Had a big rainstorm a few days ago, and during it, I happened to glance out the window and saw a mushroom cloud in the ocean. I went to the other window and took this video. The black water is all the runoff from the streets plus three dubious looking culverts that just dump onto the sand, and flow into the ocean. Seeing that has made it easy to not go into the water now. We have found some amazing shells while walking on the beach, but will happily wait to go snorkeling and swimming somewhere else.
In better news, we finally closed on a deal with the landlord and will get to move into our permanent housing on Sunday Oct 15. We’ve been in this lovely beach front place (the 22nd floor) for a month now, and I am ready to live someplace where we will have a King-size bed so Erik doesn’t have to sleep diagonally to fit and I can finally stretch my legs out. Also to have a real desk with real internet! That’s been a significant issue since the internet cuts out about every 90 seconds some days, and I can’t seem to get anything done.
We’ve booked our first off island trip - to a little Thai island called Koh Lipe that is billed as a snorkelers paradise! Booking our travel was tricky, since we take a 40 min flight to Langkawi Island (which is a vacation spot on its own) then take a ferry out to the island, which also involves a boat transfer since the island’s dock is too shallow for the ferry? Maybe something is lost in translation but I’m excited to see how it all works out.
We had a fun hike through the Penang Botanical Gardens yesterday. It was the first weekend that I have actually had enough energy to go exploring, so it was fun to be out of the house. There was such a variety of plants and flowers that I had never seen and it was beautiful in a jungle-type of way. Whoever started the Botanical Garden had a very expansive scope, and I’m not sure whether they didn’t anticipate the amount of upkeep such a huge park would entail or whether funding dried up, as many parts of it are overgrown. There was even a desert area where they had built a roof to keep the water off of the cacti and agave plants (some of which were definitely thriving).
Monkeys are common in this part of Penang, and there are two types…the naughty monkeys (macaques) are generally considered a nuisance, and can actually be aggressive in their attempts to steal food and shiny things. These are the brown ones and we’ve been cautioned not to make eye contact. We saw one yesterday climb down from the roof where we were drinking coconut shakes, look around for people, climb up onto the seat of a scooter, keep checking for people, then steal a bag of food and race onto the roof. He promptly dropped the plastic bag the food was in, then climbed back down to sit on the scooter again and rifle around in the basket to see if there was anything else it liked, before the scooter driver came back and shooed the monkey away. Another one kept waiting for the guy who was making coconut drinks (by hacking on the top of a coconut and putting in a straw) to deliver them, and he would jump in and take any coconut pieces that had been left or that were in the bin where the tops of the coconuts went. My video isn’t awesome, but it will give you the idea.
The black monkeys generally avoid people and spent most of their time up in the trees or climbing on wires…they are black and are Dusky Leaf monkeys. We saw several in a very high tree in the park that had no branches until half way up. To get down from the tree, one monkey slid down, like you would on a fire pole, another monkey leapt from the tree to another, ala Tarzan, and a third one kind of combined those two tricks and leapt half off to swing from a not very thick branch.
We discovered a little path off the main trail that went up into the woods, so we decided to explore a little. There were sets of stairs, and we’d go around a corner, and there would be another set and another. It started being comical. I started taking pictures of each new set. At a certain point, we realized that we wouldn’t make our lunch appt with some of Erik’s coworkers without turning around. I took some video of the sounds of the insects and birds on the hike.
I’m going to start a new feature I’m going to call “Seen on a Scooter This Week” where I hopefully get a picture to post of the sometimes bizarre, unsafe, and unique ways people transport items or other people.
Our winner this week is a kid we called Power Ranger when we saw him from behind. He’s holding onto his dad who is driving, presumably to or from karate. As we get up close and eventually pass the scooter, we see not only the kid in the back (which is not unusual) but discover a smaller child up front (also in karate attire) with his arms draped over the handlebars, watching a video on a phone. Unfortunately, we were going to fast to get a picture of the boy with his phone, but you’ll get an idea from his seating position:
Oh, and Erik’s blog is awesome, and he’s taken some pictures I haven’t - check it out - and have a great week!
If you are bored, and a glutton for punishment, you can read about the disheartening experiences I’ve had this week too. It’s just generally depressing, but as I want to keep it honest, I’m keeping it in the blog. I can laugh about it now, but it was a fairly traumatic day.
This is my third attempt at writing my blog in the last 2 weeks. Each time I’ve been stymied by a combination of factors: screen fatigue primarily, but also overwhelm, exhaustion (haven’t been sleeping great) and mental blahs. I’m still fighting remnants of the virus Erik shared with me the week before we moved and Penang’s air quality hasn’t helped. Apparently Indonesia burns its forests this time of the year to prepare for planting so we get a lot of their smoke. I went to the doctor (all by myself, took a Grab (taxi)) and she prescribed and provided (no separate trip to the pharmacy) antihistamines, prescription cough suppressant, a mucinex-type medicine and refilled my thyroid meds for a grand total of $40.92.
It’s been over a week and I can tell that I’m getting better, but I still have some days that my lungs feel tight. I needed refills on my depression meds as well, but learned that Malaysia doesn’t have the same meds, so she recommended I go to a psychiatrist to figure out the right meds to replace what I’ve been on.
There are three private hospitals in Penang, which our international insurance recommends over the public hospitals, so I picked the one that will be closest to our permanent condo (its called Gleneagles). For each trip out by myself, I’ve preplanned excessively - getting everything out that I need to bring with me, scheduling time on the calendar to call the Grab with enough time to get down to the lobby and adjust for traffic and the wait time for the Grab to arrive.
The email confirmation from the hospital noted that the doctor’s office was in Block B, so I typed in Gleneagles Block B. I couldn’t find an established location for Block B, just the Main entrance. Thinking that the hospital could be the size of St Vincents or Portland Providence and that if I ended up at the wrong drop off location I could spend a lot of time walking around trying to find the right spot. After more searches, I saw hospital and Blok B and chose that one. The drive was beautiful as we drove through a super ritzy neighborhood which jived with the private hospital vibe I was expecting. I was so proud of myself for doing another hard thing on my own.
The first thing I noticed is that there was no air conditioning, and it was an open air campus, kind of like the Kona or Lihue airport, and all the signs were in Bahasa . I finally found an elevator, but was extremely puzzled to see that there were only two buttons: G and 1. There had been signs to Blok A and C, so I wondered if I maybe had been walking into the wrong wing. The place was like a maze, and I soon started seeing patients in beds in the breezeways, and old equipment or furniture laying in stairwells. I even saw a hand made sign that said “Keep out: SPORES” on one door.
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| Note the words ECG are spelled out on the wall using electrical tape |
I kept asking people where the doctor’s office might be, showing them the confirmation email I received, and being told to ask at a desk up ahead, or someone else. Then its 3:30, my appointment time, and I finally spot a sign for Dept Psikiatri. I go up to the window and ask the guard about the address (again showing the confirmation email), and tell him that I had an appt but I can’t find the dr’s room. He stares at it for a long time, then points to the hospital name Gleneagles and says “this is Penang General Hospital, not Gleneagles.” I was late and at the wrong hospital, and sweating from all my walking. It was 3:45 and I didn’t know what to do, so I decided to see if maybe the doctor would still see me. I called another Grab, and he drove super fast, and I made it to Gleneagles within 5 minutes.
This hospital has A/C and signs in English and I race up to the second floor and find my doctors office and burst in, expecting to have another window where I showed my insurance card and a waiting area. Instead, it's just the doctor sitting at his desk in his office that is also an exam room. He is startled by my appearance, and I explain quickly that I was late and had a 3:30 appointment. He asks me if I’ve been to registration already, that I should have a white sheet of paper.
I go back downstairs, find the registration desk where a very patient woman helps me get registered. There was a whole thing about me not having my passport, and not being able to find the picture on my phone and not being able to remember how to attach it in all my discombobulation. It was excruciating and I won’t make you read it. Finally, she makes me a file and sends me upstairs with it. I knock this time, embarrassed by just bursting in earlier. I learned that the common practice here is to wait in the general waiting area outside the doctor’s offices and that registration will send the doctor a message, and then when they are ready they will open their door and call your name.
The doctor is very kind, very soft-spoken and I have to change gears completely and start talking about when I was diagnosed with depression, how I’ve felt since I’ve been in Penang, what the family history of mental illness is, etc. I learn that, in fact, this hospital was just barely approved to prescribe Wellbutrin (one of two places on the entire island), and another one of my meds (Trazodone) isn’t available in Malaysia. It’s unclear to me whether its not allowed due to government regulation or just not easily accessible, but “we just don’t have it” so we have to talk through some replacement options.
After a 45 min appointment where I mostly talked and he mostly listened, he sends me to the in-hospital pharmacy/cashier where I watch a video board with numbers on it to see when my prescriptions will be ready or when I can take my turn to pay. It looks a little like Bingo, but you end up giving the prize money to the cashier instead of getting any yourself. I get called up to the pharmacy once for them to tell me that they don’t have the same dosage pill that I was taking, so I’ll need to take four of theirs to make the right dosage. I will need 335 pills total for my 3 month supply. They don’t have that many in stock, and am I okay with taking the equivalent of a rain check and picking up the rest when they receive their new stock?
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| I was #2078…it took a long time for them to count out all my pills |
Finally I finish and pay (not cheap this time - my medications are still expensive even over here). I go outside to call a Grab and click Gleneagles hospital as my pick up location. The app tells me to walk to the pick up point, which seems extraordinarily far from where my blue dot shows on the map. I walk across the entire length of the hospital parking lot, and my dot still hasn’t changed. Thinking that I’ve entered the wrong location again, I cancel that Grab, and try to schedule a new one using the “Use my location as the pickup point.” I’m watching the grab driver on the screen and he isn’t coming close to my spot, and then it says that he’s arrived, and I’m looking everywhere and not seeing his car or his license plate, and calls me and asks where I am, and when I tell him he starts yelling at me because I’ve chosen the wrong pick up location and need to learn how to use the app. I hang up and start crying and text Erik that its not working and I’m never going to be able to get home. He calls and tries to offer words of encouragement, but he still has no idea about my other fiasco trying to get to the right hospital. I call a third grab, and in a miracle, when I select use my location, the pick up point and my blue dot match. In fact, the Grab had just pulled up to drop someone off, and I was in the car about 2 minutes after I made the request.
I think the driver had seen that I had been crying as he picked me up, so he put on some soothing piano music and I felt so much better by the end of the ride. I am glad that I was being watched over, because I generally felt like I was lost and never going to be found…the Mother’s Day Massacre Part II. If you don’t know that story, just ask when you have 15 minutes to hear about how I got separated from my family on Mothers Day in Tiananmen Square.
Till next week!
So proud of you!
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