Day One

Written and posted from my hotel room, just before going to lunch. I’ve actually been working – looking at databases and familiarising myself with the resources of a sister university (whose students I’ll be training over the next couple of days) – which I thought justified paying for a day’s net access in the comfort of my hotel room.

Earlier on:
6:49am

Have just had a bath. What is it about lying in a tubful of warm water that is so soothing? I slept reasonably well, once I stopped coughing (yes the cough’s still lingering, still annoying) and once I managed to get used to the very faint smell of cigarette smoke in the airconditioned air. I have a non-smoking room, but unfortunately the airconditioning means that smokers’ air is circulated to all rooms. I’ll get used to it, I’m sure. The hotel seems nice enough. My room is small but clean and the furnishings are good. Internet access from the room is RM60 a day, and I can’t decide if it’s going to be worth it for me to pay that much for an hour or two of access. I’m writing this on the Tablet and will see if I can get access at the College when I go out there later today.

The flight was uneventful, although we had a quite a lot of turbulence over Sumatra (according to the in-flight onscreen map). I watched two movies – Aeon Flux and Zathura, and even managed to cram in an episode of Little Britain! There was a family with three young children seated across the aisle. A mother, her parents, and a boy aged about five or six, and twin girls, two or three years old. Each adult looked after one child; as the plane took off I was a bit worried because the young mother sobbed quietly to herself, while one of the little twin girls gazed at her. I tried not to stare – the mother had to stop crying when one of the other little girls started screaming and carrying on and she had to get up and walk around the plane with her. Maybe it was just fear of flying.

The plane landed on time. Everytime I go through the Kuala Lumpur International Airport I can’t get over how huge it is – having to hop on a shuttle to get from terminal to terminal is a bit confusing. I was quite amazed by the number of people lying around on the furniture, sleeping, and the number of people wandering around looking at the shops at that hour of the evening. I was to meet my colleague DD from another Australian uni at the airport – we’d exchanged photos, so I spotted him quite easily. The poor guy had arrived about two and a half hours earlier, and had been waiting for my flight to land. After having a drink (green tea for DD, freshly squeezed orange juice for me) we got into our taxis to go to our respective hotels. Unfortunately we couldn’t share a cab (the ticketing system was strictly “one cab one destination”).

My taxi driver was not chatty so I looked at the scenery out the car window – dark trees lined the freeway most of the way. We went through two toll booths. I was amazed by the unmarked lanes on the road leading out of the toll booths, and tried not to think too much about all the cars, buses and huge trucks leaving the the toll booths at the same time… By the time I arrived at the hotel it was just after midnight.

I don’t have much on this morning, beyond having breakfast and calling my contact at the College to see what time I should head for the College. The first training session I’ll be conducting is this afternoon – at around 4:30pm.

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Well, on calling the College it turned out they weren’t expecting to see me until the afternoon so it was a matter of deciding what I was going to do for the morning. I called a couple of locals (my godparents and a cousin of Dad’s) and have arranged to have dinner with them tonight and tomorrow night. I decided it would be worth paying the day’s charge for net access. It’s been quite good and I’m glad I stayed in instead of venturing out to explore the neighbourhood. It didn’t feel right to go gallivanting as it’s a Monday and I am supposed to be working! Also, I seem to have a strange aversion to exploring new locales without a map…