Malaysian Vacation: Day 5

Monday, October 17, 2011.

One nice thing about good hotels is that they’re not cheap with the curtains.

And the Ixora was a very good hotel.

With good curtains, you can block out the light.

All the light.

So if you want to sleep past daybreak you can.

That’s important, especially if you only got to sleep shortly before daybreak.

I vaguely recall eating breakfast.

Not because it was almost 8 weeks ago as much as because the breakfast was the same as it had been for the two preceding days.

Lack of sleep and a dearth of variety make it hard to differentiate Monday’s breakfast from Saturday’s or Sunday’s.

Well, Sunday’s breakfast I remember that I was so sunburned that I could feel the heat from my coffee on my nose and forehead.

It hurt.

But I managed to eat breakfast Monday anyway. Let’s not get too far off course.

I spent some time before checkout in the lobby, talking with Yuvin and Rafael. We were waiting for Ben, who had to take care of a few last things for the hotel and the event.

He took one look at my t-shirt and started laughing. And kept laughing. He laughed all the way to the restaurant where we had decided to eat lunch.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

The shirt is actually a riff on the Skittles slogan “Taste the Rainbow,” but I can see how someone might mistake me for a 270# bull fruit.

Especially when I do this:

Though as Ben noted, it was very unlikely anyone was going to give me shit over it.

Ben insisted on showing me as much of the amazing food that Penang has to offer as he could. He did a fantastic job, and I ate like a condemned man on his last meals.

A very lucky, well-fed man.

Monday lunch was chicken and rice (no euphemism), and the place was apparently quite famous. I can understand why, too. The food was fantastic.

The only bad thing I could say about the meal was that Rob-B-Hood was on TV, but that’s not the restaurant’s fault.

I had a great time eating and talking with Ben, Yuvin and Rafael, learning about Malaysia and generally laughing heartily at least once a minute.

That was, I would discover, to become a theme of the next three days: our entire group, varied as it often was, laughing ourselves incontinent about everything and anything we looked at, experienced, or discussed.

After lunch, we headed back over the bridge to the island. We needed to check into the hotel, or in my case, back into the hotel.

Yes, I was back at the Good Hope In, the hotel that’s nice and clean on the inside and Atomic F@#$ing Orange on the outside. 

Hey, it makes it easier to find when you’re drunk, and it’s a nice place. I kid, but I don’t insult.

We dropped off our bags and went to visit Alvin Lee, who was staying in a different hotel.

I’m a PhD, but Alvin’s a lawyer and an entrpreneur. He was staying at the Northam.

For the sake of comparison, here’s the view I had from my room:

That’s nice, right?

Here’s the view from Alvin’s room:

Yeah. That’s just how it works. 

The best part is that Ben walked into Alvin’s suite, took a look around and said “You like this? Is this okay? Let me get  you a better room. I’ll go talk to the manager,” and left.

So Rafael, Alvin and I talked about stuff for a while until Ben came back with a bellboy and we all moved to Alvin’s new, bigger, better suite. 

I have to say, the next best thing to being a well-connected guy who knows everyone and can go anywhere and do anything… 

Is hanging out with that guy.

It was especially fun because all of us were wearing shorts or jeans and t-shirts. And it didn’t matter.

Well, it did, actually. I hate wearing suits. I get ‘judicial flashbacks.’

We hung out for a while, talking and laughing. 

It was almost like I was on vacation.

Around sunset we   got  ready to head out to dinner. 

See? It’s all about food. And it should be.

Dinner was going to be special that night.

We had no idea how special.

Not only was Ben taking us to eat at a great seafood place he knew of, we were meeting up with Cindy Lim and Amy Fay.

Cindy worked for Mean Machines. 

Amy was the car model I had met briefly in the airport the day I arrived.

“Let’s hear it for these t*tties!”

She tweaked my nipple 5 minutes after we met, and the more I think about it (and knowing what I know now) I really should have just done it right back to her. 

Cindy was her minder. Cindy was busy.

The restaurant was open-air, so again I was just happy to sit back and let the breeze wash over me. But I didn’t do it because it was raining.

Really hard.

It was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock.

But so what? I’m on vacation.

And as usual, the food was more than enough to distract me from the weather.

Just regular people. Mostly.

I had other distractions too. One of the people at dinner, who shall remain nameless, had some rather… interesting habits.

And remember, this is me talking.

When Ben served her some crab, she smelled it.

I don’t mean she could smell it.

I mean she leaned over her plate and sniffed loudly.

This apparently didn’t tell her all she needed to know.

Because she proceeded, while still bent over, to lick the crab.

Seizing the moment, I said in Cantonese “Look! She’s licking crab!”

Crab is essentially a homophone for a rather coarse slang term describing a woman’s private parts.

Everyone at the table who could understand Cantonese got the joke.

I.e. everyone but her.

Little did we know, she was just getting started.

She ate with gusto.

And not with silverware.

Finishing her crab (no euphemism), she turned to Ben, who had the (mis)fortune to be sitting next to her.

“Is that yours?” she asked, pointing at a glass of tea.

“No, that’s for you,” he replied.

So she stuck her fingers in it to wash them off.

Then she took a swig of it and started to swish it around her mouth.

And gargle.

She was about to spit it back into the glass when Ben, starting to get uncomfortable, said “Don’t do that!”

So she spit it onto the floor.

Of the restaurant.

“Is there Crab Tea on this?”

I grant you, it was nearly outside, but close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.

We all looked at her, dumbstruck.

Which made her subsequent belch seem that much louder.

“Okaaaaaaayyyy…”

Well, the food was really good.

When I say good I mean really good.

I mean unbelievably f@#$ing delicious.

It was one of those meals (like all my meals in Malaysia) where I had to really, really struggle to let other people eat some of the food on the table. 

I was sorely tempted to just get penitentiary on them, gather up all the plates in front of me and dare them to touch MY food. 

But I liked these people. So I didn’t. 

I showed restraint.

Someone had to.

And we still had a lot of fun. We laughed and laughed and laughed some more. My sides were starting to hurt from laughing so much.

I suppose it could have been much worse. 

Actually, it was.

Because as we were walking back to our cars, the Unknown Model (oops) spit.

I don’t mean like “Ewww, a small bug flew in my mouth”-type spit.

I mean she brought it up from the bottom.

I’ve heard wild boars that can’t make that sound.

She let go with a lung cookie across the parking lot. 

It was so nasty that a man from the Chinese Embassy  came out of the dark, held up a board with 9.3 written on it, and gave her a free Chinese visa.

They know spitting in China.

I chased him away and we got into our cars. She was riding in the other car.

Thank Christ.

But the night was still young.

And I wasn’t.

There was a private party at the first place we stopped, a club called 69.

Nice.

---

So we went to the G Hotel, where Ben had done some consulting work. They have a small Jazz bar in the hotel.

Called the G Spot.

Niiiiice.

We didn’t play cards, but everyone (else) got the Asian Flush.

Alcohol flowed freely, as it should, and soon things started to get memorable. 

Luckily, there’s photographic evidence.

There’s even life reflecting art!

Hunter S. Thompson, Dr. of Journalism, and Oscar Zeta Acosta, Attorney; 1971, Las Vegas, Nevada

Attorney Alvin Lee and Sean M. Tierney, Dr. of Communications; Penang, Malaysia, 2011.

Cindy and Amy. They seem so innocent.

Yeah, right. Why do you think they invented alcohol?

“I don’t know, they felt kinda hard. And cold…”

It says “Please don’t get any in my hair.”

Ben’s tattoo says “I have impeccable aim.”

As the drinking continued, things got more interesting.

I love Malaysia.

What could be better?

Stereo is better than mono.

But I’ve never caught stereo.

Literally or figuratively. Dammit.

And lest you think someone was just faking it for the photo, I have to assure you that she really went to town. I had a wet spot.

On my shirt, for a change.

It was kinda nice.

Something tells me she’s sucked more than one nipple in her life.

And I’m not talking about her mother.

I don’t want you to think that I  monopolized the women or their attention. It was fun, but it was fun talking to everybody.

And Bros before Hoes.

We had so much fun it should be against the law. Some of it was.

And as you can see, the t-shirt was a hit.

Dressed to impress. For once in my life.

You may notice that I look kinda odd in these photos.

No, not the shirt.

Or the shorts.

Or the sunburn.

It’s the smile.

I was having so much fun I literally didn’t know how to handle it.

I had to do something.

So I did.

They’re filled with helium, so it was pretty easy.

Theoretically, I can say I picked up a girl at the G Spot. 

But I put her back down again. 

Too much Vomit Risk.

We left the G Spot and went to an outside bar in “Penang’s version of Lan Kwai Fong.” It was nice. There was a band in the bar, but we sat outside and so we could still talk. 

And burp.

Yes she did.

Several times.

I’ve gotten so used to being sober around drinkers that I sometimes really enjoy it. It helps when you’re with people who can handle their booze and manage to keep even drunken conversation interesting.

But it’s more fun when people can’t manage both of those things.

We were discussing work, and Cindy volunteered that she had mistakenly studied law at university and it was a crap major and you’d have to be stupid to study law, much less go into it as a career.

Rafael, Ben and I looked at each other, and then at Cindy, and then at Alvin.

You know, the lawyer.

But Alvin handled it well.

Like a lawyer, actually. 

And it was hard to take anything seriously with Ben, Rafael and I literally falling off our chairs with laughter.

Cindy eventually saw the error of her ways and backtracked, saying that she really wants to go into doing event promotion, since its easy enough that anyone can do it.

Just ask Ben and Rafael, they do it for a living.

I’ve never seen anyone put both feet in their mouth before.

And if I was told I would see it that night, I wouldn’t have expected it to be Cindy.

But by this time of the night, everyone was very, very happy and smiling and laughing and we just had a fun time.

There was no animosity or bad feelings.

We all just laughed and drank and laughed.

See?

But no one was out of control drunk. Try as we might, we couldn’t get Amy to do anything too crazy with this statue.

We just wanted the statue to share our pain.

I have no idea what time we left. I just remember returning to our (respective) cars and trying to stay clear of Not Cindy as she spat in the parking lot.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said to Ben, “before she pisses in the gutter.”

Ben dropped us off back at the Good Hope, where we were reminded one last time of our special dinner guest.