I woke up sore from being in bed too long, although I didn’t feel a lot better. I went downstairs for some toast and fruit, and when we came into the lounge where we usually have breakfast, there were people sitting at our table. Now, I say “our” table, but it’s no such thing. It’s just the table we happen to sit at every morning because it’s near the bar and we don’t have to shout or wait forever to get the waiter’s attention for tea. No problem, there was plenty of room, but it started the day with a weird sense of wrong.
Later, we went up to the World Lounge and took the big table in the corner near the only well-placed outlet. There’s an older lady who normally sits at that table and holds court. She doles out advice to the other old ladies about how to get online, and which are the nice crew members, and which lounges have the best food.
She came in just before lunch and looked absolutely put out that, in a room where every single table was occupied, someone was at her table. She asked us whether there had been a power cord left there, and we said there hadn’t, although I could perfectly see her power cord in her bag. She sat at the table next to ours, giving us the evil eye every few minutes as though she was having an epic internal battle about whether or not she should demand we get the hell off her table. When we left for lunch, we hadn’t even stepped away from the table before she was moving to take our place, much to the consternation of the folks she was talking to.
Day 49:
Never looked up from my desk, because I was working.
We’re in port in Thailand. It’s hard to tell how we’re supposed to refer to it. The name of the actual port is Laem Chabang, but the nearest town is Pattaya, and our tickets say Bangkok. Bangkok is a two-hour drive from the port, so we’re here for two days so that people who actually want to go into the city can do so and then spend the night. Weird, because Valley of the Kings was an even greater distance from our port (3 ½ hours by bus), but we didn’t stay overnight.
Our tour took us into Pattaya to a place called “Sanctuary of Truth.” I have learned to modulate my expectations on this trip, because so many things don’t live up to their hype. Luckily, I had never heard of the Sanctuary of Truth.
It’s a sort of Buddhist shrine right on the beach in Pattaya. It’s large for a wooden structure – about 4 storeys tall, although it’s all one big room. Although it sounds like something created in antiquity, it’s only about 40 years old, and still not complete. The first part of the walk takes you through the woodcarving shop where we got to see the carvers at work turning bits of wood into art. And of course, they made it look easy.
The Truth sanctified in this sanctuary isn’t mystical, revolutionary, or hard to understand – it’s the same Buddhist truths people have been living by for ages – all humans are fundamentally equal, treat everyone with respect, revere your family, care for the old and the young. I loved thinking that someone was moved enough to design and begin building this lovely place just to get everyone to remember what it takes to be a good person.
After the Sanctuary of Truth, we went to the beach. There couldn’t have been more of a contrast. According to our guide, Pattaya used to be the place that Thai families went to for a weekend getaway – it was cheap, lovely, and had a nice beach. Now, he said, white tourists have taken it over. The beach is dominated by people with stalls where, for about 100 baht (about $3), you can rent a beach umbrella and a couple of plastic beach chairs for the day. Across the street there’s a line of the kind of tourist bars you see in Mexico – an open patio packed with tables and chairs, and hostesses that shout “Welcome! Come on in!” to every passer-by. Interspersed with these are the occasional American fast-food place, and a couple of convenience stores where, next to the cashier where one would normally expect candy or gum, condoms and lube.
We had been dropped at an absolutely huge mall, where we bought a tank top (for me), and some much needed groceries – saltines, fruit, tonic water, sinus medication, cough drops.
Day 47:
And no – I wasn’t better yet. We went ashore for a hot second to load up on a few last-minute Thai souvenirs, but apart from that, stayed on the ship. My chest is still full of goo and I’m still coughing and dizzy. I tried toughing it out, but gave it up and ended up going to bed at 3:30 in the afternoon, and sleeping until about 7 the next morning. Rather than the restless sleep of illness, this was the solid sleep of getting better. The poor Pirate had dressed and gone to dinner, but forgot his card key. He apparently knocked at the door, but to no avail. Luckily, he was able to snag a steward to let him back into our room. Apparently I told him he looked nice, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
Today is a day at sea – one of two between Singapore and Thailand. And I’m sick. Like, snotty, hacking, coughing up phlegm sick. I started the day with room service breakfast – oatmeal and lots of orange juice. I made a pot of tea in the new teapot and drank it, then made another. I had to carefully consider how much tea I was going to drink, because the water from the taps here is nasty, and the drinking water comes in 1-liter bottles, of which we get 2 a day when they make up our room. Except that they haven’t had a chance to make up our room since yesterday morning, because I’ve been ill.
It made me think about the kind of packing I used to do for my 10-day residencies at grad school. I’d take plastic wine glasses and a corkscrew, dishes, sharp knives and scissors, a tiny cutting board, a fruit bowl, laundry detergent and fabric softener, all kinds of over the counter meds (Excedrin, Sudafed, Mucinex, antacids), a power strip, a sewing kit, a small electric kettle, a teapot, tea, first aid supplies. This all went into a big plastic box, because I drove to residency and had the room for it. We also took all this stuff on trips for piping competitions, which were normally only two or three days. And these trips were in cities, where I’d be near grocery stores, etc.
All that stuff, packed for less than two weeks, and yet, I didn’t pack most of those things for a four-month trip where I would have very limited access to stores! Here are some things I regret not bringing:
Command hooks (there are just never enough hooks, and they’re not where you want them)
Normal scissors (I brought hair scissors, but you can’t use those on anything else)
Sudafed and Mucinex (why did I think we wouldn’t get sick on a four-month trip?)
Powdered hummus (they never have enough vegan protein options, and hummus is always a nice snack)
Having not brought that stuff, here are some things I learned from shopping abroad:
Other countries have unexpected restrictions on pharmaceuticals (for instance, in the UK, you can’t get more than 32 pills of the over-the-counter painkiller paracetamol – in the US, you can get Tylenol in Kentucky Fried Chicken-sized buckets)
Speaking of pharmaceuticals, other countries don’t call stuff the same thing we do, or use different drugs for the same effect, so you have to do some decoding (we couldn’t find guaifenesin, an expectorant, but we could find this other stuff that works even better and doesn’t taste like burnt hair)
In Asian countries, people are expected to be smaller than they are here (if a piece of clothing says “one size,” it’s a good bet it’s at most an American size medium)
Hummus is mysteriously elusive – we haven’t been able to find it in Dubai, Malaysia or Singapore, and I feel like we’re just not looking in the right place – either it’s sold in a can or jar, or it’s sold as a powdered mix. However they sell it (if they, indeed, sell it), we haven’t been able to find it.
Hopefully, I’ll be over this creeping crud in time for Thailand.
Day 45:
All the days at sea are eerily the same. But I got a lot of work done today.
We started out at Gardens By the Bay, an enormous botanical garden close to the marina. While the gardens take up several acres of ground, we stuck to the flower dome and the cloud forest dome.
In the flower dome, there are several dry-weather biomes re-created. To celebrate Chinese New Year, they had a display of dahlias that I could have sat and stared at all day.
The exhibits are arranged by biome, including South Africa, succulents, Mediterranean, olive grove, and California.
In the California area, there were lots of citrus trees, and what could have been our own garden – rosemary and lavender and blackberries. I was charmed and enchanted until we got to an area with a little thyme plant. Thyme is one of my favorite cooking herbs, and we had (have?) two large plants from which we took what we needed to spice up our cooking. One whiff and I was in tears, homesickness hitting me square between the eyes.
The cloud forest dome was beautiful, but they have turned a lot of it into an Avatar exhibit, with fiberglass Pandora animals and plants in among the real ones. While I’m sure it was a big draw for the kids, I wished they could have kept it to one area, because I was far more interested in the plants and art. In both the flower conservatory and the cloud forest, there were driftwood sculptures of animals. I love driftwood sculptures because they sort of look like things with the skin off so you can see the musculature underneath. There was also a really cool sculpture that looked like a stump had been dug up with the roots intact and the tree end made into an eagle’s head.
From there we went to Singapore’s famous Orchard Road, the high-end shopping district. Because we’re high rollers, we had an expensive lunch and then did some luxury shopping. We bought new toothbrushes, cough drops, and painkillers. Yeah, I know. You’re jealous.
On our second day in Singapore, we decided we’d go on our own to the amazing hotel with the observation deck shaped like a ship. I booked the tickets online yesterday, and we were going to walk there from the ship, because Googlina says it’s only a 20-minute walk.
Except, now I’m sick again. I’ve been low-key sick on and off for about a week, but now it’s really coming on. But here’s a thing: we already paid for the tickets, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to flush that money down the toilet. Small change of plans: the ship has a shuttle bus that drops people off right across the street from that hotel. Instead of walking, we’ll take the shuttle bus. It’s a little fiddly, because we want to leave as close to our ticket time (1:00pm) as possible, but we can’t leave the ship after noon because of some immigration rules. Yesterday, the process of getting through immigration just to go into town (which, in most other countries involves showing the immigration officials our cruise ID card, and, in some cases, our passports, which are given a cursory glance and then we skate in) took about 45 minutes. We decide to leave at 11:00am.
There’s nobody in the cruise terminal. We sailed through in about 5 minutes and managed to get on the bus just as it was leaving. This meant that, instead of getting there at noon-ish, we got there about 11:10. The bus dropped us off at the convention center which, like a lot of this part of Singapore, is attached to a gigantic, high-end mall (seriously- Orchard Road is one giant high-end mall after another). We walked through the mall where I bought a teapot and some more tea, and then had a pricey lunch at a lovely Indian place. From there, onto the hotel. Getting there was a little weird – a lot of major streets in Singapore can only be crossed either by tunnels underneath or bridges overhead. We couldn’t figure out how to get to the bridge that would take us to the hotel, and a guy who looked like he was picking up someone’s food order directed us to the correct elevator – so many people here are really, really nice!
The observation deck was everything it promised to be – great views of the entire city, and we got some really good pictures. Far in the distance in the center of this photo, you can see the Queen Mary 2.
I was thinking as we came back on the bus about how proud everyone in Singapore seems to be of their city. The cab drivers we had all bragged about how clean and safe it is, and exhorted us to go all sorts of places. Guides talked about its great infrastructure and innovative environmental programs. Yes, you hear about the stiff penalties for chewing gum and littering, but if I could have completely safe streets, a good social safety net, and tidy streets, I’m okay with not chewing gum.
I’m still not feeling all too great, BUT today we’re in Port Kelang, Malaysia. Our tour today took us to Batu Caves (called that because they’re full of bats), a popular pilgrimage site for the Hindu god Murugan. Today is the end of the Tai Pucam festival, and the place was so packed that our tour bus had to park a couple of blocks away and we all walked.
The caves are natural caves, and there are several shrines inside (and several more outside). To see the inside shrines, you must first climb 272 stairs that take you to the first big cave. Cross that, and you must then climb another set of stairs to get to more shrines inside.
For the festival, the stairs had been painted rainbow colors.
Pilgrims were doing a ritual cleansing that consists of having one’s head shaved and then covered in saffron paste. Everyone wore yellow, and most pilgrims were taking offerings of flowers, fruits, incense, etc. Our guide said that lots of people go there to ask for a spouse or a child, a job or a promotion, etc. And often, people who get the thing they asked for will go every year to show their gratitude.
The thing that struck me was how many of the people going up those stairs were going up them barefoot. The place is overrun with monkeys, pigeons and bats – three species not particularly known for their fastidious bathroom habits. That’s some pretty impressive faith. (“Please, Lord Murugan, cure me of this hookworm…”)
After the caves, we went to the Royal Selangor pewter factory, a super-famous pewter factory started by a Chinese immigrant in 1885 and still run by the family. We got to see the pewter-making process, which was pretty cool. Even cooler was getting to make our own pewter bowls. We were each given a disc of pewter about 9” in diameter, a block of wood with circular depressions in each side, a metal hammer, a wooden mallet, and a set of letter stamps. First, we stamped our names onto our discs. Next, we used the mallets to hammer our discs into bowls, first using the shallow side of the wooden block, then the deeper side. I now have the world’s tiniest, cutest fruit bowl, which is currently holding 4 very tiny plums and an equally tiny peach in an unstable pyramid.
Nope. I spent today in bed, asleep, while the Pirate toured the spice garden and the butterfly sanctuary. But he did come back and tell me some highlights:
Turmeric, ginger, and cardamom are all rhizomes. There are over 200 species of ginger, all of which are edible, and all are native to southeast Asia.
Nutmeg and mace are the same(ish) thing. The nutmeg is the seed, and mace is the fruit that surrounds the seed.
Green, pink, white, and black pepper all come from the same plant, but the difference is how they’re treated.
You can tell whether you got real cinnamon or fake cinnamon (cassia). Cassia is thicker and the bark is in a single, curly layer. Real cinnamon will have more than one piece of bark rolled together because they’re thin and brittle. But you shouldn’t use powdered cinnamon because it blocks your chi.
In Malaysia, they wait for the durian to drop from the tree, because that’s when it’s ripe. If you see people cutting them off the trees, they’re harvesting unripe durian. Only people from Thailand do that, and people in Malaysia don’t have a high opinion of them.
He also saw about a skillion cool butterflies. Sadly, it’s almost impossible to capture a really good photo of a butterfly with a phone while on a walking tour with a bunch of other tourists.
This butterfly is laying eggs – the little nodules on the netting.
After being stuck on buses with a zillion other people and visiting crowded tourist destinations, we were feeling DONE. We decided to order breakfast in and spend a relatively lazy morning hanging out on the balcony. I made some tea and took my breakfast outside, where I immediately put my feet up on the railing and sipped my tea with a contented sigh. I could actually feel myself unclench.
Living my best Toast Life!
Day 35:
I spent most of today working on work stuff. It’s really hard, because the wifi on the ship is really spotty. Every time I’m in the dedicated lounge set aside for World Cruise folks, there’s always a queue of mostly old ladies complaining to the concierge about how they can’t get on the wifi. The concierge probably has a script for this situation, since it seems to happen 17 times an hour.
Day 36:
I spent all today doing work stuff while the Pirate stayed in our cabin, because he’s now in the throes of the same creeping crud a lot of folks on the ship have had. It’s annoying, because on every shore excursion, there have been people on the bus coughing like they’re bringing up their internal organs (we call them “Hacking Nancies”).
All of them seem oblivious to the fact that they’re making everyone else sick. One woman, after a truly wet, disgusting, loud round of coughs, looked at everyone defiantly and said “Well, I don’t feel bad.” It’s no surprise to us that about a week ago, the captain announced that there had been an increase in COVID cases. Suddenly we were no longer allowed to dish up our own food at the buffets, and they started being a lot more strict about making people use the hand sanitizer before going to the buffet.
Day 37:
I’m exhausted. For the last few days, we’ve had to set our clocks ahead an hour every day. Right now, we’re 14 time zones away from where we started in California. Today, I woke up at what was 4am just a few days ago. I hate being woken up early. It always feels like a punishment. I also dislike the feeling of sleeping all day and so missing out on events and getting things done. It’s weird to exist in a world where days are 23 hours long. I can hardly wait until the return journey, where our days will be 25 hours long, and I can get an extra hour of sleep without missing a thing.
Day 38:
Today, I was looking through the program and saw that there was a matinee of Gulliver by the theater troupe Box Tale Soup. I’d seen in the program that it was a puppet show, and I thought it would be fun. It turned out to be more than fun. It wasn’t just a puppet show – there were three live actors playing all the parts, with one guy being Gulliver and the two others both playing characters themselves and using some puppets that weren’t the normal person-in-a-box, hands-above-head kinds of puppets, nor were they marionettes. They were more like articulated dolls, manipulated by the cast members like puppets. The staging was really clever, and the original music (all done a cappella) was really lovely.
The ship they’re talking about in the video is the ship we’re on right now. If you ever happen to be where they are, absolutely check them out!
Day 39:
Tomorrow is Penang, Malaysia, but now it’s my turn to be ill. I want to go on our field trip, since it’s to a spice garden and a butterfly farm. We’ll see how well that works out!
Today, we visited the capital of Oman, Muscat. In both Abu Dhabi and Dubai, we had the same tour guide who constantly told us about how everything in those two sultanates was “the best.” Our guide in Muscat had no such claims. He was every bit as proud of his country, but Muscat isn’t the artificial glitz and excess of the last two places.
Our tour guide instead directed our attention to the many schools, parks and hospitals. He extolled the wisdom of the Sultan that passed away in 2020 for his vision in investing in infrastructure. I am far more impressed with Oman’s hundreds of added schools than I am with the tallest building in the world.
We visited the Royal Muscat Opera House, which, although smaller than San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, has some really impressive features.
Lobby of the Royal Muscat Opera House
First, the seats in Muscat are FAR more comfortable than San Francisco’s – a fact I ascribe to their being newer. Also, because the opera house is also used for concerts and theater, the layout is impressively flexible.
The elaborate teak proscenium can be moved back to make room for an enormous pipe organ that can be moved forward. The boxes nearest the stage can be rotated and moved back. The first four rows of seats are on a platform that can be moved down and covered over to become an orchestra pit. The ingenuity is amazing.
Although there was precious little going on today (another day at sea), evening was another matter. Another gala evening, but this time, we decided to dress up and at least go to dinner. While I think the Pirate is forbiddingly handsome all the time, the Pirate in a tuxedo is next-level handsome. We went to dinner at our regular place, where we have a table next to the window.
Toward the end of dinner, the Pirate pointed out the window – “Look!” The waves in the wake of the ship glowed with phosphorescent algae. As the waves formed under the surface of the water, a long line of bright cyan showed where it would break the surface. As the waves broke, the line of light limned the crest, and continued for at least 30 seconds after the wave had disappeared. The light would re-appear every few seconds, moving outward in the ship’s wake, dashed luminescent lines extending as far as we could see behind us.
The Pirate and I stood on our balcony for quite a while, hypnotized by the sight. I thought about trying to get video, but decided against it for two reasons. First, I am not a good enough videographer with my phone to trust that I would actually capture the sight. Second, I believe that not everything needs to be recorded. I like the idea that I will have to call this to mind unaided later. “But you won’t remember it perfectly,” you might say. Correct. And that’s a large part of the beauty.
Yesterday, our tour guide told us that when we woke up in Dubai, we’d have an amazing view of the city. He wasn’t wrong. It was still dark out when we got up, and the city was breathtaking. It’s like the scenic skyline of every major city in the world, all crammed into one small place.
Our tour today was to The Museum of the Future. One thing I’ve learned from reading a lot of science fiction is that aliens always choose the author’s home culture to land in, and the author’s home culture is always that one that’s going to save earth. The Museum of the Future follows that same pattern – the UAE is going to save the world with its superior innovation.
In some ways, it was like a theme park ride. First there was the part about the orbiting space station, where visitors got to check out all the parts of the space station, and look at the various jobs, and see the various fictional projects this fictional space agency is undertaking. To me, it was a weird mélange of various other scifi stories and franchises I’ve seen – aspects of the S. A. Corey series The Expansion, snippets from Torchwood, a whole lot of Disney.
Junior space explorer suit, with no functional elbows
From there, on to the conservation area. The best part of this was a huge room called the “genetic library.” It contained three concentric circles of “specimens,” arranged in jars in columns. The “specimens” were color coded by phylum. The jars were actually cylinders of acrylic with holographic representations of animals and plants in the middle of each. The overall effect was really cool.
Next was the wellness area, which was really the most fun. There was a large, dark room with a semi-circular area against one mirrored wall. The floor swam with dots of light, and everyone stood around the outside, staring down. As I entered the room, the guide said “It’s a motion exhibit.” She gestured to the area of floor, which I took to mean “walk on it.” So I did. It was great! The floor was a little squidgy, but the best part was that the swirling patterns of tiny dots moved in waves away from wherever my feet landed. I hopped, slid my feet along, took huge steps. Then I discovered that if you put one arm out away from your body, the light would scatter from the shadow of your arm as well. It was great.
As usual, I’m already late!
Then we went to Palm Island – a manmade island in the rough shape of a palm tree that now hosts the most expensive real estate in the world. The guide was full of superlatives – everything was the biggest, the tallest, the most expensive, the best. He kept saying that “everyone in the entire world wants to live here.” I think that he’s right in one respect – everyone on earth wishes that they had enough money to buy a place here. But they don’t actually want to live here.
Palm Island, so called because its shape resembles a palm tree
One hilarious thing I noticed was that as the tour bus drove along, the guide narrated the sights along the way. Whenever we drove by a building or street that looked less than opulent, he would quickly direct our attention to something interesting on the other side of the bus. It didn’t take me long to start automatically looking out the other side of the bus from where he pointed.
While a lot of Dubai is impressive, it all made me sad. It’s not sustainable. The rate of building here, the kind of consumption it takes to build a city like this in such a short time, the fact that literally everything – every plant, the soil, the building materials, the consumer goods, the talent that keeps the city running – everything has to be imported. It’s hard not to look at all this and see what it’ll look like in 100 years, derelict and reclaimed by the desert.
Day 31:
We didn’t have any shore excursions today, but after all the amazing food we’ve had, we both wanted to go to the spice market and see if we couldn’t score some spices to take home and experiment with.
Our first adventure was getting a cab. Our tour guide yesterday said that 99% of taxi drivers accept contactless payments, so we hopped in a cab confident that we would be able to pay by credit card. Nope.
We went to the ATM and realized that neither of us had brought our debit cards, so we couldn’t pull cash. No problem – we can just use our credit cards to get a cash advance, right? No. You need a PIN, and neither of us had one. We tried calling our bank to see if we couldn’t set that up, but we couldn’t even get a call to go through. Ugh. We’ll figure something out.
We went into the spice market, which is a warren of tiny shops selling spices, teas, rugs, caftans, and various touristy dreck. The spice shops all had baskets and bowls arranged in ranks, and the merchants had a novel approach to selling. They all asked us to guess what various berries, leaves, crystals, threads, dried fruits, and powders were. We got sunflower threads, oregano, ginger, hibiscus, frankincense. We didn’t know indigo or sulfur, which both looked like sidewalk chalk. The big surprise came when the guy held up a white, cylindrical crystal and asked us to guess what it was. We had no clue. Salt? Quartz? He then lit the kind of tiny charcoal brazier used for incense and put the crystal on it. He asked me to close my eyes, and gently blew the smoke toward me.
When burning menthol hits your nostrils, it can burn the hair right out of them. Any congestion I may have had was gone.
From the spice market, we went to the gold market. My tastes are on the minimalist side, so things like a necklace of what looked like chain maille made of gold links that would hang to a person’s waist is so far overboard that it’s on its own island. There were earrings that I would have thought were bracelets, bracelets that I would have thought were some kind of magic futuristic handcuffs (they may be – I don’t know), and necklaces that could be worn as aprons. A lot of the bigger pieces were probably 9 carat gold and so had a very brassy, cheap look to them.
Each of these rings is the size of a ping pong ball.
What was really funny to me were the men who kept approaching us with what looked like business cards with pictures of handbags on them, asking us if we wanted handbags, and then started rattling off names of designers. Whenever someone offers me a knockoff watch or purse, I think of that scene in Home Alone where Catherine O’Hara is offering to give someone her watch in exchange for their plane tickets. The person asks if it’s a real Rolex, and O’Hara says “Do you think it is?”
We ended up working everything out with the cash-only cab driver, and everything turned out fine. I’m excited to have some tea options that aren’t limited to Darjeeling and the nasty stuff that is just labeled “English Breakfast,” but tastes more like the sweepings from the floor of a second-rate tea production facility.
I Love You But Fuck Off 