It's been a great Christmas! Our Southeast Asian Christmases, to be fair, have all been thoroughly enjoyable, but there was something extra-special about our first Christmas in Sarawak.

Monday was mall-and-movie day.

It was a somewhat disorienting experience. We're heading for Europe next month, so while the sun blazed outside, we were shopping for big boots and rainproof trousers and thermal tops. And we watched Farmageddon, which is quintessentially British and totally delightful.

Christmas Eve brought the grand purchase of The Bird.

The Christmas fowl in my childhood days was always referred to portentously as "The Bird", and for my parents, the early part of Christmas Day, while I exulted over new Christmas toys, revolved around its roasting. Complicated calculations were needed to determine its weight, and the time it would take to cook in mum's minuscule oven. In my teenage years at home, The Bird was a chicken (and just once, I believe, a goose). But when I was small, The Bird was a turkey. There were seven people for Christmas dinner in those days. My parents, my brother, and I, plus my grandmother and her companion, and a great-aunt. My personal memories are mostly from child-height: grandma's puffy ankles, thick stockings, and old-lady lace-up shoes. But family history records the voracious appetite of the companion, and the TV-intolerance of the great-aunt (any programme apart from the Queen's speech was met with a wave of the hand, and a dismissive "You can turn it off for me").

But I digress...

We have a number of suppliers of barbecued meat and poultry along Jalan Padungan, and I'd decided several weeks ago that the best centrepiece for our Christmas feasting would be a ready-roasted duck. I'd seen them in the racks, very tasty-looking -- and very entire (in fact I woke up the night before Christmas Eve wondering how I was going to deal with the head...)

Of course I needn't have worried. The vendor chops the duck up very expertly, arranges it neatly in a big box, and packs it into a bag along with two big pots of sauce.


The duck is large... Surprisingly large, given my memories of cooking a duck in the early years of our married life (into the oven had gone a fowl of reasonable proportions, and out had come a whole lot of oil and a bit of poultry the size of a sparrow).

But this obviously doesn't happen with Padungan ducks.


Having lugged it home, we decided that we really ought to get cracking on it.

So I pulled all the meat off the bones, discarded any bits I couldn't recognize (because, at the end of the day, I'm still urban and Western), and ended up with eight generous portions of duck (two for Christmas Eve, two for Christmas Day, and four for the freezer). Plus, I boiled up the bones for soup, which we ate today. I think it can fairly be said that this little quacker did not die in vain.



To shake down the duck breakfast, we did our Kubah Ria walk (ferry across the river, walk the north bank, walk the relatively quiet road, back across the bridge, and into town via the kampungs).


For Christmas lunch, we opted for the Hong Kong Noodle House, on Jalan Padungan. We'd never been here before, but the menu looked interesting, and it was full of customers, which is always a good sign in foodie Malaysia.

For just over MYR 50 (about GBP 10), we had an awesome (albeit overly ample) lunch:




Today, Boxing Day, brought an annular solar eclipse. It's certainly an imposing phenomenon. Though the sun was shining, it was perceptibly darker and cooler outside, and by means of standing a big tub of water on the balcony, Nigel got some impressive photos (we are slightly too far north to have witnessed the full circle, but even so...)



Finally, a few more pictures from this wholly delightful week:

They've been sprucing up the area between Reservoir Park and the new museum. Contrast the mask before and after:


Or the graves, similarly before and after:



And there continue to be picturesque cats everywhere:





Love this place...