hough I’ve been here in Kuching over a year now, I’ve barely been outside of the city. Partly because of that, I had the impression that all the “real” nature was to be found far into the uplands. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I visited Semenggoh just a half an hour’s drive from our house. Semenggoh is a state park with an Orangutan rehabilitation center attached to it. “Apes in rehab?!”, you’re thinking, “what are they, on crack?”
hem. No, these are …

e visited my late father-in-law’s grave on Eid al-Fitr to read Ya Sin and pray on his behalf. This is a common practice on the Eid, maybe because families are gathered together at that time. He was buried only about a kilometer from our village. The cemetery was so humble and unassuming. Graves were marked by simple posts at the head and feet. More often than not, the posts were without writing of any kind. The posts were most often carved stone, but many were …

ome pictures of petai, a green bean used in Malay home cooking. It grows in long pods on a very large tree of the Legume family, Parkia speciosa. The beans are very pungent. I’ve most often seen it cooked in sambal tumis ikan bilis, a fried chili paste with dried anchovies. It is also eaten raw dipped in some kind of spicy sambal. A lot of vegetables in the diet are eaten raw with chili sauces instead of salad dressing, a practice known as …

ur new home is in fact several years old. The house itself is quite nice and liveable as is, but the yard… The yard needs a lot of work. I wanted a house with a lot of land, and I got that in the sense that the area is spacious. But it is missing about 18 inches of soil from the kitchen stoop to the back fence. It is common practice for developers to save costs by skimping on landscape, or even to sell …

In Michigan, where I’m from, we have large fruit; watermelons and pumpkins for example can reach great size. Sensibly, these fruits grow on trailing vines, right on the ground. But imagine a fruit that size that grows suspended from a tree! Aiee! Maybe it’s called Jackfruit because it will jack you up if it lands on you. Actually, the cultivated trees are not that tall, only a few meters, so we’re not really talking Durian kill-factor here. Still, seeing something that size just sprouting …

When I spotted this fruit in the market, I left the stall I was standing at and zipped over to the neighboring stall where it was being sold, five-year-old in tow. I started asking the hawker about the fruit when the lady from the previous stall came over, carrying my crying three-year-old. She shot me this look that said “you delinquent father you!” Oops!
The fruit you see above is Dragon Fruit, product of Bintulu, Sarawak. It’s pretty large, weighing about a kilo and about …

f Malaysia is the land of odd fruit, then Sarawak must be the capital. I have just as much fun looking at it all as I do eating it. This one is called a Kuap Terap, according to the guy who sold to me. My Malay dictionary doesn’t have it, Google doesn’t have it, SR had never seen one before. It must be in the same family as the durian, but it is even more bizarre. It’s about the size of a football (sorry, American …