So I’m posting something from the Wayback Machine from seven years ago, a picture I took of the twins at age 15 months… here’s what I said back then:

Just look at those teeth!! They’re sharp! I was holding Maribeth while she was drawing yesterday, and looked down to see her eating the yellow crayon. I dug it out of her mouth, but she left deep bite marks on my fingers.

My latest pics are from December, but I don’t have a picture of just the twins together, only ones of all the Ms before we saw The Muppet Movie. The twins are at the ends:

From teething to Grade 2, in one post. If you don’t feel like time is flying, have a look at some pictures in your own Wayback Machine. Warning: it’ll make you feel old!

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Glasgow, August 1999 with Joe (film scan)

After digging out my scanner to lend to someone and testing it to make sure it still worked, I decided to scan a few photos while it was plugged in to my computer. I do not recommend doing something like this when you’ve got lots of worked piled up, because it’s an inevitable time-sink. The ultimate distraction. You get sucked into looking at old photos and the next you know, hours have passed. Yikes! But I can think of much worse ways to spend time.

Anyway, the photo above was taken in Glasgow in the summer of 1999. (That trip was legendary — oh, the stories! In fact, it came up again when I was in England in November. Remind me to tell you in person one day, I can’t write about it on the internet.) My godson Joe was a year old in this picture, and this is him now, more than a dozen years later…

England, November 2011

One thing I noticed while looking at my old point-and-shoot photos is how terrible they are in so many ways: bad composition, poor lighting, out-of-focus, no focal point, colours washed out, the list goes on. Most of them are not even worth scanning, I just like to look at them. But that’s the reason why I let my clients pick the photos they want to print — because people choose photos for emotional value not for technical value, while a photographer can’t help but see the technical merits or mistakes (unless it’s their own photos, in which case the emotional values kick in).

It’s also interesting to see how time marches on for technology, since digital cameras weren’t around when my godson was a baby — everyone was shooting with film cameras. Now everyone is shooting with digital cameras and film is getting rare to the point of near extinction.

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Some mugshots over the years, beginning with the first one from the Philippines  (with the name I stopped using after leaving Winnipeg), which I only have a photocopy of because (if I recall correctly), I left it at my friend’s house in Germany way back in 1994 and that was the end of the trail. They moved out of that house in Leverkusen to their weekend house in Aachen when my friend’s mum fell off a horse, had a stroke, and his dad took early retirement to take care of her. I lost contact with my friend while he was preoccupied with his PhD in veterinary science. Maybe one day he’ll find this blog and tell me he found my childhood passport amongst his stuff! (The internet’s good for nostalgia.)

Maybe you can still make out that it’s me. In my brother’s passport, he is wearing an identical outfit. We look like little matching prisoners. My dad wrote that my occupation was a minor. Let me tell you, being a minor is tough work. So is writing out my place of birth.

If you ever saw my birth certificate from the Philippines, you would think I was at least a hundred years old. It looks like it belongs in a museum, with old-fashioned typeface on onion skin paper. I’m surprised it hasn’t disintegrated yet. For my parents’ race, they are both listed as “Brown”. I’m not kidding! What on earth is the “Brown” race? Box #23 is “Legitimate” Yes or No. The entire back of the birth certificate is “Affadavit To Be Accomplished In Case Of An Illegitimate Child”. One day I’ll scan it, for now I’m just shaking my head.

my first passport

So here we have all the passports since then, the latest one expiring next year. The first one looks like I just came from a squash match, but I probably did — I played squash almost every day at work. Looks like 1997 was the only time I paid attention to my hair. Apparently my eyebrows were attacked by a pair of tweezers in 2002 and I probably hadn’t had a haircut in over a year. By 2007 new passport regs had kicked in and as a nation we slid back to photo technology circa 1999. Note the funky new maple leaf by the words ‘passport’, though.

The current one also has a really fake-looking picture, ironically, despite all the newfangled security measures — including the one where the passport holder is not allowed to smile.

passports, age 18 to 39

Canadians like to complain about the cost and hassle of a five-year passport since we are pretty much alone in this world of 10-year passports. However, good news for you people: Passport Canada will be issuing electronic passports in 2012 and offering a new 10-year option.

Personally, I like starting a fresh book every five years and renewing my picture. After all, my address has changed with every passport, but my next passport will be the very first one with the same address as the previous. Amazing!

Below is an old International Driver’s License, which I’ve only ever used once when some young (and crazy) Italians demanded I show it after my rental car bumper touched their bumper in Geneva and they wanted to make a claim against my insurance company. They wouldn’t accept that my rental car was covered under fleet insurance rather than an individual policy number and took it upon themselves to write down every single number of every single document I had. My theory is that one of them borrowed her mum’s car without asking, went joyriding in Switzerland with a couple of friends and now had to explain why there was a chip in the bumper paint. Meanwhile, every 14th car in Geneva has a side mirror held together by tape, scratches on the door or a dented bumper. (In Italy that would be every other car.)

international driver's license and citizenship card

The photo below the International Driver’s License photo is my citizenship card. I had this picture taken ducking inside during a snowstorm and it was so blustery my hair was out of control. I even look like I have a widow’s peak. Of course, this would be the picture for a card that doesn’t expire, so I’m stuck with it. Typical.

I also had to wait three months for the appointment to get the citizenship certificate renewed, and I was going to make that appointment by hell or high water! Consequently, I guard it even more closely than my passport since it is the ONLY document that shows I’m a Canadian citizen if my passport ever gets lost or stolen. I can’t get another passport without it. Two cards previous to this one was replaced in Calgary in 1991, where I had to borrow my friend’s car to drive from Banff to take the oath of citizenship again! Long story…

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us in London, 1999 (what a terrible scan!)

In a few hours I’m getting on a plane, but this isn’t going to be a couchsurfing trip, or anything like my birthday trips where I meet tons of new people, sightsee, and zoom around on trains, planes, and automobiles from one city to another. I don’t even care what the weather will be like, or what we’ll eat. I’m going to visit my best friend of nearly 19 years, in England, hang out with her family, and it’s going to be a homecoming of sorts.

I was thinking all day today of our long, storied history filled with adventures, highs and lows and everything in-between. It’s enough to fill a book or two, and we’re not yet 40. We met in Edinburgh shortly after I arrived in London from Bangkok in February 1993. I was 20 and Lucy had just turned 18. I was looking all over my Flickr albums for photos of us back then, in those days when we wore mini-skirts and smoked cigarettes and watched way too much Beavis and Butthead on MTV Europe, but I have none scanned… they’re all still on film, and maybe that’s a good thing!

Lucy knows me better than anyone. She is the only person to have attended both of my weddings in Scotland (1993) and the USA (2005). I was in England for her wedding in 2004, drinking with the groom’s Belfast crew and videotaping them pranking the Best Man, who was fast asleep in his chair.

Amsterdam balcony

Lucy’s put up with all kinds of wackiness from me over the years, like the time we met up in Amsterdam in 1999 (above), after we’d been out all night and I decided to go roaming the streets in search of food at 4am and returning at dawn while she was sleeping. Or the time we met up in London a few months later when, after a full evening of dinner and wine, I decided to go to the hotel lobby for cigarettes and a friend of one of the hotel staff offered to take me to the petrol station to buy some… he then took me on an impromptu tour of the entire city for the next six or seven hours, showing me each of the nine (?) bridges that cross the Thames and I arrived back at the hotel at dawn, when Lucy woke up. I don’t think much surprises her anymore when it comes to me and my randomosity.

Over the years, our other reunion spots have included Brighton, Bergamo (Italy), Vancouver (we also did a side trip to Las Vegas), Glasgow, and Pennsylvania, with lots of reunions in London.

I moved back to Canada in 1995 after two years in the UK and we’ve had reunions in 1997, 1998, 1999, then a gap until 2002, where there was a reunion followed by an Almost Reunion. I was in Switzerland in 2002 and Lucy had a ticket to meet me in Geneva (we’d met up in London the week before), but she lost her passport the night before the flight. I had rented a car to tour around Switzerland and drove all the way from where I was staying with a friend in Neuchatel to pick up Lucy and my German friend Berit at Geneva Airport. Instead, Lucy couldn’t fly and I had to drive up to Zurich, where Berit decided to meet me at the last minute by train from her company function in Munich instead of flying to Geneva. What a malarkey!

2003 was Italy, 2004 was Lucy’s wedding in England, 2005 was my wedding in Pennsylvania, and 2006 was a really heartbreaking reunion in England, after David’s passing. The purpose of that trip was to help Berit put together her son’s memorial at Hamburg Airport. It was a tough trip. November 2007 was our last reunion, also in London, when I was enroute to Morocco.

It’s now four years later and this is the longest I’ve ever gone without a reunion with Lucy since we first met in 1993, when we were inseparable. Since then I’ve started a photography business that keeps me very busy and she’s had two babies I have yet to meet, so this trip will be happily filled with playtime and catching up on each other’s life. And in the meantime this blog will be inundated with baby and toddler faces…  it’ll also be my first time-out from work since September 5 and I can’t wait!

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beery sky over Liberty Village

I know what you’re thinking.

“She walked home in a heatwave. Dehydration makes people hallucinate.”
“She drank WAY too much beer yesterday.”

OK, first of all, those were 6-oz (0.17744-litre) glasses. And I shared them.

Ever heard of beer lace?

I’d never heard of it until I lived for a few months with two Irish lads in Sydney, Australia, in the years when I lived out of a backpack. They were serious drinkers — one drinking seriously (for taste), and the other seriously drinking (competitively). They introduced me to all manner of homegrown shaken-and-stirred concoctions, and sometimes they’d conduct the drinking lessons out in the field.

One night they brought me to a hotel pub to meet some of their mates and discover more Aussie brews. What I didn’t know at the time was that in Australia, a hotel is really a euphemism for pub, there are often no rooms, but equally often there are strippers. I don’t think there’s an adequate descriptor for the level of awkwardness I was feeling, standing with a crowd of men ogling a woman dancing buck naked only a few metres away from me. Not to mention I was barely 20.

But I digress…

It was during one of those auspicious occasions in my learning the ways of the Aussie that the Irish lads tried to teach me how to “read” lace — the foam patterns on the side of the glass when you take a sip. According to them, the “lacier” the side of the glass, the better the beer. They even went as far as to count the number of sips as evident by the layers of lace. They argued if you couldn’t count the lace, the beer was crap. Such is the wisdom that was imported to Australia and inculcated into the local drinking establishment. I came away enlightened.

Maybe it’s my imagination running away with me, but when I looked at the sky on the way home, I immediately thought of beer lace. And my beer educators — one of whom also taught me how to player snooker-style pool (along with Lachlan). It’s funny how much trivia sticks in the brain after 20 years!

sky over the Queensway

last light over the Queensway

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For the first month I dog-sat two raucous Irish setters who barked incessantly and drove the neighbours mental while their owners were in England. During my lunch break I’d have to race down to the house to walk them and sometimes I’d have to chase them in the woods to get them to come back. They never listened to me! It was a tough gig, the dogsitting. I was also quite isolated and my mobile phone had spotty reception and mostly no reception at all. I missed seeing my friends in Vancouver whenever I wanted and it bugged me that I couldn’t call them except from the house landline. With all the free time I suddenly had, I spent it at the gym — that’s about the last time I was a dedicated gym rat.

On the upside, the house was new and spacious (I had the whole lower floor to myself) and there was a great beach below the house. I spent a lot of time down there with the dogs:

One day I happened to have my camera with me and encountered the biggest jellyfish washed up on shore that I’d ever seen. This thing was so enormous I preferred to believe it was an alien life form that hurtled to earth and went SPLAT. You can see a dog paw print for scale.

I also lived in another house after this one, but I’ll save that for another day when I’ve got more time… I’ll leave you with a picture of me taken by my friend Marc on a camping trip less than a year before these pics. That was one of the best camping trips ever… and now looking at these old film scans I’m really missing the scenery of BC!

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Yesterday morning, I was shocked to read the recent obituary of someone who I had met nearly 20 years ago, a person who had become an early influence to my way of thinking.

It was March 1991, I was 18 years old and about eight months away from leaving Canada to travel the world. In the pre-internet days, travel information was hard to come by but I spent a great deal of time researching where I would go and how to support myself. Meanwhile, I knew the best way to get information was from other people, and I set about to meet as many people as possible. I was very shy at the time, but strong-willed.

My situation was that I had moved 14 hours away from my family to the next province and working as a kiosk attendant at a resort sports facility. University was a dream I had to give up, and the only way to cope was to make another dream: I was going to travel. I had been in Alberta for six months, living in relative isolation from family and friends and learning major life lessons on a regular basis. Three months before, the high school friend I was supposed to travel with ended our plans, our friendship, and left town. It stung, but I stayed and vowed to travel solo from then on. The idea was both liberating and intimidating at the same time.

Living in a town full of young people who were also transient workers, either fresh from university or taking some time off, was like walking into a social experiment. (I’d only attended religious schools, graduating in a high school class of 18 people; the larger of my two schools had a population of 200, K-12.) Suddenly I was surrounded by thousands of other young people who were raised much more liberally than I had been. Most of the time I felt completely lost in how to conduct myself. Or just plain lost.

Amidst this landscape of internal confusion, I played squash — a lot of it, all day long as part of my job and even outside of my work hours. It wasn’t just work, it was therapy, exercise, and social connectivity all rolled into one. I met dozens of people through squash, and that’s how I met him. He was in town briefly, heli-skiing. As if heli-skiing wasn’t enough physical exertion, he wanted to play our club’s best squash player. I knew all the good squash players in town, and I set him up with our best, because I wanted our best to beat this cocky American player and put him in his place. Between the initial inquiry, the squash games, and later over drinks in town, there were conversations. Conversations about everything, but centred on travel once I told him my plans to leave in November. He was quick with the advice, but put special emphasis on writing.

Writing? He hadn’t seen anything I’d written (I hadn’t written anything yet!) but encouraged me to write, for some reason. Not write for him or to him, but write for myself. It worked, because after he left I filled 100 unlined 8×11″ pages in 30 days flat. I couldn’t believe it.

The conversations continued as my departure date drew near. He gave me a 24-hour answering service number at the hospital where he was a doctor in residency and asked me to phone him whenever I reached a new place. I’d phone from bedbug-ridden hostels in Singapore, phoneboxes in the middle of nowhere Australia, lobbies of guesthouses in Malaysia with long queues for a single shared phone. Usually I would have to get his answering service to repeat back numbers to me because I was in a noisy place and there were so many digits mixed with the sounds of traffic. I’m sure the answering service staff thought it was absurd.

For the first few years the time zone differences were large and the conversations usually brief, unless I was in one place for an extended period of time or got lucky when the phone card would jam for a free call. He would always ask if I was safe, healthy, and writing. There was all sorts of doctor-ly advice. The phone calls spread further and further apart, spanning almost 11 years. I never saw him again, but kept writing.

In nearly 20 years that passed since that first conversation, I have written volumes, on paper and online. I probably would’ve started writing eventually, but at 18 I was preoccupied with more practical matters like saving money, how to get free drinks on my birthday, obtaining visas and an international driver’s license. In retrospect, this was the best time to start writing because it was my starting point. At 18 I was very green and everything was new.

Those first conversations in early 1991 lit a fire under me to commit words to paper, something I am grateful to him for. I didn’t follow ALL of his other advice to the letter, but most of it. I’m sure we discussed it in the conversations that followed, so he knew.

When I found the websites online dedicated to his memory, I could see that he influenced a great many people in his life, between the medical practice, sports, and whatever else he could fit in. He left behind a young family. It was quite amazing to me that in 20 years, he didn’t seem to slow down. He won sports medals in his 40s. Even lung cancer couldn’t make him stop playing squash. He was himself to the very end.

I can’t help but wonder how different life would’ve been if he hadn’t shown up at the squash courts those many years ago, looking out of place in a ski suit and ski boots. If all those conversations hadn’t taken place. I’ve become almost a habitual documentarian since he told me I should keep a journal. I’ve met countless people since March 1991, but he’s one of the few whose advice I still think about to this day. For more than a decade, whenever I left a message for him, it was returned very quickly. I’ve never seen such consistency. His patients and family and friends alike have commented that he was always their first call.

Looking at this website and its thousands of photos and entries, I wonder what he’d say. You’re welcome. Are you safe? Are you healthy? Are you writing? Rest in peace, doc.

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Seven years ago, I wrote a story on my blog about a night of debauchery in which I (unintentionally) incriminated those involved by disclosing full details such as their names, references to where they lived, and basically all the things one should never specify on the internet. Especially when the people were too drunk to remember anything. A couple of days later, I got a call from one of their girlfriends.

Boy, did I ever learn that lesson quickly! I logged into Blogger (this website lived on Blogger from 2002-2005), and changed the names to Sesame Street characters and I altered any identifying information to something well-known and silly. Because we all know Sesame Street characters don’t get embarrassed.

Then I read the whole story again and laughed so hard I wiped tears from my eyes.

August 3, 2003: I Am Man, Hear Me Roar

It reads like nonsense with the names changed, but it was all completely true. I should know, I was sober — unlike everyone else.

I read stories like that and wish I could retrieve more from the dusty drawers of my brain. I would like to chronicle them here before the memories fall out of my head. Let’s see if I can come up with one before the weekend’s over.

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In the spring of 1985 while moving to BC from Winnipeg, three of us in my family were in a single-vehicle accident along the Trans-Canada Highway, near the Alberta/Saskatchewan border.

It was the middle of the night. My dad was driving our beloved Volkswagen campervan when it blew a tire and rolled on the highway. I was fast asleep in the bed at the back and got tossed around like a sock in a dryer. Alvin was wearing a seat belt and asleep under a blanket in the passenger seat, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t adjusted for him but for my mother, which is how he ended up in the ditch.

Our belongings were strewn all over the highway. A semi truck drove by without stopping to help us, crushing our things before continuing along its way. I was not yet 13 years old but I remember the scene quite clearly, how angry I was at that truck. Then another truck came but this one stopped, and the driver helped my dad bring Alvin from the ditch to the cab. Alvin’s thigh was swollen like a balloon and they had to cut his jeans to release the pressure. A Greyhound bus filled with sleepy passengers came next and took us to the nearest hospital, which was too small to handle our situation. An ambulance then took us all the way to Regina General Hospital, where my dad was bleeding profusely from his head but was in too much shock to notice.

No major injuries, but Dad needed stitches in his head/ear, and Alvin broke his femur and needed stitches in his chin. The most I got was bruising and my glasses broke. Alvin ended up spending a month in traction, and I was bored and blind (no glasses!). The good people at the hospital let me make crafts (see the clothespin wishing wells?) and paint cartoons on the walls. I remember painting Garfield and Transformers. Even back then I was very myopic, painting wasn’t easy! But I had time.

Everyone was super-friendly, and Alvin had a great nurse — a really funny guy whose name escapes me. He shared a room with a kid about the same age who was hit by a car while riding his bicycle and in much worse shape than Alvin — he was lucky to be alive! The two boys were both strung up by wires and cables; they entertained each other during their long stay.

Alvin spent his 10th birthday in the hospital, so I believe the accident was early April 1985. After a month in traction, he came home to Winnipeg and spent a month in a body cast!

Even after a rather traumatic episode, I remember Regina and the hospital and the staff with fond memories. They took an awful situation and made it more than bearable.

Thanks, Regina!

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Somewhere, and I’m not entirely sure where, there is a journal with this whole story in it. The one thing I do know is that it isn’t here in my house in Toronto because I’ve rooted around for it a few times. It’s probably in a box stored at my father’s condo in Surrey, or it could be in Socar‘s apartment in Vancouver. It’s definitely not in Pennsylvania anymore, if it ever did make it there amongst the assortment of items stuffed in luggage cross-country. I’ll have to see what I can conjure up from memory. And, if I ever finally get all my things together under one roof (it’s been 5+ years and it hasn’t happened yet), I might even dig up that travel journal, which is one of several, to see if I remembered all this correctly!

Next weekend is Chinese New Year’s, and since I won’t be here I thought I’d scan a few photos from the one time I’ve actively celebrated Chinese New Year — 17 years ago.

In January of 1993 I was on a little island called Tioman off the east coast of Malaysia. I had a very loose plan that I’d formulated while lying in a beach hammock for the better part of a week. There I would read books, listen to music, watch the waves crash on the beach and think about the future. The most pressing item of any given day was keeping the monkeys from stealing our clothes and avoiding the giant lizards that would jaywalk across the paths between the beach and the hut. I had time to think about what my next step would be, and I’d just decided that next step would be to eventually reach Penang and buy a plane ticket to Britain. Penang is on the northwest side of Malaysia, so I looked at a map and opted to head west and follow the coast north instead of taking an inland route.

Originally my one-way ticket from Australia was Sydney-Auckland-Singapore-Kuala Lumpur, but after the frenetic pace of Singapore I escaped to tranquil Tioman and chose to do the rest overland, skipping the Singapore-KL leg altogether. I had no real timeline except my money was running out, and Malaysia is a developed country and therefore not cheap.

In Mersing my plan was to negotiate a lift to Melaka. I’d spotted a few travellers who were also on the Tioman-Mersing ferry with me, and I asked them if they were heading to Melaka. I was in luck! There were two German guys, a Dutch girl, and a Canadian guy from Richmond (south of Vancouver) — one of only a handful of Canadians I met while overseas and ended up travelling with.

They were all heading to Melaka for Chinese New Year, but that meant we would need to hire a car (and driver) that could fit five people PLUS backpacks. It took a while since we were in a crowd of people at the ferry terminal with the exact same idea and most of the cars were too small, but — hallelujah — we finally found a driver with a Mercedes who would take all of us. I’m sure it wasn’t legal, but we were crossing the country after all, and there was some urgency to the situation, the situation being that practically the whole country was hitting the road to Melaka, too. If we were ever going to make it there and still have a place to stay, we’d better hurry.

We hurried, alright… to a series of near collisions! Every 40 seconds! I had to shut my eyes nearly the whole way to Melaka, except my whole life was flashing before my eyelids, all 20 years of it, so I alternated between a) covering my face with my hands every time I saw the bumper of another car careen in front of our taxi, and b) watching in abject horror as the driver yanked the steering wheel over to pass other vehicles ALONG THE SHOULDER. Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea except he wasn’t looking for other vehicles doing the same thing. Everybody was doing the same thing! Malaysian highways are mostly good, believe it or not (they collect tolls, which is an unusual sight — a Muslim Malaysian woman with a headscarf in an ultramodern toll booth on a pristine highway in the jungle), but when they’re jammed full of vehicles, it’s anarchy! I also hitchhiked in Malaysia, but it wasn’t until after the madness of Chinese New Year.

Since I was the shortest in our group, I was assigned to the middle space between the two Germans, but imagine six people jammed tightly in one vehicle overflowing with backpacks that didn’t all quite fit in the trunk. Seat belts? What seat belts? Our visibility was compromised, and so was our ability to do anything but hope that our breakneck speed would get us to Melaka instead of send us into the ditch or into the path of an oncoming car. We were swerving all over the road and weaving in and out of traffic while hanging on for DEAR LIFE.

[The windmill is a throwback to Malaysia's colonial days, they were ruled by the Dutch in 1641. They were also ruled by the the Portuguese in 1511 and the British in 1795.]

Since I’m writing this 17 years later, the outcome was obviously in our favour, but I’ll never forget that crazy hellride between Mersing and Melaka. It was epic! Hours of epic! (3-4 hours, according to this local.) By the time we reached Melaka it was very late at night and I believe it was the Dutch girl who we were counting on to get us into this particular guesthouse. This part’s fuzzy, but I think she’d stayed there before and had rung the owners to tell them we were on our way. Somehow I doubt they were expecting five travellers, but we were five paying travellers and money talks in these parts.

I’m sure we all slept like babies that night.

The next day, which was the official Chinese New Year’s, we celebrated being alive to celebrate Chinese New Year’s. There were a couple of English blokes staying at the guesthouse who joined us in the evening when we headed out to participate in Melaka’s New Year festivities. In the darkness and crowds we lost one of them to the deep ditches along the side of the road that carries all manner of waste, and the only reason I know this is because we didn’t see him until the next day when he informed us of the reason for his sudden disappearance. I would’ve felt more sorry for him had I not been recovering from my own sorry state, which I’ll get to in a minute.

The group of us wandered the busy streets of Melaka, searching for a party, and we found one: the other English lad (the one who managed to avoid the ditch trap) saw us walk by and waved us into this restaurant. In the top photo, he’s the one with the glasses, beaming. Can you see why he’s beaming? Yeah, all that booze was FREE! I know what you’re thinking… how on earth could it be free? I suppose technically we couldn’t call it free, but the owner of the restaurant had fallen asleep in his chair, which for all intents and purposes, meant that there was no bill. Which made it free, right?

Using that flawed logic, we saw it as an open invitation to squeeze ourselves into the restaurant and eat and drink whatever was put in front of us. That night, it started out with peanuts and Carlsberg. Cases and cases of Carlsberg. Every time I looked over, someone was carrying a case of Carlsberg to distribute bottles around the restaurant. Malaysia has its own beer, but for some reason we were provided with an endless supply of the Danish stuff. Who were we to say no?

From what I can recall, I think the English bloke said the owner was already giving it all away for free, and after he fell asleep no-one could rouse him again. The generosity continued without him.

I don’t remember how long this continued, but I distinctly remember sometime in the evening bottles of Hennessy cognac getting passed around, too. By this time we were all extremely merry and probably in dire need of some real food to counteract the peanuts sloshing around in our bellies. I kept passing on the Hennessy because I was full of beer. Last I checked, cognac and beer aren’t in the same family and therefore I would be asking for trouble if I introduced the cognac to my beer-saturated system. No thanks, I kept saying every time the Hennessy crossed my path, no thanks, no thanks, no thanks. Thanks, no. No. Thanks. No. No thanks.

The next thing I vaguely recall is leaving the restaurant with the group and dancing in the streets. The firecrackers were going off left, right, and centre, and people had set up speakers to blare dance music. We were all dancing and saying Gong Xi Fat Choy! to everyone. That’s pretty much the last specific thing I remember when I woke up the next day. Oh, and another bottle of Hennessy appearing out of nowhere while we were dancing. They told me later that I said yes to that Hennessy, for some reason, after saying no to all the previous Hennessys, and combined it with a few puffs of someone’s spliff. Let that be a lesson to my 20-year old self!

I was feeling so rotten and inhuman I spent most of the next day in bed at the guesthouse. I had some company, though, since the English lad who fell in the ditch was also convalescing. He filled in the blanks for me: apparently I was shortly incapacitated by that Hennessy (assisted by all the preceding booze et al), and the others couldn’t carry me all the way back to the guesthouse. They had to hitch a lift with a car for my semi-conscious body! The amazing part, in my view, was that they were able to recover my flip flops (each went its own way) in the big street mess, my daypack was fully intact with contents accounted for — passport, money, the new music player I’d spent all day haggling for in Singapore, the camera I spent a second day haggling for in Singapore, and everything else.

The only casualty of my foolishness in Melaka was my dignity. I’ve had many misadventures abroad, but that particular incident ranked pretty high on the foolishness scale. But I have lots of good memories of Malaysia, especially the food, the scenery, and the kindness of people, especially when I was hitchhiking there (stories for another day). Whenever I make it to Denmark, however, I will drink anything BUT Carlsberg…

Video for today: Bill Cosby again, in one of his classic comedy performances about drinking

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