What a strange, shifting, up-and-down week this has been...

Let's take things in order:

We continued to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Multi-day celebrations are so the way to go at the moment.

Having watched the latest episode of Kuching Old Bazaar, and become nostalgic for Carpenter Street (still out of bounds for us at that point), we decided to incorporate Kim Joo's phenomenal pork noodles into our celebrations one day. Awesome, as always. And we tried his "peach gum", a sort of dessert soup with snow fungus, wolfberry, goji berry, and Chinese almond. Also awesome. (There are various recipes available on the internet. Here is one of them.)


(Meanwhile, the whole Kuching Old Bazaar playlist is here. Check them out if you haven't already.)

The anniversary piece de resistance was our balcony brunch. Really nice Cava (courtesy of La Boca Ria, that lovely little Spanish restaurant that I've often mentioned on these pages). And to go with it, pancakes and bacon, with garlic mascarpone and guacamole.

Followed by cinnamon apples and coconut cream. Yum.





It turned out that the weekend of our anniversary was also the point at which Sarawak fulfilled the criteria to move to "Phase 2" of the covid restrictions. So on Monday 12, it was announced that Wednesday 14 (Bastille Day...) would bring the reopening of many businesses, the return of dine-in, and the removal of the "neighbourhood only" walking limit.

We couldn't help feeling this was a bit premature. If it was only at the weekend that we could tick all the boxes, surely it would be sensible to hold off for a while, to see if this was a trend or a blip?

And sure enough, Monday 13 brought the news that we have the Delta variant in Kuching. Fabulous...

So dine-in was off again.

But the rest of the relaxation went ahead. And as of today, dine-in is back. While I know that stall- and cafe-owners are desperate to have their customers back, I really have to wonder whether this is a good idea...

Here's our graph for this week (until Thursday 15 July):


There's been an uptick in Kuching's numbers (bottom line), so that we're now worse than the rest of Sarawak, rather than better, and that's a pretty steep slope we're looking at. If we carry on like that, presumably we won't fulfil the loosening criteria any more. What then?

Meanwhile, we've heard no more about those Delta cases. Why not, you may ask. Good question... Given that it takes only 15 seconds for infection from this variant to be passed on, and every 100 people infected can infect 500-800 more, it sure would be nice to have a bit more information on the extent to which it's running round in our community...

Going back to the graph, you can see that the top line (the whole of Malaysia) is catastrophic. Tuesday 13 July -- 11,079 new cases, 125 deaths; Wednesday 14 -- 11,618 new cases, 118 deaths; Thursday 15 -- 13,215 cases, 110 deaths (bringing the total death toll now to a tragic 6,613).

Pretty much wherever you look in Southeast Asia, the covid situation is dire.

Thanks for that, vaccine inequality...

Malaysia is powering ahead now with vaccinations, but we really are in a race against time that wouldn't have been nearly so dire if we'd been able to get our hands on supplies earlier.


Anyway, it's nice to be able to walk a bit further.

We've been down to the river two days running, for the first time in weeks. So nice to see our river again... But I'll be sticking with the "survival diary" rubric for the next little while. It's not exactly a time for exploration.







Unfortunately -- there's a trade-off for everything, right? -- our neighbouring building site is back at work. So balcony time is going to become more limited again. That's a pity, as we'd really enjoyed making extended use of the balcony space.

I'll close with a tragi-comic cheese story.

If you follow this blog at all, you'll probably know that cheese provision is never, even at the best of times, one of Kuching's strong points. Well, the situation has become really dire. The last time we ventured into a supermarket, there was very, very little. Our usual online supplier doesn't do real cheese. Our alternative online supplier, which usually offers something decent, also had nothing.

Then a friend told us that one of the fancy grocery purveyors in Kuching had revamped its online presence. So we decided to give it a go. I'm going to omit the name, because this is not going to be a happy tale, and I don't like badmouthing people on the internet.

Anyway, on Wednesday, we spent quite a while consulting their website. A lot of things were marked "out of stock", so we obviously avoided those. But we built up a little list of things apparently available, set up an account, and submitted our order.

Back comes the message: "We are sorry, but we don't have the cheese."

What, we think, not ANY of it? Eight lines of our order were cheeses of various descriptions... The conversation continues:

"We have the Emmenthal."

"That's it? Really? Nothing else?"

"We have Emborg camembert. Would you like that?"

Definitely not, we think. Emborg do some nice things, but their camembert is not one of them. So we decline, and probe the stock situation a bit further.

In response, we receive several photos of shelves. It's utterly impossible to tell what anything is, or what it costs.

"Just send us the items on the order that you have, and refund the money for the rest," we say.

"OK," they say.

A bit later, there's another message: "We don't have the ham you ordered either."

Seriously... 

At that point, we contacted La Boca Ria again. "Your Cava was excellent," we said, "but now do you have any cheese you can sell us?" We tried not to sound too desperate.

They royally came up with the goods, with a veritable cornucopia of Spanish delicacies: 


Some of it is now in the freezer. We're rationing out the rest.

But look -- CHEEEEESE....!