photo credit: WGB Photography on flickr
Indoors, with the windows open and suddenly the wind picks up. Clouds loom overhead, cooling the air. Doors rattle with the passing gusts and an eerie feeling settles. Outside, the tree shakes its branches, letting down a shower of leaves. Only the strong ones hold on as the dying ones drift to the ground, creating a loud rustling noise. It’s too dark to not turn on the lights, but too bright with them. The air thickens with the gloom of a potential storm, heavy with unseen particles. Everything feels ominous.
On the drive home, an ambulance approaches from the right at an intersection, howling to get vehicles out of its way. Stopped at the intersection, you wait for it to make its turn towards the buildings behind you. The ones you just left. As firetrucks honk their way from the opposite end, turning in the same direction as the ambulance, you wonder if they will go near where you just had been. Did the weather bring along with it trouble? A foreboding sense creeps up on you as you drive off towards home. Away from danger, away from trouble, you hope.
At the next intersection, leaves swirl in furious spirals in front of you as you wait for the red light to change. All the excess from nearby trees has been brought down to clutter the curbside. With each car that passes, another puff of dust is left in its wake, blurring your vision. You watch as the palms sway vigorously, so high up. One has even thrashed down a frond that lies forlornly in the road, being run over by the traffic passing by. For a moment you wonder if the apocalypse could start like this – just a dreary, troublesome day… much like when the Santa Ana winds blow and bring with them strange behavior.
Unexpectedly, you feel your car move. Did someone just bump into you? You check in your mirrors and find nothing wrong. All the cars are a safe distance away. The car moves again. This time you recognize it – the gentle rocking from a surge of wind. You didn’t realize the rushing air had reached down low to shake your car. After all, it was just the treetops that were affected, right? But no, the undeniable push of the winds tells you otherwise and you wonder if this is how it feels to be in your car during an earthquake.
What an odd day.
On Wednesday I had a fabulous time volunteering for Global Inheritance, which is a non-profit that opened up Environmentaland on Hollywood and Highland awhile back (October 1st, to be exact). Tuesday night was a public party to celebrate the brief three weeks that the interactive theme park was there and Wednesday was the final closing party, exclusively for people affiliated with the environmental playland. Not knowing that it was a closing party (and thinking it was an opening one), I was super excited to share the place with my friends. It’s a pity they won’t be able to enjoy it. Perhaps we’ll catch them again when they come round to LA next (and hopefully they will!).
My first unique experience was the monorail, which sit atop these concrete tracks suspended above the roads of the city. It’s nice to be able to look out and see things when you’re traveling, which is my one complaint against subways. Being underground and in the dark is just not very exciting. Floating over the cityscape is. Granted, they do move far more slowly and these little monorails don’t take many passengers (not that they need to). I got in pretty late that night, so I just went to my hostel to rest. I only left to go next door to get something to eat back at the hostel.
The next day I went to check out Batu Caves. I walked through Chinatown to get to the bus stop and was driven out to the surrounding countryside. A huge golden figurine guarded the stairway leading up to the cave, no doubt some sort of religious being meant to protect the place. There is a plaza area before you approach the stairs and on the string of lights in that area perched dozens of pigeons. Many more were cooing on the ground and the entire place was speckled with their droppings. I climbed up 272 steps to arrive at the foot of a big open-air cave in the middle of the mountain. The cave was mostly empty except for some roosters and, well, cavernous. I went to the other end where another set of stairs led up to an area that opened up directly to the sky and held a shrine or worshipping temple. On that side were a cluster of monkeys, climbing up and down the walls of the cave and running up and down the stairs.
On my way down the mountain, a man brought out bananas and began to throw them up the stairs towards monkeys that were streaming towards him. They grabbed whatever they could and horded what they caught, then each found their own place to enjoy their food. Being hungry myself, I decided to get some lunch after I explored the rest of the grounds and took a spin around a much larger temple structure at the base of the mountain. My lunch was pretty simple, just pickled vegetables and rice with a salty, crispy wafer of bread, but it was filling and good for my exhausted body.
When I got back to the city, I walked around Central Market, where they had a lot of goodies for sale. There was a Fish Spa place where a lot of people were getting their feet nibbled at by the “doctor fish” that eat away your dead skin and leave your feet softer. I was tempted to give it a try, but decided that I would get around to it at another place. It’s pretty popular in some countries in Asia and at the least I knew there was a place back in Singapore that I could visit if I didn’t get around to it before then. Instead, I bought a little keepsake cloth art to remind me of the place and summer dress to wear when things got hot. I then wandered through Chinatown, too lazy to bargain and not really in a spending mood. I nearly stopped for a massage service but then decided against spending money and went back to the hostel.
At night, I went out to eat dinner and found myself in front of a huge shopping center called Pavilion. A beautiful fountain (Liuli Crystal Fountain) stands at the entrance of the massive collection of shops. I went inside for a stroll and found a lot of classy shops in a mall that’s probably twice the size of the largest mall I’ve ever been to before. There are something like six stories and the food court at basement level is four times as big as my own mall’s.
My final day there, I met with some people from the company distributing the Livescribe Pulse smartpen in Malaysia. I was treated to dim sum before we sat down to share our experiences and ideas. I was then taken to KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Centre), where the iconic Petronas Twin Towers are. Yet another shopping center is situated at ground level there and I was shown the shops where the smartpen is being distributed. After a break for lunch (and sitting out a quick rainstorm), I was shown how the cloth art I purchased the day before is made. It’s called batik and they melt wax in these special “pens” and draw out designs on cloth. When the wax hardens, colors are painted on to the design and then the color of the cloth is “fixed” (not sure what that means or how it works). Cloths are then dewaxed and dried and the result is a pretty design with the white lines as areas where the wax was. Sometimes the wax is left on so the lines appear to be golden in color. A final pit stop at a chocolate-making factory was a bit less exciting since they wouldn’t actually let you view the process and only offered a huge shop with every flavor of chocolate imaginable (including durian and chili, for example).
UCLA is rich in its culture and full of traditions. One such (relatively new) one is the ever-lively Undie Run. By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 2004, it was a blossoming tradition that I had heard of, but didn’t really know much about. I spent my first year hearing the rumors, but not knowing anyone to go with or where to find the gathering, I never tried to join in the festivities. My second year I returned, eager to find my place and I did so by joining over a dozen organizations on campus. As I spent my time going from meeting to meeting, social to workshop, I didn’t quite find the bonds I was looking for. And so in the spring, I opted to pledge for Alpha Kappa Psi, a co-ed business fraternity on campus. My time was sucked up by that, but I still managed to meet some new friends who were the type to party it up. In them I found Undie Run enthusiasts, so I prepared myself for my very first participation in such an event.
For my first time, in the spring of 2006, I got some cute frilly underwear (black with pink hearts and completely useless as normal underwear with way too much poof) from Urban Outfitters on 3rd street and wore a plain black bra. We congregated at the bottom of what was known as “Rape Trail” (now Saxon Trail/Steps), right on the road where Landfair meets Gayley. The closeness of the crowd provided warmth in the cool night as we got ready for our journey. At some point, the front part of the group began to to scream and run and we all followed suit, flying down Gayley, passing through De Neve Court, continuing down Bruinwalk, then up Bruinwalk, and making our way to the destination at the fountain in front of Powell Library. (Yes, we like to run scantily-clad and scream and sing right outside the library where students are still studying for finals.) Along the way, some creepy guys were standing around just staring and a few more were waiting at the end of the run. There’s always a bit of a downside to everything, right? Some were taking pictures and video and others were just scanning the crowd.
