Kota Kinabalu

Kota Kinabalu is buckets of fun.

We spent Saturday coming to terms with the fact that we were in Asia. This made sense because it was humid outside and air-conditioningly chilled inside. But Kota Kinabalu (or KK as it is called here) has a real country town feel to it. The streets are wide. The driving is remarkably un-chaotic. The occasional hawker selling Rolex watches and Armani leather belts is good natured (along with everyone else). Markets are filled to the brim with knock-offs. No surprise that the zip on my new "DIFSEL" laptop bag did not last the afternoon.

Reecey made some friends at the indoor soccer ground on the pier.

“Did you just play soccer?”
“Yeah.”

“Did you win?”

“Yes!”

“What was the score?”

“21 - 20.”

“Wow! So close!”

Were there any goalkeepers in this game? My guess is that the boys would play 20 minute halves, so that would be a goal-a-minute. Defence must be on this week's agenda at training surely, Coach Damo?

I was enjoying a beer or two on the Waterfront while Reecey enjoyed a massage. Young Jude introduced himself with an A4 piece of paper with maths homework and two handwritten words. “Excuse me, can you help me with this?” he asked. His English was confident and he looked university-aged, but his mannerisms gave away his youth. He told me he was 14. He was reading the English version of one of the Twilight books. The words he was asking about were “arbitrarily” and “overtly”. I discovered that “arbitrarily” is not a word that is that easy to explain to someone with English as a second language. I also discovered that year 10 maths is not something that you can just pick up 15 years later. So we talked about Shakira and Green Day instead.