Yes, the title is misspelled, but on purpose, it’s too late at night (early in the morning) to figure out how to better make the alliteration work. And I do so adore amiable alliteration action.

I scanned the content of my 1mpx wonder phone today and realised I’ve been taking quite a number of food-related shots. So this post is dedicated to the freaky food fexperiences that I had around Kota Kinabalu recently.

Freaky Fish Fotos

I was browsing for nothing in particular at the Giant at City Mall the other day when I walked passed the fresh fish section and I swear this fish said “psssst”. I turned around looked square into a fish face. He didn’t blink. I didn’t blink. We stood there for a good 60 second show down. But finally I had to blink – besides, it’s a fish – even if it wasn’t dead and just a head, it still would have won (because fish have no… ah, never mind). I had a bit of gander to see what other colourful and wonderful sea-life the fish counter had, and there was plenty.

Sabah has some of the best dive sites in the world; Layang Layang, Sipadan, Mabul. But you won’t be seeing these fish there anymore. The head likely belonged to a barracuda and that’s a school of batfish – I’ve seen both types whilst diving and they were beautiful and alive, so it’s a little disconcerting seeing them like this. Fish is good for you, but I eat it pretending not to know how it’s caught or what it looks like before it arrives on my dinner table covered in a light and tangy soya sauce.

Bird Nest’s Drink

Light, refreshing, hits the spot when it’s chilled and the day is hot and it has a host of curative abilities. That being as it may, I just can’t see this product taking off anywhere else other than in Asia. Bird’s nest is a highly sought after commodity that sells for hundreds per gram. It’s hell difficult to obtain as it’s usually harvested from impossibly high cave roofs by people who literally risk life and limb to get what is essentially bird spit.

Bird nest, in this context, is the gooey saliva of a particular type of swift common in these parts of the world. The nest is built entirely out of their spit with the odd bit of feather, twig, leaf and a good dollop of bird shit. The nests are then plucked, cleaned and sold to gullible people who believe in its curative properties and ability to give rock solid erections – or was the rhino horn, or abalone, or turtle, or ginseng… I lose track.

And now you no longer have to cook up a soup and wait until dinner time to get your bird nest fix. Nope, simply crack open a cold one and instantly gratify your bird nest craving. Aaaah!

Magic Flavors

These biscuits are magic for various reason. Nothing other than magic would enable the biscuit to contain as many e-number preservatives, flavour enhancers, stabilisers, colorants and god-knows-what-else as it does. It can also magically induce virtual diabetes mellitus as it prompts a flood of insulin from the body to deal with the aforementioned. If you magically want to fall asleep due to low blood sugar, just chew one of these after you had a long day at work and only a small meal for lunch.

Micro Portions of Fatty Desserts – They’re doing you a favour!

This was one of those scary experiences that puts me off ala carte or menus without pictures. I was at a well known 5-star hotel, middle of the night, coffee and dessert and chose the cheese cake. Hmmm, cheese cake. And at RM 20 a pop I was expecting a decent portion – I mean, it’s a five star hotel, sure, so it’s expensive already, compared to a chunk of cheese cake I could get at Starbucks or Coffee Bean for RM12. When the plate arrived with crumbs on it and I was told that the crumbs were in fact the cheese cake, I heard the flushing of a toilet and my money kinking around the loo bowl on it’s way down.

But at least it was heavenly, divine and the best cheese cake I’ve ever had and certainly the king of cheese cakes in all of Kota Kinabalu, right? Right!? Er… no – it was disappointingly average.

Hantzel & Gretel – Quintessentially Christmas

In another 5-star hotel in a country far far away from you (but very near me), there once lived a wicked witch. The wicked witch lived in a ginger bread house, which was perfect. Perfect from a marketing perspective, because comes Christmas when they want to sell Christmas biscuits and cookies and stuff, what better than to build a ginger-bread house and sell ginger cookies and biscuits from the house. Never mind of course that Hantzel and Gretel had nothing to do with Christmas and that Santa Claus has nothing to do with ginger bread, or biscuits, save for the plateful that he shoves down his gullet at every other house where he delivers those damn presents.

But I digress. That’s it for this freakishly feisty food furore.

The PanoTools Panorama Tutorial is taking a wee bit longer to write than I anticipated. I just tried to take some pictures with a normal camera that I borrowed, but it seems even more difficult than my cellphone – I also read about Field of View and relationships with lens specifications and I thought I knew how to master it, but now I’m more confused than I was before.

Anyway, it’s in the works and still to come – in the meantime, here’s what I picked off my Nokia today – a random sampling of photos taken as I went about my week:

Seen in traffic

Juvenile, but it still brought a smile to my face, and my fellow South Africans will know why. This is an Afrikaans word meaning ‘shit’ – it also means ‘sister’ in Malay. This was early in the morning, it doesn’t take much to amuse me…

Food Mattters

That very day, this was the menu in the staff canteen. It could have been the Beef Ball’s Soup, or just the way the food looked, but I honestly wasn’t up for it. I rounded up a few colleagues and we headed to Grace Point where the food portions are getting smaller and smaller every time we go there to eat. My colleague and I both ordered Pataya Fried Rice, mine cost RM5.50 and his was RM4.50 – mine took 35 minutes and his 50 minutes, I guess that’s how they justify the extra Ringgit. Aside from the decorative chili sauce on top, it was exactly the same size. When I first ordered this dish some months ago -when the new broom was still sweeping clean, it covered the entire plate…

No problem here

And then today’s traffic violation – you know, I don’t go looking for these things, and I wasn’t going to say anything, because I’m sure it’s getting pretty boring, but again, the parking lot was full… anyway, I saw in an episode of CSI this afternoon that somebody said they parked across two spaces to avoid having their car scratched. I guess that makes sense, unless some irate person goes up and scratches on this person’s car “you park like an ass” then it would all be for naught.

Why I don’t have mosquitoes… or hair in my nostrils.

The other day I got home and I was certain somebody had emptied a can of Ridsect in my house – I couldn’t explain it, because it didn’t smell like my neighbour burning his dead leaves, nor the dump-truck that leaves note of their visit by the ever lingering aromatic calling card. Then I heard this droning sound and at first I thought it was in my head.

It kept getting louder and with Stephen King’s book, Cell, still conjuring up all sorts of images in my imagination, I did fear for the end of the world. As the droning got louder I peaked out the window expecting War of the World-like robots, only to see billows of smoke. For a moment I did struggle to make sense of the whole scenario (imagination still overpowering), but eventually saw that it was the local municipality spraying for mozzies.

They were fumigating the neighbourhood in their efforts to control mosquitoes, which tends to break in the stagnant pools of water we have after some of the heavier rain showers. Their efforts work, but it stinks up the place and enters into every conceivable little orifice.

Snippets

I snapped a picture of those cocktails we keep on going for at Atmosphere, but of course the quality of the pictures is vastly inferior to the product. The next pic is of Cara posing for this Covergirl thingum they’re doing at Blue Note, at STAR – they tart up the girls, make them look H.O.T. and then snap their pics (obviously not with a 1mpx camera phone). The picture far right illustrates why bookstores are my favourite places…

Sapphic Light Fixtures

In closing, this is a lamp in Blue Note. Not sure what it’s supposed to be, but it was clearly designed for turning on… yes, ponder that for a moment.

I took my Flabby Gut for a run last night – the first real exercise I’ve had in two weeks, which Flabby Gut loves of course – I’ll show him yet.

Following the exertion of a 2km run and 3km walk, I napped. Well, I planned to nap and then the nap turned into a full on 90 minute snooze-fest, which at 6pm at night of course does nothing for the desire to sleep at a decent bed-time later on.

So in a state of self-induced insomnia I sat perched in front of my computer, online, ready to blog only to find… my server is down. It came back up briefly, only to have me work on a post for 1 hour before it downed again never to return. Sigh. So sweeping changes will be made, sweeping.

I’m just waiting to receive the credit card that took me only four applications and 16 months to get approved for. Why the big deal? Well, I’m an Expat in Malaysia not earning an Expat salary – life is not as easy as it could be.

The first piece of credit card debt EVER that I will rack up, is my own reseller account.

More about that later.

Whoohoo! As I previewed this post past of the one I worked on last night reappeared – I’ll finish it and post it later. Yah!

Here’s a collection of random things that apply to multiple categories.

Rugby

The world champs went home and although politics are pissing on their parade, they have the umbrella of that longed-for euphoria to keep them dry for now. But it’s a tiny, tiny umbrella and the political piss is being blown in from all sides by the winds of change.

The good news is South Africa is now topping the IRB’s world rugby ranking, which as World Cup Champions is their rightful place. Interesting is how Argentina jumped from 6th to 3rd (!) place, thanks mostly to the vicious salt they rubbed in France’s wounds, and is now the number 3 team in the world behind New Zealand who is number two. If, like me, you wonder how that works, it’s all explained here.

Never too old for online dating

Whilst I was surfing my favourite South African news site (favourite, because you don’t make you pay for it when you’re logging in from overseas like the other giant, Naspers, does), I came across this little gem advertised in the sidebar. It’s an online-dating web site’s advert that features random profiles.

Meant to entice you to join, it will give you a little bit of info about who you’re seeing and what they’re looking for. I had to screen-grab this one (might never see it again), because it amused me for several reasons.

First, for relatively conservative South Africa for this distinguished gentleman to date so publicly at all is a huge social achievement. Secondly, I know my mom took a good 10 years to get the hang of this online thing, so kudos to him for doing that too. Then, I think he’s quite possibly the oldest person I’ve ever seen using an online dating service.

It’s probably a bit nasty of me, but first thing I thought when I saw his profile pic was rich, lonely, and extremely rich.

Anyway, chaps to the guy. You gotta wonder how the responses he’s getting are going for him.

Water under Troubled Bridge

I think I might have been one of the first people to travel across the new flyover next to the Kadamunsing Shopping Centre the night that it was opened to the public. Have you noticed how it hangs to the right when you travel over it direction Damai?

I picked up this little morsel of goss from architect and engineering friends of mine the other day: apparently, and these are just rumours, I don’t pretend to state them as facts, they were saving costs. See, usually roads are built slightly higher (nearly imperceptible) in the middle and lower to the sides to facilitate the efficient run-off of water, but this means draining systems on both sides, which clearly is more costly than just doing it on one side. So, slant your bridge to the right and save yourself some dosh.

I’m not sure if they were cutting corners to do this, or whether they had planned it all along, but there you have it. By having the surface slant down from left to right, they only had to fit one side with drainage holes and pipes. Hmmm.

And, I’m not sure, but if there are some mathematical geniuses out there, they could calculate the difference in the volume of the earth/gravel/rubbish used to build the ramp on the Damai side of the bridge, vs. the volume that would be required to make that ramp a proper, smooth decline.

Damn, if you approached that end of the bridge going faster than 40 kph I’m convinced you’d catch some air on the way down. By making it so steep they must have saved tons of earth, or gravel or whatever it is they use to prop it up with, and I wonder how much stuff like that goes for per truck load.

KK Traffic Problems

KK doesn’t have traffic problems. KK has driver attitude problems.

It’s true, there’s possibly 2 cars for every person in KK, but I think the roads can actually handle it. The challenge we face is the every driver is only in it for himself, which is understandable, because if you give one guy a chance, the 5 behind him will take advantage.

In order to make it easier for everybody, everybody has to be kind, patient and giving on the road. If everybody doesn’t do it, nobody will do it, so I can understand that this is going to be an uphill battle. But by making small, attitude adjustments that require very little effort, everybody can contribute to alleviating the traffic situation in Kota Kinabalu.

Tip No.1: Park properly - For instance, in this picture I took today, I returned from lunch to find the car park packed. There was this space, but Mr. or Mrs. Park-I-Cant parked their car in a way which made this space unusable. You see this in car parks every, as if KK sells drivers licenses right next to Pay as You Go phone cards.

Sure, I can squeeze my car in there and then carefully slip through the narrow space I would be left with, but do you think Mr. or Mrs. Park-I-Cant will do the same? Probably not. They will come back and without much regard for my car take little bits of my car’s paint with them by scraping it with their bag / keys / small children or their own car door, thinking nothing of it. My car is already full of little nicks and cuts that mysteriously appear while it’s parked in car parks and I’m not near it.

So park properly, it’s no effort. And if you can’t expertly maneuver your car, please stay at home.

Tip No.2: You’re not the only road user, be considerate – I was forced to drive to KK’s CBD in the middle of the day. I didn’t want to, but I had to. And then what I knew would happen, happened. Stuck in a jam, crawling along at two steps per minute, little grandma’s with walking sticks looking like they’re running past my car.

So cars were pushing and shoving and not respecting yellow boxes and not letting anyone in, but I was patient. Aircon, music, I was ok. Then I circled the Capital Hotel block to look for parking, all the while crawling, when suddenly the Kinabalu Daya Hotel mini-bus in front of me stops. More traffic, I thought, but no – this driver gets out, opens the back and starts to unload supplies, linen, flowers and other rubbish for the hotel from his van.

My incredulous look, hands up asking wtf was only met with a smile and wave of the hand. What could I do? And while he gingerly took his time unpacking the stuff onto the sidewalk, traffic was building up behind me and spilling into the road in front of Little Italy, causing yet more traffic. Eventually, after a good 6 minutes of seeing how many eggs the Daya Hotel uses per day, he hopped in and crawled off. A little further down the road a parking space opened up and he rolled in. I was fuming.

Anyway, watch out for my How-to-solve-KK’s-traffic Tips Series coming up soon.

The Doulos has Left the Building

We went to visit the Doulos last night. Got there, long snaking line of course. Armed with our secret weapon, Julia, we just waltzed straight past and went to the staff entrance where Julia hooked us up with the main man, the Director of the ship, who in turn hooked us up with Marli, the very easy-on-the-eye Media Relations Officer of the ship. She took us through the staff entrance and gave us the skinny on the Doulos.

Check out that article coming up soon too. They left the KK harbour this morning, but they’ll be spending it at Sepangar Bay today, because that’s where they will be refueling before they leave for Brunei, their home for the next 7 days. After that it’s off to the Philippines for some down-time to do a 10 day dry-dock stint for repairs.

The Doulos is a worthwhile project, and if I could afford to go without pay for so long, I would actually consider joining it. If you can afford to live on the ship, do good is many different countries while you live off sponsorship, then do go check out their website at www.mvdoulos.org for the requirements.

And that wraps it up for Issue I of Random Snippets.