Category: General

Not so long ago, we posted about how the weather had changed.  For the past month or so, it has been really hot here, and it has poured in the mid-to-late afternoon for about 20 minutes.  The heat was worse than anything we had felt in Indonesia…just brutally hot in the sun.  It was hotter in Sabah, but that was abnormal; here, the heat was really something.  The rains were also crazy.  These were big old thunderstorms that whipped down all of the palm fronds around our neighborhood and started small floods at the bottom of the hill near our apartment complex.  The sky would be completely lit up with lightning for about half an hour as well.

Well at any rate, in the past couple of days, it’s like someone has flipped a switch.  Not only has it been much cooler, but it hasn’t rained since Saturday.  It is so comfortable here now that I (TP) have been wearing jeans around the house with no problem, except for when I’m cooking.  Moreover, when we go out for our swim at 7:00 AM, right as the sun is rising, we are downright chilly.  It’s bizarre.  Needless to say, getting in the water makes us even colder, as the pool has been much cooler.  Another fun benefit is that the cats in our neighborhood have been out more often during the day, since they don’t have to avoid the hot sun so much.

We hope it stays like this for awhile…almost certainly this is the end of the intermonsoonal period and the beginning of the summer monsoon that used to take traders back to India and China (and the Hadramawt in Yemen and even back to Portugal).  Just think, 500 years ago right now, people in Malaya were finishing up their month of trading and were getting back on their ships. 

Today I  (jm)  had a presentation about grad schools for a change.  It was fun, I didn’t have to talk about the SAT, and people weren’t sleeping in their chairs propped up on their friend next to them (ok, that only happened once, and someone had presented something before me so I’m going to pretend it wasn’t my fault).  It was actually neat, a lot of people asked questions and I had lunch with one of the staff who was very friendly and pro-American.  She said that my little talk was so inspiring and that she was going to be dreaming about going to America now.  Right before my talk she was telling me she saw the movie Jeepers Creepers and would be scared to death to go to a small town in the US because all sorts of crazy, weird, bad things happen there.  I’ve decided that movies are kind of good but mostly bad as far as Amercian PR goes.  It’s good because all these people here see beautiful images of NYC, LA, Chicago, etc. and decide that they really want to go (they also expect to see Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise walking down the street).  However, I can’t tell you how many times they get these ideas in their heads that people run around wild with AK-47s, Uzis, and bombs tucked into their briefcases and blow people up.  And they’re seriously afraid that if they go to school in, say, Ames Iowa, that they will be dodging bullets on the way to class every day.  I now have to start each presentation with a disclaimer saying that it’s not like the movies,  and most that they most likely will not be shot on their way to the dining hall. It’s crazy.

Two of the staff members had studied abroad, one in Arizona and one in Australia, and they amused me going on and on about how hot I must find it here.  One of them said "I guess the heat is ok, if you stay inside in the air conditioning all day, and, well, all night too.  Then it’s not so bad."  The other was horrified when I said I was going to walk 20 feet to the nearest big road to hail a cab.  She insisted on calling me one because it was too hot to walk around.  At least I feel like less of a wuss because the locals find it hot here too.  It was also funny when I told them I had learned some Indonesian.  They started saying that Indonesian was much harder to speak than Malay, and one of ladies said "it’s really  hard, they use all these words that aren’t in our books!"  Well, yeah, they’ve got Malay words in the books here, not Indonesian ones, so I guess she had a point.  All in all, though, it was a good experience, hopefully Malaysia will be sending a few more PhD students our way soon.