It's been quite a busy week, as current weeks go.

On Easter Sunday morning, we went down to the river to see the sun rise.








The bit of the river we'd chosen was near the Mazu shrine that we visited back in October. Since then the shrine has been moved to make way for the building of a 20-storey condo...





Easter Sunday lunch was a delivery of Foochow Estay's Ba Ting Pork. A yummy hunk of pork, an egg, vermicelli noodles (but these are the wheat ones, not the rice ones), and a flavoursome broth. Everything from this shop is tasty.

I found out this week that the Italians call Easter Monday "Pasquetta" or "Little Easter". It's also known, very beautifully, as "Monday of the Angel" .

For us it was the occasion to try a different rendition of low-carb hot cross buns. These involved a version of the popular low-carb pizza dough that I use quite frequently. (I didn't bother with the sweetener, the egg wash, or the icing. ICING? Hot cross buns don't have ICING!) They weren't as spectacularly good as the bun-based ones we had last week (which were so amazing as to be hard to beat). But they were nice, especially hot from the oven, and accompanied by butter and chia marmalade (chia seeds, orange juice, and orange rind).


On our Tuesday walk along the waterfront, we became aware of a far greater variety of boats than normally frequent our riverbanks. A little bit of investigation revealed that they were all there ready for the launch, on Wednesday, of Sarawak's own Coastguard, which is going to be working "with other maritime agencies to protect the state's coastal waters from encroachment".

It certainly made for vibrant photos.






On Thursday we celebrated the two-year anniversary of our MM2H visas... And what a strange two years they've been... Last year, you may recall, we celebrated the first anniversary in exile. And currently, there's very, very little of Sarawak that we're actually at liberty to visit. (The CMCO has been extended. Again. To 26 April this time... Jeez...)

Still, we had a nice day. We set out before dawn, and walked to the Botanic Garden, which we've not visited for many a long month. We had coffee at Indah. We had pork porridge at Min Hong Kee. These are all things that used to be routine parts of our day, but now happen very infrequently and hyper-carefully, because we're always busy weighing up risks, rewards, and inconveniences, and most of the time it's just easier not to do anything.






Otherwise, the week brought a lot more effort on Nigel's part to get my new computer up and running. (It's really ace, though. I don't remember ever being so enthusiastic about a new computer. Usually by now I've discovered something annoying. But so far my new laptop and I are all sweetness and light. Long may that continue.)