We belong to three very active societies in Kuching, which provide access to a treasure-trove of information.

Last week, we did orangutans in museums. It's a bittersweet story: Remains of orangutans captured in Sarawak in the past feature in museum collections worldwide, and help educate people about our contemporary biodiversity crisis. Presumably these are responsible museums, and include alongside the specimens a discussion of 19th-century ethics. Museums are much more self-challenging than they used to be, I noted during our last Europe trip.




Another excellent reason for living here is the plethora of cultural experiences that just happen along unplanned. This week we finally got round to visiting the interior of Tiong Hock Kiong, whose exterior transformation we've been documenting for a while now:







And we also popped in, for the first time, at the little shrine on Lorong Ang Cheng Ho, which looks like nothing at all from the outside, but is fascinating inside:



We checked out another branch of Zus this week. The one at The Hills (and therefore handy for Goceli, our current cheese-purveyor of choice):



Towards the end of last year there was talk in Malaysia of boycotting Zus, on the grounds that the old guy on the logo was assumed to be Zeus, and therefore supporting this local coffee brand was "equivalent to believing in the existence of the Greek god". Personally, none of that would ever have occurred to me, but there we are... Anyway, the CEO explained to everyone that the old guy is Kaldi, the Ethiopian shepherd crediting with discovering the revivifying virtues of coffee.

We just like the coffee, and the opening times are convenient...


Serious considerations ahead, so let's start with a couple of cats. There's a very moany one, and a very leggy one:



A friend told me recently that she enjoyed reading about other people's perspectives on life and ways of thinking. She asked me how to find my blog. I gave her the link, but commented that she might well find it superficial and disappointing. Yes, it's a blog that records our travels, which may or may not be interesting to others. But for many months of the year it's a blog for people who want to know what it's like to live in Kuching. Actually, that needs modifying: What it's like to live in Kuching for people of a certain origin, age, income, and set of inclinations. Because everyone's experience of the city is obviously going to be different. But I hope the blog at least gives people who don't know Kuching at all a bit of an idea of what can be found here. A lot of people in other parts of the world find it hard to imagine a city like this. They know about Asia's mega-cities, but they find it hard to conjure up the mixture of tradition and sophistication that can be found in a city of this size.

So that's why the blog is as it is. Whether that's what it originally intended to be, I'm not quite sure. What happened? Life happened...

I'm upfront about major life-events, but I don't tend to include much philosophical stuff in these posts. There's maybe the odd thought in the reviews at the end of each month, usually something that has struck me from the month's reading. But generally PT blog entries are a run-down of walks, food, culture, and activities with friends. Superficial, like I said.

A lot -- too much -- of my mental energy is spent worrying away at questions like these: How much worse is the world going to get before it turns the corner back towards some degree of sanity? Will the road to the corner be so long that the corner vanishes before we get there? How long should we stay here (where "here" is understood both as here in this flat and here in Borneo)? How long do we have before we're caught out by major conflict or serious (uninsured) illness? Where should we go when we leave?

But I don't put any of that in the blog, because I don't know the answers to those questions, and a post about them would be a big pile of nothing. Whereas I do know the answer to questions like: What noodles shall we eat next? So that's what I write about.

(It's also because I don't know the answers to the big questions that I spend a lot of my time escaping into books. But that stuff gets housed over on The Velvet Cushion.)

I often wonder about the usefulness of continuing.

But while there are still noodles, I guess it's still worth it.

Talking of which...







And so to the rest of the week's gallery:













Small things...