Welcome to Phenomenal Penguin!

A note about the blog title:  Whenever I type Phnom Penh on my Lenovo phone, it autocorrects to Phenomenal Penguin.  So we'll let it stand.  

A note about the blog content:  I’d stopped keeping a personal blog years ago, but as we sat in a KLIA coffee shop after checking in the two cats for the flight to Cambodia, one of my friends suggested that I resume blogging. Not everyone uses Facebook, after all.  It also struck me that this will be as much a record for me as for anyone who wants to bother reading it.  There is something very fleeting about the new perceptions of a city, before everything comes to be familiar and even mundane.  After a few months, you tend to gloss over the fact that Phenomenal Penguin is not at all like Kuala Lumpur, Bursa, Helsinki, or Portland, Maine. I’ve visited PP ten times in as many years, but living here is a whole new trip.

I bought my Malaysia Airlines ticket (Air Asia won’t carry pets) on the day MH370 vanished, and three weeks later, as I leaned back into seat 17A and sipped my wine, toasting the fact that the cats were actually on the flight with me (a whole lot of planning and fretting involved there), I looked over at my neighbour’s Malay Mail, the headline of which read, “MH370 ENDED in the Indian Ocean”, the capitals and red ink adding utterly superfluous emphasis.   The clouds beneath our plane looked like a meringue gone mad. Yes, I do know that air travel is statistically the safest, but the timing did not feel auspicious.

But MH762 did set down on time in the appointed place.  I sailed through Immigration, inaugurating my shiny new one-year, renewable, multiple-entry visa while most of the other passengers were busy filling out forms and queuing for their on-arrival visas.  My hideous, huge suitcase in shades of Pepto-Bismol and plum, nicely set off by the RM79 price sticker, which I perversely left in place, was rolling past on the conveyor belt just as I walked up.  But where were the cats?

"What the fuzz just happened to us?!"

In the middle of the terminal, surrounded by a curious crowd.  I hoisted their carriers onto a trolley, wheeling the pink monstrosity behind, and off we went to Customs.  I went through the "Items to Declare" line. It just seemed like the thing to do.  The officer, busily chatting with his colleague on the other side of the fence, looked first stunned, then slightly irked.  I seemed to be the only one on the plane trying to declare something, and it was interrupting his conversation.  He looked me up and down, and then seemed to have decided that I was simply confused.  "You have something to declare?" he asked.  "Two cats," I replied. "Two cats," he repeated.  He did not look into the carriers; there might as well have been... I don't know, penguins in there for all he cared.  "You have a paper?" he suggested. I handed over my painstakingly procured exit documents.  He glanced at the top page for a split second, just long enough to spot what looked like some sort of an official stamp, chop or seal, and then waved us away.  And that was that.

I normally take a tuk-tuk from the airport, but I thought the noise and wind might be a bit much for the cats, so we splurged and took a taxi.  The driver told me there would be a $3 surcharge for the furred ones.  Ok, so what would have been his tip became the cat fee. 15 minutes, and we were home.