Do You Like Genting? I've Never Gented!

E@L is going to persist with this "joke" until someone laughs.

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Genting Highlands Malaysia is where Kafka and E@L went for their holidays...

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"Must take leeceet to counter for bus travel agency len you alive at hotel," said the helpful travel agency girl to E@L and K as they sat in the exclusive front seats of the Platinum bus.

"Kokay," said K with his thick Polish accent. His deep-set eyes and dark floppy hair seem attractive to the girls despite his gaunt, bony frame. E@L's high round eyebrows fool nobody.

Up the high hill, in the chill, they dragged their bags to the crowded desk of the bus travel agency travel counter and pushed through the queue, pretending to be lost so that they could ask if we were in the right place and therefore jump past those waiting in line.

"You in long place," the girl said, leering into K's eyes and twirling her pen suggestively. "Must be hotel check-in. Preese, go up to there." She pointed into the mist-swathed heights of the First World Hotel where the howling winds tossed newly formed clouds across the car-parks and the covered walk-ways. Hundreds of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian tourists dragged their baggage back and forth between the counters and queues, their copious and essential but always inadequate paperwork desperately clutched in chilled hands. The longer queues, those to important counters in the bus stations and in the hotel(s) lobby(ies) were routed into short paths by means of red bands staggered on short chromium poles. Baggage stations with chaotic queue-less crowds took bags and gave back a coupon with a number on it.

They dumped their bags first.

K and E@L then fought against the random statistics of the crowds (as they would later against the fall of cards) to find a path to the right counter at the right hotel. Again they used the Slightly Lost Expression paradigm (one they would try later on, against the rumour of hookers) to jump those queues that led to the allocation of numbers for the selection of desks at which be assessed for the possibility of being checked-in today.

The lady sat silently for a minute, reviewing K's documents, turning them over once, twice, a third time as if there was another, secret side with even more redundant stuff written on it.

"You must take this not to here," she said. She lent forward, towards K, as if trying to smell his after-shave. Man, the power of floppy hair, E@L thought.

"Must to Bus Travel Counter. Back Starbuck," she indicated with the wad of papers.

Again, only in reverse, K and E@L fought their way out of the hotel against sea of oncoming tourists and their kids, past the Starbucks, past the Strawberry Tea shop, past the Monkey-Brain sushi stand. Just where the crowd was thickest and noisiest, K turned into a room that E@L had not noticed. A man sat at a desk alone. He, like the others, had a machine that produced tickets with numbers. But this room was silent, somehow it existed between the walls of the other rooms, yet was quite spacious, if forgotten. The room had many seats but they were all empty. K showed the man their paperwork. He quickly assessed it, stamped three of the pages and pressed a button on his machine which printed out a piece of paper with the number 10047 on it.

"Come back, 2 o'crock," he said to K, handing him the freshly printed page.

After 3 hours, it was 2 o'clock, and the sign over the counter said, "Now Serving 11077 and when they returned to the room K said to E@L, "Where is your passport?" He would need it to prove he was who he said he was in order to sleep in his room. It was in his luggage, E@L said, back at the hotel. He hurried back to the hotel where the baggage was, with the coupon with the number on it from the chaotic baggage men. He rescued his passport easily enough. Many of the people who had left their luggage had already come to retrieve it as their buses had been scheduled already.

Going in both directions, back and forth past the the Starbucks, etc... E@L had to fight again against the crowd; it was the same TYPE of crowd, it was the same TYPE of fight - their random acts of acceleration and deceleration, their directional drift, their moments of indecision and lives of quiet desperation, their whims of hunger or thirst prompted by deftly positioned marketing ploys, their fears of the fleetingness of things and the needs to capture the moment digitally in blurry, overly bright ghost images or chiaroscuro moody silhouettes of loved ones partially obscured by indifferent people passing between the camera and the focused object, those who have no time for this shit, such as E@L, who was in a fucking hurry if you don't fucking mind!.

K had let several people go past him in the queue while he waited for the out of breath E@L to return. Which, eventually, sooner rather than later, he did.

"No need see passport," said the man behind the counter as E@L plonked his on the desk. "See yours, is OK," he said to the mysteriously charming K. Everything was in K's name. That was true...

E@L put his head in his hands...

He took a deep breathe...

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And the time in the internet cafe expired...

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Rumours that if you cut and paste Expatatlarge.blogspot.com into Google Translate it just gives you "blah blah blah in German", or "blah blah blah in French" are NOT to be believed, OK!

E@L