Monday, October 17, 2005

Incarceration!

Well well, I've set foot in Penang and it certainly has been an interesting 24 hours.

First, the follies of the day:
1. The booked taxi didn't arrive
2. AirAsia only allows 15kg checked-in-baggage, with RM14 per additional kg.
3. The waiting line for passport control started outside the actual entrance
4. To make the flight, the AirAsia people collected our passports and asked us to head to the gate as they clear the passports... and they lost mine.
5. Everyone on the plane thought I was to blame, including this weird guy from Senegal who poked me awake and waved his hand about to indicate he wanted a pen, which I passed to him and which he promptly put in his mouth.
6. The plane landed one wheel at a time - left, then right.
7. The Autogate automatic passport control had an error which ended up with me virtually incarcerated between the barriers with a red light flashing, "Please ask for assistance" (the officers were held up with the weirdo from Senegal.)
8. The officers were suspicious that my viola was a bomb.

And the better parts of the day included:
1. Some old friends
2. Chinese chopped chicken
3. Hong Kong chee chong fun
4. Lo mai kai
5. Bak kut teh
6. Pork-potato meatballs with turnips, Dad's recipe
7. After a month, finally remembering to place this link of free rare sheetmusic/scores on my blog. Check it out!

Also, if you haven't already heard the news of the discovery of a lost Beethoven piano duo manuscript, click on this link. There is a sense of cautious optimism in at least some music circles, because discoveries like this have been made before and eventually turned out to be fakes - unlike the famous Haydn forgery however, it seems this one has been authenticated at least to some extent.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the viola becomes a bomb part sounds interesting, once my cello bow was thought as an arrow after the scan...