Truly Asian Mountaintop Retreat

As promised, though no one give a damn, here are the pictures from my mountaintop retreat in Truly Asia.

This is the view from my backdoor. Believe it or not, the house is just 10 metres away from an equatorial rainforest. There were monkeys in those trees, I was too lazy too wait for a clear shot. Snakes show up occasionally too, but I wasn’t brave enough to go looking for one.

Another view from between 2 laundry poles. See that fallen tree trunk in the foreground? That’s probably the remains of the stupid tree that punched a hole through the roof on that Dark and Stormy Night 2 years ago. I spent half that night bailing rainwater from the storeroom. Funny it hasn’t rotted away though. Maybe it’s a different tree.

Tarzan the dog.

The very last bottle of that bootleg rice wine I was talking about. There’s no more left in the entire world. I drank the last drop.

Random phantom fish. The fish don’t have names but the dog does. Probably because they keep dying every other week. Had to dig out half a dozen carcasses that got sucked into the filter pump.

Cute Care Bear bed sheets, ya? My old trusty Super Soaker 100, which ceased to function maybe about 10 years ago. Wonder why they’re still keeping it around. I used to shoot marauding monkeys with it, when we had fruit trees in the yard. (banana, jambu, buah ceri etc). Chopped the whole lot down years ago so that the damn primates would stop invading the property.

What colourful students we have nowadays. This is a girl’s essay, btw. Another boy wrote some horrendous Deathnote rip-off which I would have scanned if I could. Felt like penalizing his plagiarism but decided to think of it as a fanfic in the end. The bugger chose the wrong manga to copy from actually; if he had written a story on the Dango Daikazoku I would have awarded full marks. Anyway, I changed his protagonist’s name to Light Yagami just to let him know the examiners might not be as ill-informed about pop culture as he had thought.

Both regular readers of this blog (Nikuman, I know you’re lurking) would probably be wondering what business I have correcting others' grammar when my own written English sucks like a vacuum cleaner. I have no idea either.

“Screencap” from NHK’s overseas satellite broadcast. The guy there is Saotome Taichi, a 16 year-old Kabuki trap. Forgot to take a pic of his trap form, but trust me, he’s quite trapalicious. Sounds like the real-life inspiration for our dear Saotome Alto “Hime” .

Loot: 9-in-1 “Deluxe” edition Haruhi novels. Obviously not-very-original, since I don’t think Kadokawa would give away to some Inner Mongolian publishing house the rights to one of their best selling series. Let’s just pretend I got fleeced unknowingly by unscrupulous pirates. I got this book at a Truly Asian branch of the most Popular local bookstore though. Tsk tsk. =p

Back cover. Price tag at the upper left corner says RMB 45. =)

Here’s what the not-so-very original DVDs look like. The Shana 2 DVDs aren’t even fully released in Japan, are they? The video quality is sharp, probably HD source. Chinese subs are fine. No Shana-tan though. This is the kind of competition that our dear local anime distributor is up against in Truly Asia. A full season of episodes bundled together, available within 2 months of the TV run’s end. I’ve seen Odex’s silver-lined products on the shelves in a few specialist anime retailers up in KL, but based on my observation this is the kind of stuff most video stores are stocking. And I’m not talking about guerilla street vendors; those stores are brick and mortar retailers in shopping malls.

I wasn’t attracted by the quality of the product (No Shana-tan. Boo…). I bought it because it was available. Now if only the “official” distributors can match the speed of the not-so-official ones, the industry wouldn’t be “bleeding to death”, would it?

Inside cover art. I kind of like this picture of Shana. Fiercely determined.

There are no pictures of me peeling mangoes because my hands were occupied you see.