Bentong

So I'm back home again...this time at my parents' house in Bentong, which they moved to in December. Bentong is a VERY SMALL town. In my brother's words, "Bentong makes Segamat look like a metropolis." (for those of you who aren't familiar with Malaysia...Segamat is its armpit.)

On the plus side, being that Bentong is up in the hills, the drive up here is very nice with a winding road and lots of mountains. Very classical-looking limestone hills (you know...the kind in Chinese
paintings) covered with shaggy carpets of forest and whatnot. It's cool at night when you can see the parallel curves of reflectors snaking away into the darkness. Hills are nice after having spent 4 years of college in Appleton.

Highlights so far:

• Our house is weird because the building was originally intended to be a church on the ground floor and the pastor's apartment on top. Since the local government never issued a permit to use it as a church, downstairs from us are my dad's office and a lot of empty rooms. Bloody Malays.
• We have 2 dogs, both spayed females. My dog Max is about 8 years old. The other one is called Happy. She is, appropriately, happy, but also a bit stupid. She likes to jump on people and tends to be mouthy, i.e. acts like a six-month-old puppy. Last night I fed them dinner (rice + meat scraps, we don't do fancy dog food here) and she finished hers in 2 minutes flat. *rolls eyes*
  
  Both dogs are pretty whiffy. There's a black smudge along the wall next to our driveway where Max likes to sit. Clearly my parents haven't bathed them very often. *takes out hose and scrubbing brush*
• Our house has forest on three sides. Mum says that if the dogs bark a lot, there are monkeys around. She claims to have seen wild boar, and Pa claims to have heard a nightjar. I need to spend less time on
  the computer at night.
• The district police headquarters is near our house, and so is the police target practice range. I thought some idiot was shooting off
  firecrackers at 8am because I'm not familiar with the sound of guns. Also, when I was walking back from the market today, a police Kancil passed me. It had the yellow-and-blue local police checker painted on the sides, and the flashing lights thing on top, and everything. I think I might have fallen over laughing if there had been someone else to support me.
  
  FYI non-Malaysians, "kancil" means "mousedeer". A mousedeer is a Southeast Asian deer that's about the size of a bunny rabbit. A Kancil is a VERY SMALL car. It's smaller than a VW Beetle. Yeah...you look like some super tough cops fighting crime in a Kancil, all right.
• We have a super loud gecko downstairs in one of the unused church rooms. I think it's one of those monster geckoes that's the size of a
  human hand, not one of the little ones. It sounds like a chicken on steroids.
  
  House geckoes cost $5 at Petsmart in the USA. Here they're free if you can catch them.
  
  My mum knows some woman who has a hatred of geckoes because a pair of copulating geckoes fell on her head once. I guess it could have been more traumatic if it wasn't the geckoes that had been copulating...
• Pa let me drive back from Raub to Bentong last week (about 20 mins) I didn't hit anyone, and I remembered to stay on the left side of the road. The tough part was remembering that my turn signal lever was on the RIGHT side of the steering wheel.

So...that's Bentong so far.