Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I all I want to do right now is go home. My friends are arriving from various parts of the country to spend Thanksgiving with their families, students and teachers are off school Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to celebrate, people get together to laugh, play football, and eat delicious fall foods. It’s my favorite time of year and it’s really hard to be away from home right now.
Not much has improved at school since I wrote about the teachers who left. A week later, another cowoker left the country and went home, which was absolutely devastating because I worked very closely with him and his students. It also fell to me to tell his students (and our boss, for that matter), which made for the worst day I have ever spent in a classroom. We all cried, and I have never cried in front of students. And I don’t mean I dabbed at my eyes with a tissue; I watched the students mourn their loss, and it was terrible.
A new teacher for one of the classes showed up from Australia on Thursday, which was really exciting. She was with the students for part of the day on Friday, called in sick Monday, went home sick Tuesday, and called in sick again today, Wednesday. When I got home from the gym tonight there was a note under my door from her telling our boss that her “heart isn’t in it here.”
That was quick. (Guess it’s my job to break the news again.)
That should also give you a good idea of how things are.
Intellectually, I know why I came and I know why I’m here. I came to teach and to learn and I’m here to teach and to learn. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, I’ve got nothing. Mitch and I gave up a lot to move to Malaysia so I could try out teaching at an international school. We were talking very seriously about The Question, talking about a buying a house, talking about what we wanted out of life.
I can’t regret coming to Malaysia because I believe it was the right idea at the time, but there are days when I yearn to go back in time and change it all.
Phew, first week of school is over! It was only three days but wow, was it exhausting. You forget from year to year, you really do, and I always spend the first Friday evening of a school year thinking, “How am I going to do this for five whole days next week?” But I always do, so it must be possible.
It was a really great first week. My class is tiny right now (three girls, one boy) and we’re supposed to be getting two more boys on Monday, leaving it still tiny. I have to admit, though, having a small class makes it relatively easy to differentiate instruction. So far, the four students I’ve met speak excellent English. Two of them speak English at home (it’s probably the first language for one) and the other two search for and mispronounce the occasional word, but their comprehension is very strong.
One thing I learned this week from my year six students (equivalent to grade five in the US and Canada) is that insects are fascinating. They found three dead dragonflies and put them under bug viewer magnifiers to keep in our classroom and study. They also rescued a live beetle from the stairwell, named it Sticky because it stuck to the paper they used to lift it, and designated it our class pet. This led to a mini research investigation of what kind of beetle it was (a book from the year five classroom told us it was a scarab beetle) and what it eats (the Internet told us it ate plants and the book told us it ate dung). We went outside and picked a few leaves from the bushes in front of school and one of the girls made a box for Sticky out of paper. I poked some holes in the top and my kids eagerly showed off Sticky to every teacher and student who walked down the hall for the remainder of Friday afternoon. One student took Sticky home over the weekend, so we’ll see if Sticky comes back to school on Monday. Welcome to year six!
There are a couple particularly strange parts about school for me because I’m teaching primary for the first time. Firstly, the kids are tiny; I have to bend down to talk to them. Considering they’re 10 and 11, that’s not saying much, but I didn’t know what to expect coming from teaching seventh, ninth, and eleventh grade back home. Those kids are 12, 14, and 16 at the start of the school year and most of them are taller than me. In addition to height, it’s bizarre having to teach all subjects. I spent a good bit of today planning my first maths unit. Admittedly, I had to interrupt Mitch’s reading several times to ask him to explain things to me (sorry, children) but I planned a maths unit. Never in a million years did I think I’d be doing that.
Before I sat down to do school work today, which honestly felt really good, Mitch and I went to the botanical gardens in Old Town Seremban. See this post for more information on Old Town. After a brief miscommunication with the taxi driver, we learned that botanical gardens here are called lake gardens. The two we’ve seen (one in KL and one in Seremban) have been lakes surrounded by a park, so that makes sense. Here are some pictures of our walk around the park.
One of the most frustrating things about living here is the lack of sidewalks. Even relatively quiet suburban streets have no sidewalks. It’s just a road, perhaps a bit of lawn or a bit of concrete, and buildings. That makes it very unpleasant to try to walk anywhere, which only increases the amount of traffic because people give up walking because it sucks so much and just drive. Consequently, parks are refreshing places. We even found a street sign in this one! (Haven’t seen a real street sign anywhere, however . . .)
New York is VERY far away. Thank you, sign.
In addition to our first street sign (I’m not really joking about that), we also found the largest leaves I’ve ever seen. In my experience, the only leaves that come close are in conservatories and greenhouses.
As Mitch said, “This leaf looks like it belongs in Jurassic Park!”
And then Mitch put the leaf down, saw red ants crawling all over it, began to feel itchy, and found large bug bites all over his ankles. But it made for a good picture!
We walked all the way around the lake before taking a moment to talk about what was around us. The lake was lovely, yes, but there was industrial noise everywhere, there were cars just above the hill (the park was built in an artificial valley), the wooden picnic tables were made of concrete, the boulders were made of concrete. It’s hard coming from a city that has so much preserved natural beauty to a place that doesn’t. We know that there are naturally beautiful places in Malaysia (we’re going to plan a trip to Penang for our next long weekend), but I definitely miss the ease of walking on sidewalks along streets and running in parks from back home.
This is a prime example of what I don’t like in urban Malaysia – even green space is overshadowed and overrun with new construction and industry
We wandered through Old Town for a while once we were done with the lake garden (and I literally mean sick of walking through outdoor space so planned and sculpted, yet done poorly).
Cool Chinese building that we passed – Mitch guessed it was a temple and I don’t have a better guess than that
Tonight for dinner we ventured back into Old Town, bringing our four taxi rides today to a total of RM45, about $15. Dinner itself, though, only cost RM11.20 ($3.73) so it was a pretty cheap day by Western standards. Dinner was cheap by any standards and probably the best meal I’ve had since being here. No. 1 Top Curry House, we will be back.
We got two servings like this! And ate it all!
Today we learned that Indian food is traditionally eaten with the fingers on giant banana leaf placemats. We asked for all the vegetarian food they had and this is what we got. We also got an order of roti (bread), which came with three dhal and curry dipping sauces. I don’t have a picture because my fingers were full of delicious veggies, but you can find one here. Seriously amazing food.
Long story short, we’re learning a lot and trying to make it work. So far, I’d say we’re doing just fine.
It is a truth nearly universally acknowledged that alcohol can bring both joy and pleasure to meals, festivities, and socializing. (Coffee can, too, as does excellent food and good company, but none are the focus of this post.)
Malaysia is a Muslim country and devout Muslims avoid alcohol. As a result, we really didn’t know whether we would have access to decent beer, wine, or liquor while living here. As a coworker and friend at my school in Rochester put it, “All other things aside, what are you going to drink?” Mitch is a craft beer snob, an attitude I have definitely acquired under his influence. Unfortunately, we seem to be in the very tiny minority here, perhaps comprised entirely of the two of us. My expat coworkers are American, Canadian, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Australian so there is clearly a drinking culture present. We’ve already been out for drinks, in fact, which meant drinking Tiger out of tiny glasses full of ice so we wouldn’t actually need to taste the Tiger. Like all mediocre beer, it was better that way.
The upside of having expat coworkers with expat customs means that “Where the heck do you find good alcohol here?” is a perfectly reasonable question, just as it would be back home. I was surprised (that’s been a theme lately) to find out that Tesco (basically the British version of Wal-Mart) is the best place in town to purchase anything that can be purchased in terms of libations. I’ve heard rumors of duty free prices somewhere, but no one’s been able to find that outside the airport.
We finished orientation a little early today so Mitch and I decided to take a cab to the Tesco Extra (think Wal-Mart Supercenter) a couple miles away to check it out for ourselves. We were rather pleased with our findings.
Alice White is one of my favorite Australian wines. The store had The Stump Jump, too!
As soon as I saw this, I knew it was all going to be okay. This is not to say that I need todrink; I grew up in a household with wine and learned to appreciate alcohol for what it is – an excellent complement to food. However, creature comforts do matter when one is thousands of miles from home. Creature comforts don’t necessarily come cheap, though. Alice White at this store in Seremban, as you can see, is 49.99RM. That comes out to about $15. The same bottle of wine would cost around $7 back home. Ouch.
Harder stuff
The liquor selection was decent. Not bad, not good, but decent. They had something of just about everything one would need to stock a respectable bar. The shelves on the left had a respectable whiskey selection, too. Mitch is also a whiskey snob, a sentiment he shares with my dad, and he classified the whiskey selection as the best of all the liquor, but nothing impressive. Whiskey aside, they had Jose and Beefeater and we’ve seen Bombay Sapphire elsewhere (in little bottles with big price tags) so I’m satisfied with that. Again, prices were at least twice what we’d pay at home.
Finally, there was the beer. This is the most disappointing of all. We drank mostly beer at home and now we need to adjust to drinking less beer because it’s expensive and not nearly as good. Paying high restaurant prices for average beer is not a habit I feel like starting.
There were a couple gems like Leffe Brun and Hoegaarden, both of which I’d happily drink at home, but Tiger and Carlsberg seem to get the most attention around here.
Notice the “Tidak Halal” signs on the shelves – “Not Halal.” (That’s like putting a “Not Kosher” sign on shrimp or bacon. Anyone who cares already knows.)
Regardless of the alcohol situation, the real reason I’m here is to teach. We visited the school yesterday and there is a lot of construction left to be done. When it is finished, hopefully sooner rather than later as we have students starting on September 17, it will be beautiful.
The front entrance to school
Someone go to Roc or Old Toad and have a good, strong stout for me, please!
By Rebecca Michelle 