On Facebook:-
June: Rachel please check your email re cottage weekend away
Gmail: -
YaoHoong to June, fowarded to Rachel: Weekend away in Dorset?
Rachel: Oh, yes let's go!
June: I think you gotta drive
Rachel: Ok, no problem!
YaoHoong: Cottage booked, everything set for Friday.
This is literally the ONLY bit of information I got from this supposedly weekend away in Dorset that I was somehow invited to.
Read and reread the top 6 lines.
Yes.
So I was home in KL for 10 days and this was the whole communication I got from the top two poeple, one being my flatmate, the other being the organiser of this event.
When I got back from KL, this was STILL only the information I have up until 2 days before the Friday.
Call me dumb, call my spontaneous, call me whatever you want, but then I seriously did not even ask about the thing (and also received no further email updates about it) right up til the point when I realised that I cannot NOT know where I am driving to with WHO in my car.
SMS:-
Rachel: I have NO idea what is happening.
Mel: 800 bucks, 9 of us, 2 nights, leaving Friday evening. Prob Liwan, me and JJ in your car
Rachel: I need a SatNav! Where are we going??
Mel: Me, Liwan and JJ have SatNavs on our phone. That's 3 for you.
Rachel: WHERE ARE WE GOING!?
....
Of course, the email update came through in the end, which I opened up, scanned for 1 second and closed it down again (only to be caught out later that I did not read the email as I had no idea where things were in the cottage).
So Friday night, 7ish pm, picked up my passengers, 1 VW Polo and 1 Toyota Prius set off for The White House at Kimmeridge.
2.5 hours of driving south west of London, a few missed turns, getting completely confused on the 101 roundabouts we had to go through, and receiving a phone call from the other car about this 'fog'that was non existent, we arrive safely at the intended destination.
YaoHoong: ....(whatever he said on the phone to Mel)
Mel: I have NO idea what you are talking about. We are in a very brightly lit road with visibility of 10 kilometres!
YaoHoong: .....(again insisting his case)
And of course we hit this fog later on the pitch black winding cliffside road that was the only way to the 5 bedroom cottage that we rented by the coast. Completely forgotten how to turn on the fog lights and dip my headlights etc, I drive on slowly with JJ's (the only male in the car) blood pressure rising through the roof.
JJ : TURN OFF YOUR HIGH BEAM!
...
We still arrive safely and I am after all sitting safely here writing about this.
I have to say, during that weekend away, I descended into my former self of being a spoilt taken care of little girl without any responsibility (except that of my passengers, but trust me, I am a doctor. And I have comprehensive insurance cover) and with no requirement of being the adult that I must now be.
I arrive, shotgun the room I wanted by dragging my best friend out of it, bounced up and down the stairs, dodged in and out of the 5 bedrooms, and explored the entire place like an excitable puppy (of Bassett Hound breed, must be purebred ok) out on his first walk in the woods.
It was, one word.
Awesome.
The first night was spent sleeping, as I had burnt up all my energy reserves of working and driving that day and woke up the next day to the sounds of people pottering about downstairs with the clang of pots and pans. This to me, was pure bliss.
The day was clear and warm and the sight of the sea just beyond the end of the garden almost made me run down towards it whooping and yelling but what the heart tells you to do, the brain intervenes and reminds me once again that I am too old for this sort of thing.
The smell of Nasi Lemak wafted through the house and I skipped downstairs only to find myself taking over the cooking of one pot of rice.
Eh, which part of 'rice cooker' did we forget?
Yes, being the Asians we are, we had to have an Asian meal for breakfast.
While I had a fry up and Eggs Royale in the morning when I visited the ang moh county of Cornwall, we had Nasi Lemak on the ang moh coast of Dorset.
Mel did an exceptional job of making curry chicken and sambal for breakfast (all prepared the day before) and HuiChin and I spent a happy 30 mins stirring and adding water to the rice that was soaked in coconut milk while adding liberal amounts of salt much to the chagrin of the others. Or maybe I spent a happy 30mins and HuiChin spent a hot and humid 30mins. But for sure we added the salt together as one despite YaoHoong breathing down our neck telling us NOT to.
Eh, we are girls alright, cooking is our thing.
So the 9 sat down to a breakfast of curry and rice and the 9 then quickly set out on our sightseeing journey.
Jurassic Coast.
The whole coastline from Exmouth to Poole was declared as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We drove to Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door, one of the attractions along the Jurassic Coastline where we parked up on the cliff and had to walk down towards the beach. Even the random grassland where we parked had a Pay & Display ticket booth where the minimum pay is 2pounds!
Extortion.
And once again, with childlike wonder, we hopped, skipped and jumped down the many steps towards the pebbble-y beach.
Boys being of XY chromosome had to challenge the sea, only to get their feet wet when they couldn't outrun the waves. I stayed a safe distance away. Being hero and touching the waves is one thing, risking my shoes and socks to get wet in this sort of weather and having to drive in them is another.
We spent about 2 hours there just wondering about and taking photos. To my absolute disdain, no one brought a camera except for me. My trusty old Canon 7 mega pixel digital camera was the all important keeper of memories that 2 days while my other friends whipped out their iphones, HTCs and BBMs to capture the essential moments.
But no, not this time.
It was of no surprise when I uploaded my pics and discovered that they were of sub-standard quality.
Anyway. Back to Dorset.
After Jurassic Coast, we headed off into Wareham for lunch. When I mean lunch, I mean tea/dinner. The 2 pubs we stopped by had actually stopped serving food (this is what happens in the countryside, everything comes to a standstill after peak hours) and we finally went into a small hotel in town and had what I would call - massive amounts of food whose pure reason for existence is to make someone fat.
The massive but sooo tasty seafood pastaYou can say I am a sucker for board games.
Because I am.
I forced everyone to play Cranium and discovered a few untapped talents while we were at it.
So, Liwan is actually good with Play Dough and can build realistic items out of it. She is deemed a highly commendable candidate for pottery and glass blowing.
Wei Perng is a master puppeteer where he successfully controlled the movements of another human to convey his toughts. A ventriloquist lession will serve him well towards bursting into the entertainment scene of puppetry.
I think the main issue we sussed out after our mammoth game of Cranium is that - we ALL had huge gaps in our vocabulary. Many a time one had to confirm the meaning of a word with another and I also fall victim to the problem that English just ain't our first language.
I mean it is, but what we speak is so rojak that I am forced to submit to the fact that 7 years in the UK has not increased my language skills as much as I would've liked it.
Firewords to celebrate Guy Fawke's NightThat night we had a mix of left over curry, frozen pizzas and a grilled chicken for dinner where only the hungry ate.
And yes, I was one of them.
We spent the rest of the night doing only one thing we know how to do - play Bridge.
Oh and also watched X Factor.
Liwan's 25th. Blueberry cheesecake with strawberry jelly topping by MelI went to bed at 3am this time and woke up the next day once again to the sound of people preparing breakfast.
I wanted poached eggs right, but this is what I got:
2 semi poached ones and 2 failed ones that I tried to make in a pot of whirling water.A phone call to my angmoh mates did not help in the slightess as the eggs were nothing like what I had in Cornwall. I'm quite sure it is the quality of the eggs that caused the problem and not my skills.
Definitely. No doubt about it. Cornwall has got better hens that lay better eggs.
After another massive breakfast of croissants, pain au chocolat, fried/poached eggs and leftover curry (again!) we decided to go to Monkey World - the Ape Rescue Centre. Or more like I told them TripAdvisor recommended this place as #1 on their list of Things To Do in Dorset, and hence we ended up paying a tenner to enter the amazing world of monkeys.
Once again, I dive back into the fantasy world of a child where the sight of playgrounds excite me. Indeed, it wasn't only me who clambered onto the swings and see saws on the playground, indeed it wasn't only me as all 8 of us 25-26 year olds (there was only one 19 year old) pressed our noses against the glass panes in search for Rou Rou the chimpanzee.
A lot of the primates were saved from slavery and human abuse; some used to work in fairs and TV shows, some used to be lab experiments and quite a few were found wondering in Taiwan where they were kept as pets but later escaped.
It was fun to watch what was meant to be our not-yet-evolved-selves act so much like a human, it was fun to squint and point excitedly when we spotted the stumped tail macque (or whatever you call it) and it was definitely fun to growl at the small ape that was looking at us comically out of the cage as if we were the specimens that it had come to see at the zoo.
And there were those orang utans that will knock back on the glass when you did and those that stared straight back out at you as if it was looking at itself in the mirror.
Funny. I can think of some people who would fit right in there next to that chimp.Another hour or so of monkey hunting led us outside and the drive back to London.
Starting the trip with a meal of Nasi Lemak, one can only end it in a just as Asian way- duck rice at Gold Mine.
Oh yeah.
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