31-Dec-2019
What's most obviously happening at the moment in Kuching is rain.
Rain. Rain. Rain.
Not the kind of rain that pours down and then clears up, so that you just hang on for a little while, and then go out to do what you've got to do.
And not the kind of rain that drizzles persistently but inoffensively, so that you can just get on and do stuff anyway.
This week's rain has flicked around with irritating unpredictability.
On, then off. Light, then heavy. Heavy, then REALLY heavy. A little tiny bit of sun, then no, sorry, it's urgent, I've got to rain again...
Photos taken while waiting for the rain to ease off sufficiently for us to cross Jalan Padungan...
It's a bit wet at the moment even for a water hen...
But this week, we've also had rainbow day:
And we've had a movie day. Totally alone in the big cinema by the riverside, we watched Habibie & Ainun 3, the third in the series of films chronicling the life of former Indonesian President Habibie and his beloved wife, Ainun. It admittedly verges on the hagiographic, but I enjoyed it (I think it's better than the second in the series, although the first remains the masterpiece, I think). Framed by a family dinner where Habibie's grandchildren want to hear about their late grandmother, the story takes us through Ainun's early years as a medical student (definitely not an easy path for a woman to follow in those days), and her romance with another student (which comes to grief partly because of his lack of nationalist feeling for Indonesia).
And there've been all the usual little snippets of city life:
Waiting for Nigel to emerge from the barber's
Now that's what I call a good supply of steamed buns...