Forewarned hangover...

Waking up around 4 pm today I realized my head was still attached in a sound way to my body. If it was sound in itself trying not to get me into trouble is another story. One that starts yesterday late evening, when I wandered into a typical pub on Lebuh Chulia (the backpackers' street of Georgetown, colorfully lined with cheap pubs, motels, oldies and fattish 'working girls' and goodlooking but not definite girlish 'working girls') Also it seems to be one of the areas of the Island of Penang where one can smoke a little bit of Marijuana. Well, I didn't bother with that, being forewarned and all about the small print on passport entries. But I ended up in this place featuring an old and sweaty Chinese guy who was trying to impress a beyond curvy-set Indian girl with his vocal capacities. Singing in Malay while on the TV-screen images of a happy Malay couple dancing in a sunflowerfield (do they have sunflowerfields in Malaysia? Or was this a big-budget Karaoke video?) and holding hands. It looked like good fun to me, and besides, the price of the beer was even cheaper in this place than in the China-Blues Cafe I just came out of. In the back two youngsters that looked like they had walked out of a VZW somewhere in the deep heart of Borgerhout were playing a game of pool on a battered and ragged pooltable. Resting on the bar was the head of the Japanese bartender, an outcast of the Samurai Island and probably the only Japanese bartender in the whole of Malaysia. With luck he was making in one year what he could make in one month back home, but back home people were to uptight, as he later confessed to me. Once the Chinese man had taken off, the place started playing Bob Marley and other Reggae classics. Another reason to stay a little bit longer.
Soon a Malaysian man with red but focused eyes placed himself at my table, leaving his pregnant wife alone in the back, where the pooltable with the characters was. He introduced himself as a man that has only just begun life, repeating regularly during our lengthy conversation that life begins at 40. (I guess that was when he left wife and children behind on the mainland to marry his second wife here in Penang and start a second family.) Being a Muslim this was no problem, he joyously added, brushing away my frowned eyebrows and trying to keep a good vibe going. With all that Bob Marley in the background that wasn't to hard anyway. Looking at the amount of beer he was consuming, I suspected that being a Muslim in Malaysia is quite a different thing than being a Muslim in, oh say, Iran... Well, after talking about world-politics (Europe cultivating frustration and anger amongst it's many settled Muslims, fundamentalists being used by the word of some God to accomplish things that benefited someone talking of that God, Thailand being such a good place to enjoy the lighter side of life (coming from him, not me) and so on) and local policies ("Oh, they can hang you even if you just posses Marijuana, no need to be trafficking Heroine at all.") I was invited to his upstairs room to smoke some herbs that could seriously damage one's health in this country. Sure, why not, I thought, listening to good old Bob singing joyously about his green-grass-revolution. So up we went, entering a drab room were one of the VZW-guys was frantically painting the walls. It turned out to be the owner of the Motel/Bar and a local supplier of Penang's illicit drug-market. (Nervous little fella, but very friendly and funny.) I was soon to be introduced to the local way of rolling and smoking. No Rizzla's here, but some kind of leaf from some kind of Bamboo-like plant growing at riverbanks. And tobacco mixed in with grass that looked like tar scraped from a sunburned highway. The tobacco, that was. It was Indonesian cultivated tobacco, sticky and dry at the same time, if you can imagine. The grass was grown somewhere on the compounds of the Motel, but this was only admitted to after I confessed not working for Interpol. (See, I told you this guy was funny. Even though I wasn't sure why a comedian needed a diver's knife attached to his right leg, patting it subconsciously from time to time to check if it was still where it was supposed to be...) Immediately after my first drag of this hazardous little smoke-stick, I could feel my hands tingle and this funny little awareness of having space behind your eyeballs. (Do we?) This was good stuff. Not like the dry rubbish in Cambodia or the light-version of Bangkok. But then again -smoking from their personal stash- I don't see why one would want to risk the gallows only because of some crappy light version of what weed should be. This was not some medical weed, relieving you from arthritis or something, this was highly entertaining grass, taking you on a cloud somewhere beyond the paranoia and overshoulder experience a milder version would bring with it. Once our little ceremony was over we went back downstairs, where the Japanese bartender had fallen asleep on top of the hifi-chain that was now playing something that could come from a Thunderdome-compilation. Talk about a change of moods. Luckily we couldn't be bothered with such futile changes of decorum, and soon the owner had to excuse himself from our table to go play pool with some very out of place characters. I thought they had just walked out of Rikers or someplace like that, but my new friend assured me it were just the local cops coming to play some pool and collecting whatever it is badass-cops collect in a place like this. After finishing my beer and trying to shake the impression that one of the cops (he looked like the local version of Danny Trejo, you know, Razor Charlie in From Dusk Till Dawn) was looking over in my direction more than just casual, I shook hands with Mr. Life begins at Forty and I walked out before sunrise, remembering the advice the owner had given me earlier while painting his room. "It is your right as a visitor of Malaysia to refuse a urine-test, exercise this right!" Well, now I only had to steer clear of the working girls whose make-up could no longer cover their five o'clock shadow and find my way to the hotel...