – Juhu Beach is on the Arabian Sea shore while Kuta Beach is on the shore of Indian Ocean.

Incredible Mumbai, Home to the World’s biggest Film Industry & the World’s Biggest Slum

City of Mumbai seems to rise up from the dirt & pollution. The bay by Haji Ali Dargah clearly is not for swimming. Or even to wade in its water. In the background, skyscrapers of Mahalakshmi Chowk are barely visible through the haze.

India, namely Mumbai’s Bollywood produces the most number of movies in the world. Bollywood alone makes around 300 movies per year. Don’t be surprised if you stumble upon your favourite Bollywood star “beating” bad guys up or “crying” a river because her heart’s been broken. We pass by a movie set nearby our hotel in Fort area for 2 out of 5 days in Mumbai.

Away from the glamourous film industry lies the biggest slum in the world in Dharavi. 1 million out of 18 million Mumbaikars make Dharavi their residence. It even becomes one of tourist attractions of Mumbai. Slumdog Millionaire, a critically acclaimed movie was inspired by the poors of Mumbai. So many movies made are based on the reality of the Mumbai slum. The latest one is Gully Boy, starring Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt.

With population of 1.3 billion and rising and 18 million in Mumbai, it’s choking. But hey, it’s the glam and glitz of Bollywood, the reality of Dharavi slum and everything in between that makes Incredible India.

Indian Taxis. It’s not for the Faint-hearted

After we pre-book an INR500 taxi for our hotel, the sales counter guy directs us to our taxi. It’s a Hyundai Santro, the maker of taxis in India it seems.The driver is a slim, middle age man. He might be a few years older than me but his weather-beaten face makes him look much older.Hyundai Santro don’t seem to have boot for suitcases. But they all have racks on their roof tops. My 7kg suitcase easily goes in the car with us. But Ben’s 15kg, bigger in size suitcase must go on the roof. The driver jokingly signalling me to heave Ben’s suitcase up on the roof. I might be younger or look stronger than him but in reality I can’t even uncap water bottles. Wrists problem.Our hotel name, located in Mumbai city centre does not sound familiar to him. After a noisy, dusty 1 hour drive, we get to the area nearby our hotel. Only that the area is super messy due to construction works for underground station, which is in progress.The driver refuses to go any further. Google map says our hotel is still about half a km away. When asked to drive closer to our hotel, he asks for INR100 extra. I know it’s not much but it’s just typical taxi drivers’ attitude. Mumbai taxi service is a few rungs behind Kuala Lumpur as the worst in the world. Not surprising at al.We get off the taxi, curse the driver and walk the last half km. Cursing.Taxi drivers in Mumbai mostly use meter. If they don’t, they’ll use it once we remind them. One or two will haggle. We walk away when they start quoting their fare.If you think only basket or fabric makers are the only experts at weaving, think again. Move over basket makers. Mumbai taxi and tuk tuk drivers rock at weaving. Lanes mean nothing to them or, even to other private motorists. They weave and can change a 3-lane street into 5 lanes. When behind wheels, their main aim is to be ahead of everybody else. They are very demanding in asking others to give way but stingy in giving way to others. Hence the constant beeping and honking. Everybody beeps. Nobody listens.Wonder not if most of vehicles in Mumbai are dented. My heart skips a beat, or two everytime our drivers weave or take over other vehicles. Luckily we never meet with any accident. Not once. Fingers crossed. Phew.