G’day mates!
After a long silence finally another update on my trip, that is now swiftly drawing to a close… Time has flown by on this large island downunder. When I arrived in Sydney on the 18th of August, Australia proved one of the biggest cultureshocks of my travels so far. Everything was so clean, people were dressed so smart, everyone spoke English. Fixed prices, supermarkets, no bargaining. Incredible. How much one gets used to the Asian way of life without realising it!
Chris, an Ozzie chimpfriend from Uganda, was my host for the first ten days and a fantastic one at that. Showed me around Sydney and introduced me to his friends and family and made me feel very welcome. Took care of me and put up with me shouting things like ‘look, there’s some real Australians there!’ Talya, my travel mate from Sumatra, was in Sydney as well and we met up as soon as we could and started to make travel plans to see Oz. Which was pretty hard, it’s vast and there are about a million things to choose from.
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From Indonesia with Love
Selamat malam, my friends!
On the 15th of June an immigration official at the port in Penang stamped ‘Malaysia OUT’ in my passport, and I boarded the ferry to Medan, on Sumatra. (As it goes, the ferry left 1,5 hours late due to some problem with a bunch of illegal immigrants that were being sent back on the same boat, but didn’t want to, or something.) The ferry, that looks like a kind of large floating bus, took about five hours to cross the somewhat rough Strait of Malacca, and during this time movies were shown for our entertainment, with bits of Malay karaoke in between. I was sitting with a bunch of other foreigners and we watched the first movie in total amazement. I’m sure it’s about the weirdest movie I have seen in a long time. It was a Chinese vampire horror-comedy, with the voices dubbed in Malay without first erasing the Chinese. We, the foreigners, were totally bewildered but the Malays on board (the majority) absolutely loved it and laughed at moments that we didn’t find funny in the least. Sense of humour is one of those big cultural differences that is very hard to overcome; I rarely have a good laugh with a local person. But all this on the side.
