April 25th, 2008
Call me old fashioned but sometimes I just don't like the way that people treat women. Let me explain...
Today was RN's last day in Brunei, he was catching a flight back to Fredericton on the 4:30 flight, or so he thought. We arrived at the airport at 3pm so that he could check himself in and then we could go get ready to go to Malaysia. After we dropped him off at security we went and walked around a moment, we turned around and discovered RN walking towards us.
My flight out of the country is at 11:30am, when he mentioned that his was at 4:30pm I didn't think anything of what he said and just continued on my way working. He missed his flight, it was at 11:30am. Whoops.
We run drive across town to our sponsor's travel agent in hopes to make arrangements for rescheduling flights. It was no problem to rebook the flights from Hong Kong and then from Toronto, the only difficult part was booking the one out of Brunei. It was booked through a travel agent / ticket broker and the airline refused to reschedule the flight because of this and the broker refused to arrange a new flight and forced him to buy a new ticket.
There is a rule in the country of Brunei, that you are only allowed to enter the country for a period of 14 days before you have to leave and enter again. RN and I were in the situation where we were going to be in the country for 15 days so we had to go to Malaysia for supper. Oh darn.
We walk across the border and get stamped to enter the country, on the way in we gather a customs card to bring beer back into the country. Since its a dry country non-Muslims are allowed to bring back 12 cans of beer (8 bottles) and 2 litres of spirits. We were being used as Mules to gather beer for everyone else.
We go to a little shanty town called Cowboy Town, but when the locals pronounce it “Cabo Town”. Basically its a group of places the cook chicken of various forms (deep frying, skewering, etc) and a giant tent for people to get drunk on $1 beer. What!? Did you just say $1 a bottle. Yes, $1 Brunei dollars, which is $0.75 a bottle in Canadian dollars!
I was informed the next that that we drank, between 9 people, 72-80 beer. All of which was paid for by our sponsor.
We got drunk. We then went home.
We walked back across the border because its easier and quicker to walk than to take a car because people to go Malaysia and either switch their engines or have it stolen. Plus its illegal to modify the crap out of your car like you can do in Canada.
It was then I discovered that our host had disappeared with his driver to find some food.
And if by “food” you mean Chinese prostitutes, then you'd be correct.
Thats right, I saw my first official Chinese prostitute. One of them was so fresh off the boat that she didn't speak a lick of English and she wasn't here for more than 15 minutes before she shot gunned a bottle of our illegal beer, and took one of the boys to the room for some quick action. (He was back within 3 minutes and bragging. Asians are wierd about that.)
Within the next 5 minutes she went back up the stairs with one of his friends. Why would you share a prostitute with your friend? Gross.
The night progressed and I began drinking water to rehydrate myself, I spent a good portion of the night on the front step talking to Tommy about traffic, weather, family, etc. to escape the pulsating techno music and random bursts of Metallica vidoes. (Malaysians, Chinese, etc are OBSESSED with Metallica for some reason....)
For some background, Tommy is a colleague of our sponsor and an ex-sharpshooter for the Brunei police force. A fantastic guy.
Shortly after 1am, the Chinese girls disappear into a cloud of v.d.
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