Happily Ever After

Some time, ago, Bridget Clay and I drank pink Cava in front of 'Bride Wars' and cried because we couldn't afford champagne, or even Prosecco on shitty teachers' wages, and it was evident that at least one of us was going to die alone with cats.  Since Bridget is a dog person, things looked pretty bad for me.  Possibly in the same year, I asked my mother what would happen if I never got married.  Some mothers would have dismissed this, laughed it off as absurd.  My mother, ever the honest realist, simply replied, 'Well, Emma, some people just aren't meant to get married.'  I cried.  In a pub.  Whilst my father nervously asked the waiter for more ketchup.

For a long time, my profile picture on Facebook was thus:

I think you get the point.  To make matters worse, I'm a raving feminist, consider most men below me, and turn to violence if I ever feel that the female gender is being oppressed/put down/objectified in any way. I didn't realise how vehement I was until a young student told me her intention of getting a tattoo of the famous war propaganda poster, depicting a land girl saying 'We Can Do It' on her thigh, because I had, like, y'know, taught her about feminism and stuff.  Oops.  Permanent bodily mutilation for the sake of The Cause... Emmeline Pankhust would have been proud!

Thank goodness, then, that Frenchie is as crazy as I am, and through his strange perception of the world finds my insanity charming, my rage endearing and my stubborness a 'challenge'.  This morning, whilst sporting the baby-vole eyes of extreme fatigue and glaring at him over my cup of Earl Grey, thinking early morning death thoughts, he looked up, smiled in a melting sort of way and said, 'You look pretty.'  He is clearly a LIAR, or completely deranged.  I hope the latter because that, at least makes two of us.

If you haven't met him yet, then here he is:

Luckily, the rock he bought me to propose with, was much prettier, even if it was slightly smaller, and he mostly wears a shirt and jeans to go to work in, rather than this strange, elongated boob tube. Facial hair is similar.

It would have been rude to say no after bullying him into it, so of course I accepted, and ended up with a rather nice sparkler.  Tadah!

Yes, it is on the wrong finger, because officially the proposal was a surprise (in reality, it was a matter of conquest and aggression, whereby I lead my armies of Insistent and Deceptive Questioning into Frenchie's undefended realm of Having Never Planned a Proposal Before) and Frenchie chose the ring all by himself because he is very clever and artistic, and a little bit camp, and whilst he managed to pick a beautiful design, he was also convinced that I have monster great big giant fingers (which I do, to be fair), and so it doesn't fit on the right finger/hand.  Romance and surprises come at a cost, alas: just look at Romeo and Juliet.

If anyone reading this, by the way, wants to spend their lessons/working hours/lectures/retirement time doodling wedding dress designs for me, surrounded by floating love hearts and chirping birds, please do so and submit your entries to ElizabethSheppardWeddingPlans.org.uk and my sister will get back to you whilst I despise myself and resist the temptation to sit down with all designs surrounding me in a cloud of weddingdressness by searching frantically for my 'G.I. Jane' DVD.

I now spend my weekends in Singapore, which have become too passé for a blog entry every time: forgive me.  However, I will endeavour to blog at continuing regular intervals whenever something mundane and Vietnamese/Singaporean amuses me.

For example, today, when coming through passport control at Saigon airport, I put my handbag on the immigration counter.  As the security lady was checking that the frizzy haired eighteen year old was in fact the very same person as the radiant, sophisticated fiancé standing in front of her, my phone beeped to tell me that I had a message.  I ignored it, as it is possible not to be a slave to technology and leap at any handheld device the moment it makes a noise/vibration, but she stopped what she was doing and looked at the bag, blankly.

Immigration Lady: you have a message.
Me: GUFFAW.  Yes.  I do.
Immigration Lady: me too.  *Reaches inside important looking drawer, removes Samsung, checks and replies to Samsung-chat message*
Me: *thinks: maybe I should have smuggled some drugs this time?*  Oh, it's my fiancé.  (Because now I only ever receive communication exclusively from him.)
Immigration Lady: you are a teacher?

How bizarre.  Can you imagine the Immigration Officer at Heathrow doing that?  Israeli immigration would never stand it.

In other, beautiful news, RoD and I discovered that Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Romeo, Juliet, the Nursemaid and John the Baptist had not in fact, been flushed into the sewers of Vietnamese hell, but had simply been relocated to an Appropriate Pool of Joy on the other side of our apartment complex!  How exciting.  They now live in the Playground Pond where small children can fall off apparatus into the sand, cry, and then be soothed by them... and maybe healed if Jesus is feeling gracious enough.  What great news, right?  I was very, very, very happy to see them, and RoD and I have agreed to continue saving fish from the Plastic Bag Man to release them into their new happy home.

"If you are for scuba, then I am a pea!"

So.  Having checked out of the Sheraton, Happy and I waited for a boat back to Bali for quite a long time, rented some motos and zipped along the Balinese coastline until we arrived at our second dream destination of the trip.  As I had been party responsible for the booking of this hotel (I clicked the button on the internet), I was quite pleased with my success, and repeatedly asked Happy if she had noticed how wonderful the hotel was.  Happy was very patient with me and confirmed over and over again that yes; indeed; Candidasa was a sleepy holiday village with dramatic coastal scenery, and the hotel pool was, indeed, a dream.

We spent our first day in Candidasa whizzing around the roads they use for all the National Institute of Tourism post cards: the rice terraces and winding roads and green and mountains were exaclty what I had always imagined Bali to be like, so we were very pleased that the island had lived up to our naive and stereotyped expectations.  We saw lots of beautiful things on our ride, and also a group of fully grown men splashing around naked in a river.  Sadly, we were riding along the bridge above them, so we couldn't join in, but in all honesty, we were both so surprised to see this, that we simply rode past with our mouths open and then stopped a little way away to giggle like scandalised school girls.  Photos of the hotel and the terraces will come, soon!

We discovered - through a very curt and reprimanding email from the owner of the dive shop - that we were supposed to have turned up to dive that very same morning.  Oops!  I felt terribly, apologised profoundly, and we turned up (after I had locked us out of our room) only five minutes late the next morning.

We spent the next two days with our instructor (who was aweome), Darta, learning how to float in the lotus position under water, how to get over our disapproval of snorkels (they are a pain), how to throw ourselves off the back of a boat without giving ourselves concussion, how to avoid floating, uncontrollably to the surface and how to high five under water.  Most of these are recognised PADI skills.  High fiving is one of the hardest skills to master.

On one occasion, I decided to throw a spanner in the works by having a panic attack at around 6 metres down.  Don't judge me, guys: there's this horrible skill where you have to take your mask off completely, whereupon water rushes excitedly up your nose, and your brain says 'DON'T BREATHE IN THROUGH YOUR NOSE; IMMEDIATE DEATH WILL FOLLOW!', but your nose gets confused, and so do your lungs, and then your brain gets confused, and your legs say, 'There's nothing else for it, guys, we better abort and kick up,' but then a very small, calm voice in your brain, that I imagine to look like Patrick Stewart on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, gripping calmly onto his chair's armrests as the ship is thrown back and forth under a Klingon attack, and some minor character goes flying through the air behind him, screaming for his mother, says 'No; no, breathe through your regulator, don't kick up.  This too will result in immediate lung explosion, and therefore death.  Breathe through your regulator, Lieutenant, finish the skill.'  My eyes were also upset at this point, as well, because I had to close them and therefore was panicking in suffocating darkness.

Anyway, I didn't die, but I did stress Darta out for a few minutes.  Happy, on the other hand, had been floating around quite peacefully, waiting for me to finish the skill and hadn't noticed a thing.

During the two days, we saw these cool things:

White tipped reef shark - not dangerous at all, but pretty cool!

Manta shrimp.  Surprisingly dangerous, and very weird looking.

Frog fish.  Ugly.

Stone fish.  Ugly.

Nudibranch.  Silly name.  Pretty slug.

And passed our PADI certificate, so now I can join the leagues of people who spend all their money on dive holidays.  Hoorah!  So, whilst it's not that Li Hi, I at least scraped back some form of Li Highness and can once again consider myself Extreme Royalty, even if I'm the impoverished cousin of royalty, selling off their land to car dealership owners to soften the blow of ancestral bankruptcy.

Remember: if you are for scuba, then I am a pea!

Rinjani: Nemesis

I wish this was a happy post, but there are many sad parts to it.

Since the age of 18, I have successfully lived up to my Chinese alter ego, Li Hi Shan, by taking on hardcore and impressive adventures, surviving, climbing up very high mountains and lots of steps, and generally preparing myself to aspire to the lofty heights of insane activities upon meeting my Li Hi destiny in the form of Risk or Death.  It is with great shame, therefore, that I recount the next episode of my Indonesian adventure to you, however, I feel that it is essential to my artistic authenticity to give a true and honest account of all my goings-on in Asia.

Happy Flower had decided that a lying-around-on-a-beach holiday was not for her, and so had booked us on a four day trek up to the Rinjani crater on Lombok.  Teaching being the busy occupation it is, I did not give the trek itinerary the attention it deserved and arrived in Lombok, amazed and delighted by the views of paddy fields and the obvious ease at which this four day stroll clearly promised.  I had packed my walking boots, I had packed two of Frenchie's t-shirts into which to sweat, I even had the sports bra of awesomeness, purchased for me by my sister at Christmas as a reward for surviving the Angkor Wat half marathon and proving that I was, truly, Li Hi.



Day 1
Imagine my distress, therefore, after three hours of walking or so, when, nestled under a tarpaulin lean-to eating some impressively cooked noodle lunch, when a monsoon storm suddenly exploded from the sky.  Happy Flower and I watched the rain come down steadily, and then turned to our guide, Singa, to explain to him that nothing that we currently possessed, was waterproof, and when, please, was the rain going to stop? After an hour of sitting, becoming increasingly more concerned, the rain had not stopped.  Three other, fully prepared Irish trekkers helped us to fashion half-waterproofs out of pink plastic bags.  These, with the amusing aid of my well-endowed womanly form helped to keep my body dry for all of half an hour as we trekked vertically upright.  After the four hours that we spent walking through a cloud, however, the plastic bags were as much help as they had originally seemed to be, and every single part of me was soaked to the skin, and becoming colder and colder by the minute.  Very miserable and embarrassed we were, especially as both Happy and I claim to be 'experienced' walkers.

Half way up our vertical ascent after lunch, it transpired that we had the worst guide in the history of mountaineering, ever.  Poor Singa got cramp, and within about ten minutes, was nowhere to be seen.  Happy and I continued, regardless, knowing that to stop moving would mean freezing to death.  However, when the thunder and lightening started, I called to Happy, explaining that it made me a little anxious to be standing in the middle of a storm without a guide to be seen.  We waited a moment or two on the mountainside, Happy reassuring me that the storm was a long way off.  Lightening, followed less than two seconds later by tremendous thunder claps, had her taking back her words, however, and we had to agree that we were right bang smack in the middle of the storm.  Quite scary.

We eventually made it to camp, whereupon we realised that our fingers felt very strange, we had no tent, and our porters had arrived too late to get any dry firewood.  At this point we were incredibly unimpressed by Singa, and Rinjani in general, although the view was spectacular now that we were out of the clouds.  We therefore explained that due to our lack of preparation, his general uselessness and the miserable weather, we would be cutting our trek short to two days.  We would summit in the morning, and return to the village the next day.  We slept, miserable, cold, warmed only by brief candlelight, hoping that some of our clothes would dry out a little bit by the next day.










Day 2
For those of you who know anything about altitude, you will know that it stops you from sleeping properly, gives you weird dreams, stops you from breathing properly and is generally a bit tough on the old morale after about 2,500m above sea level.  You will also know the phrase 'climb high, sleep low'.  Strangely, though, Singa and his company thought it appropriate for us to sleep at the highest point of our trek between day 1 and day 2, at 2,600m.  I therefore got absolutely no sleep, waking up every thirty minutes or so feeling like I was suffocating.

At 2am the next morning, we were woken, donned our head torches (I had to borrow one - I didn't read the itinerary) and began the summit ascent to 3,750m.  It was dark, it was cold, I was tired, there was sliding volcanic ash and slate under foot, it was straight up, scrambling with hands and feet in the dark.  At around 3,500m, the wind began to blow and the sun still wasn't up.  Frankly, a lack of willpower and an excess of altitude made me sit down at around this point, on a rock, with my hands up the sleeves of my inadequate jumper.

Happy: what are you thinking?
Me: I'm thinking I'm not going to make it and I feel horrible.
Happy: oh, Emma, are you sure?
Me: yes, go on without me.  Take the camera.  Take pictures.

After about four minutes of sitting, feeling miserable, I realised that to stay would mean pneumonia, so I gave Singa clear instructions to tell Happy where I'd gone, and started off down the mountain on my own.  There are few moments in my life where I've felt so bitterly disappointed in myself.  I've never not got to the top of a mountain, and not doing so on this occasion was nobody's fault but my own.  Sad times.

Half way down, however, the sun came out, and I was able to see this view:

I stopped to chat to two Australian boys, who had also not made it, and who lifted my spirits a little, and eventually returned to camp to practice my 'overjoyed' face for when Happy came down, victorious.  However, when she did finally arrive, the disappointment was too much, and we were soon sitting, staring at the view, in hugs and tears.  At this point, some Idiot Foreigner thought he might invite himself into the conversation.

Idiot Foreigner: hey, did you make it to the top.
Me: no, no I didn't (brush away tears).
Idiot: oh... why not?
Happy: (encouragingly) she made a really good job of it - she got right to that bit just before the last really hard bit.
Idiot: huh.  Don't you feel kind of bad about yourself that you didn't make it?
Me: ... yes.  I do.
Idiot: it's just, I thought you were injured or something.  Why didn't you make it?
Me: ... because I'm pathetic.  Go away now, please.

Refusing to completely accept my failure, Happy and I decided to trek for one more day, and walked down to the crater lake, and sat for a whole afternoon in a cloud, reading, sleeping, and generally getting tent cabin fever.







Day 3
On day 3, we walked up the other side of the crater, and thank goodness we decided to keep going for an extra day.  The views were extraordinary:







We had a very happy walk for about five hours in the morning, and then just after lunch, it began to rain again.  This time, however, Singa - his saving grace - had managed to source some makeshift waterproofs for us.  Happy was presented with a ripped poncho, and I with one of those foil wraps that you cover yourself in after a marathon.  It was gold.  After I had fashioned a makeshift cape for myself, I looked like a cross between a superhero and an Easter egg.  However, it kept my body bone dry.

Towards the end of the day, we were walking through dense jungle, where the path was just a narrow gully cut out by tree roots.  Within minutes, this path had become a gushing river, and we found there was nothing for it but to walk with free abandon through the water, getting mud and grit in our shoes and continuing, recklessly, regardless.  All conversation stopped: a combination of the pounding rain and the metallic shuffling, crinkling sounds of my super-cape meant that communication was pretty much impossible.

We were very pleased to eventually be picked up by a very posh car, and to explain to the driver that we would be going to the first five star hotel that we saw.  The lovely people at the Sheraton, Senggigi did well to hide their amusement/disgust when we rocked up, muddy, wet, stinking to heaven, hair bedraggled, insisting that they had a room for us, and that we take that room immediately.  How sad, that this is the Li Hi conditions that I - spoilt expat brat - have grown accustomed to in such a short space of time!  Obviously, I will have to plan something of Li Hi and epic proportions to prove to myself and the world that I am not a soft little dough ball of privilege, and could take on Rinjani - my nemesis - any day, if I so chose to.

Singapore-Padangbai

I am most flattered that some of you lovely readers have felt snubbed, disappointed, offended, even, that the bloggy blog has not been updated for some time.  This is not due to lack of awesome activities and adventures being undertaken, rather an excess of them and therefore insufficient time to sit down and tell you all about them.

Now that the Easter holidays are upon us, I have taken the equivalent of a jaunt to the South of France, and am in Bali with Shining Shamrock.  We flew here via Singapore, a city-country I am now well acquainted with, having visited it all of three times in as many weeks due to Frenchie's insane job.  Shining Shamrock and I discovered yet more delights in the shape of tea rooms, outdoor sculptures, art galleries and egg men.

Egg man!

Our most exciting discovery, however, was copious amounts of food and alcohol in a restaurant called 'Crostini's' in the Muslim quarter.  Shamrock is naturally drawn to dark alleys with grafitti scrawled all over the wall, but much to my relief (and her disappointment), in Singapore, these are not the hangout spots of unsavory ladies and hoodlums, but rather 'cool', 'trendy' and 'funky' bars and restaurants.  In a word, the most pretentious alleyway in all of Singapore.  However, both Shamrock and I come from solid, working class roots, and delight in anything that makes us feel rich, spoilt and expatty, so we ate artistically created crostini, drank cocktails and beer, and made friends with the chef, who then took it upon himself to feed us complimentary dishes all evening. 

Amazing and delicious.  Everyone should go there and visit James the Crostini Chef.  He also gives you complimentary Chinese names with every meal.  Mine, obviously, is Li Hi Shan (Hardcore Mountain), and we christened Shamrock as Kai Xin Hua (Happy Flower), as she shall now be known forever more.

After savouring all the delights that Singapore had to offer us in a very brief weekend, Happy Flower and I then boarded a plane to Bali.  The journey was uneventful, other than, whilst buying an Indonesian sim card in the first sim card shop I saw to adhere to Frenchie's international phone calling demands, a young Australian man came hurriedly up to the counter, asking if the shopkeepers had seen a brown envelope.  Calmly, the shopkeepeer pulled an envelope out from under the counter.  "Drugs?"  I asked (joking, obvioulsy), "Or passport?"  The passport suggestion was also a joke, but the young man, looking quite relieved said, "Yeah, passport.  Man.  Too easy!"  I'm not entirely sure what 'too easy' means, maybe, 'it was too easy to steal someone else's identity and buy passage into Australia by organising an under-the-counter passport heist', but I tell the story to show you that it is not just me who is a fool with her passport.  18-year-olds who don't know any better and have never been travelling before also leave their important documentation in silly places.

Happy Flower and I spent two days lounging around in the pool of our hotel in Padangbai, drinking beer at the swim-up bar, watching Indonesian bands sing U2 whilst singing along enthusiastically in a small square, making friends with Peace Corps volunteers from Chicago and teachers from Scotland/Spain who were now teaching in Shanghai, and sweating off half our body weight whilst sunbathing in hidden coves before getting the boat over to Lombok for a trek of epic proportions, that we didn't realise was a trek of epic proportions...