Aceh Part Uno - The touristy day

So I didn't put up my Aceh photos right away. I did NOT catch swine flu despite my stubbornness with the mask. I DID get food poisoning following carefree kampung food consumption. And this was followed by a flu which DID get me worried enough to go to the doctor but, Clean bill of health!! I suspect someone may have cursed me following my last post though. Anyhoo, this will be more like a photo blog so soak it in!

Taken from the plane cos i was struck by how picturesque the greenery was. The mountains kept making me think Lord of the Rings! More like the map that precludes every good fantasy novel rather than the movie, though.
This is the entrance (well, actually the exit) from the Great Mosque a.k.a Masjid Baiturrahman. Had some tourist time before the work so stopped by here. Wanted to point out the 'Muslimin and Muslimat' dress code sign above

And this is the mosque itself. I thought it was peculiar that it had a black dome. But saw quite a few black-domed mosques throughout Aceh. When asked, they didn't think it was for any particular reason.

Right, Muslimin-muslimat time. This is obviously me in all my ah ma glory. Mak Cik Fatimah (i mean me) was smart enough to bring a scarf along for just such an occassion.

Islamic architecture - i am a fan. But these lamps make me think more of old railway stations. I reckon this is the Dutch colonial history sneaking in.

Just wanted to note that the sign says 'Don't lie on the floor' somewhere, but erm... peek in the background. (i don't blame him though. The mosque is really cool and airy despite no fans on)

More architecture shots. Apparently a lot of people took shelter in this mosque during the tsunami and miraculously, while there was fence-high water around it, inside there was only knee high water. I put that down to the steps leading up to the mosque, but there's a story that a Chinese lontong seller ran in during the tsunami and he swears he saw whitish hands holding the water back. The man is now a Muslim convert.

This is a view of the centre of the mosque from the 'Women's Only' section. (I felt bad violating the privacy of these women but my Muslim colleague said it was fine to take photos) Directly ahead and to the right a bit is the pulpit (i can't think of a better word) bit where sermons are delivered on Fridays.

After that, we went to see this part of town called Punge where there is a memorial to mark the tsunami. It sort of built itself, as you can see from the photos below.
This electric company tanker ship got carried inland by the tsunami. Can you imagine how huge the wave must have been? For one thing, a ship this huge got carried. For another, this is 4 km from the coastline. There are about 3 houses underneath the ship and they couldn't remove anything from underneath it.

This is the ship in its entirety. It wasn't dragged to its final spot, but carried and them promptly dropped when the wave subsided. So the drag back to sea must have been MASSIVE which is why so many people had the clothes ripped off their backs.

This is the view from the ship. Where the tiny towers are, just before the mountains - yeah, that's kind of where the coastline is. Most, if not all the houses are new. NGOs did lots of reconstruction work and they tend to have different coloured roofs to signify who built them. (e.g. red is for Red Cross and blue is for UNDP... but i don't actually know which NGO is what colour)

Touristy shot with my colleague. I'm so shamelessly without my headscarf. *gasp* (and this is end of photos of day 1)

This is just the view from a stop on the 5-hour 4wd journey to our project site. Yes, it was a bum massage cos the roads aren't really that great. But you could be fooled into thinking that picture was taken in Cairns or Tasmania, no? It's a gorgeous place...

This photo actually cost me 16 mosquito bites. Along the same stop as previous photo (we were out of the car for maybe 15 minutes?) Definitely the record for most bites in shortest period of time.

Fruit sellers in Lamno market. I love fruit stalls! They look so gorgeous. Kuinis were in season and that was when i learned that kuini is different from mango. Although it looks the same, you can't mistake the smell.
A goat. Rummaging in the rubbish bin. He's a really healthy goat though. That's the bin outside the fruit stall so it's got lovely organic goodies inside him. But still. It really tickled me. A goat. In a bin. At the market. *snigger*

I'm gonna hold off for a bit 'cos this is a long post already. Still to come - Aceh part deux!

UnMasked. Gah.

Ha.
In latest news, following the outbreak of H1N1 in Malaysia, my parents promptly went to the pharmacy to buy me (and my colleague) masks.
(-_-")

But i still refuse to wear them.

And,apparently, my claim for swine flu to be less deadly than the common cold has apparently been refuted. But i can't find the article online. Hhhmm...

Be safe and healthy, everyone! (myself included)

Harken back to CPU Biology and World Issues...

I had meant to write about this when I read it... but i only just remembered.

McDonald's does McPHDs

David Fairhurst, the chain’s chief people officer, said that the company’s new power to award qualifications made it “a university in its own right”.

“One day I’d love to see us doing a PhD. I definitely think we can go as far as we can,” the Telegraph quoted him as telling the Financial Times.

Somehow, deep down inside this arts-embedded self of mine, I felt a twang of -- what was it, panic? despair? fear? -- as I realised my worth had just dropped once again.

People will no longer make arts students jibes about how we're gearing for a life serving greasy fast food.
With qualified McDonald's degrees,

WE WON'T EVEN BE ABLE TO GET THOSE JOBS...

Especially if we're concerned over artsy issues like GE food...

Oh, look. A convenient segue into the issue of genetically modified food!

Well, you get my take on it, anyway, I personally don't have a big issue with GM food. I see it like, instead of taking years to breed certain traits into things, you just use scientific surgery to cut out the desired gene and plop it right in there. Of course some of them are just pointless and self-serving (think glow in the dark pigs)

As if little Mr. Piggy didn't have enough trouble trying to get laid. Now she thinks he's Asian.

But most of our food is relatively cheap thanks to genetic engineering. Did you know that strawberries are made frost-resistant through a fish gene? Yup. Apparently it helps them resist the cold so your strawberries can last through the winter.
I guess my only issue would be that you never know which one of the genes taken will carry on allergies too. Wikipedia told me that some workers in cotton plantations started getting reactions to the GM cotton because there was a brazil nut gene inside. Turns out allergies are transferrable. So if you go into sneezing and rashes after buying a relatively safe t-shirt, it might be your peanut allergies kicking up.

Or swine flu. Oh look, another convenient segue into new diseases!

Last scientific nugget for the day. I was highly suspicious of this fact for the longest time, thinking that all this swine flu (oh sorry, H1N1) stuff is highly overrated and really due to hype. [Don't you find society at large has a morbid fascination with anything new? New iPod! Crazy hype around it. New Idol! Crazy hype... New disease! It's the latest thing on the block...]
Anyway, I finally found something that backs me up:

Most swine flu cases so far have been pretty much like normal, seasonal flu. Swine flu and seasonal flu share symptoms, and spread the same way.
In a typical U.S. flu season, an average of 36,000 people die of flu or flu complications, and about 200,000 people are hospitalized. Swine flu hasn't come anywhere close to that.

My point being, new disease: we don't know how it could mutate and how best to fight it - fair enough. But if you're going to worry, there's a higher chance of you dying from the common cold than from swine flu (oops.. H1N1). And while we're at it, a higher chance of me dying while driving on my way to work than dying on an airplane.

In conclusion, mum and dad (not that you read this), I REFUSE to wear a face mask at the airport!

Oh look, final convenient segue into flights!

I'm flying to Aceh for work in about 2 days. This will be good because:
- a travelling job, what's not to love?
- out of the office, what's not to love?
- it will be really great to see what i would call ground zero of the tsunami, 5 years on
- we're supporting a project that cultivates seafood. Read: Free crabs, lobsters and fish.
- you are now deadly jealous of me and will curse the diseases of the world on me.

Anyway, expect not more than the usual silence, failing which, those be some mighty curses.

Onan the Barbarian (teehee.. couldn't resist typing that)

Ah! Silence for too long!
Well, nothing that great is happening in my life... I'm waiting for travels to come (May, June, July all look promising at the moment!)

However, I did just read a highly enlightening book entitled 'The Year of Living Biblically' by A.J. Jacobs (i've liked his writing since i read the Know-It-All: his quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica), which is about this dude who decides, 'Hey, i'm going to live the Bible as literally as I can for a year'. It's kind of sweet really, he's doing it so that he can have a good moral pillar to raise his son by.
Anyway, it's taught me a whole bunch of obscure rules in the Bible (mostly Old Testament), that are, well, worth reproducing here:

• You shall attach tassles to the corners of your clothes.
• You shall bind money to your wrist and the Bible between your eyes (well, more like a small piece of scripture on your forehead)
• You shall not trim your beard and sideburns.
• You shall not touch any woman who is unclean (time of the month) or come into contact with anything that she has touched [i thought this was kind of sexist]
• You shall not touch any man who is unclean (has released seed in the past day) or come into contact with anything that he has touched [but the Bible is fair]
• You shall not wear mixed fibers (in particular wool + linen. This is called shatnez And there are shatnez-checkers whom you can hire to check your wardrobe and make sure you are not unwittingly sinning)
• You must shower after sex

Well, i'm of the belief that these are all sort of rituals that made sense back in their day. There's a theory that pork is not eaten in Jewish and Muslim cultures because at one point in history, something which is the equivalent of modern day Avian flu must have hit and pork was a 'dirty' meat so it was easier to say 'it is forbidden' rather than explain disinfection to a mostly illiterate society.

Then again, there was that Islamic book i read, '20 most common misunderstandings of Islam' that said there was evidence that eating pork and carnivorous animals in general affected your behaviour and made you more aggressive. I'd go for the former theory.

Anyway, strange as they are, i think there is method to the madness. For example, the whole unclean thing. When it's just women and periods it feels sexist. But when men are included in the equation, i feel a bit more sated. But then the explanation was that it's actually in reverence of life, because everytime a woman menstruates, it's like the loss of a potential life. (And this is millions of potential lives for everytime a man, erm... you know.)

An aside: There is the story of Onan, who was punished by God because he 'let his seed spill on the ground'. Apparently this has been misconceived to mean he was a dirty self-loving man. The story is, he married his brother's widow (as was customary then) and while love-making, he didn't go all the way and instead 'let his seed spill on the ground' - coitus interruptus or the old pull-out-before-you-spill-out tactic. [He had a reason, any child from the union would have been counted as his dead brother's. Complicated old customs...] God was angry because this was disrespectful to the life that had been wasted and to his wife too (wasting her baby-making abilities, i guess). And thence the term onanism was born.

Back to my point. In some strange way, i do have a greater respect for life now. I know this is a disgusting thought, but menstruating just isn't the same anymore. It sort of feels like a little foetus is bleeding out of me for a week. Highly disgusting but also makes you think "Gee... them eggs should be made into babies, not just expiring each month." And how does that make you boys feel when you spank the monkey?

So, the Bible.

I can't agree with everything in it. I mean, a lot of things are open to interpretation and people have been as liberal or as literal as they see fit. (i.e. animal sacrifice. Not practiced anymore because the Bible, or rather the Torah, stipulates that this can only be done in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Which was destroyed way back when. So can't sacrifice. Oh, convenient!) But there are definitely good points to be taken out of it, as with most if not all religious text, so I say choose that!

And i have also discovered that I am not an atheist, as previously suspected, but more aptly, an Agnostic. (definition from Wiki)

Agnosticism (Greek: α- a-, without + γνώσις gnōsis, knowledge; after Gnosticism) is the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims — particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of deities, ghosts, or even ultimate reality — is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently impossible to prove or disprove.

In short, i dunno whether there is a God/Gods and we may or may not find out so what the heck. Fits in with my indecisive nature perfectly =)

Disclaimer: Info here is patched up bits I remember from the book. Hope i got the facts right!