New Year

It’s a few minutes before the New Year and I am supposed to be at a party with friends from my last year, which includes the hike up the nearby city-centre hill to watch the fireworks at midnight, but I am held up on the wild edge of the city at the Bible college.  The college has a big, warm library, and as the whole campus would have been empty, I thought I’d spend a few uninterrupted hours there in the peace and warmth studying.

It turned out I wasn’t alone: Timothy had returned for the new semester (17 days early) and the studying turned into a video game afternoon.

Wan turned up and we got a pizza meal deal and hung out in the common room.  When I joined the college in 2008 they had a poor selection of U-rated movies.  During the 2 years, Daniel (a gun-toting Canadian) and I checked out various little shops for gun-toting movies.  We ended with a selection of around 40 which we left hidden in a box in one of the endless attics of the campus.  The best attic happened to be one that was like something out of Alice in Wonderland as each ‘room’ of the attic had a gap to the next, and the gaps got progressively smaller until one I could only just contort myself through.  They hadn’t been disturbed, except by dust, in over a year, which showed the current students weren’t as adventurous as ones in the past.

We selected a very Christmasy/New-Yearsy video -Die Hard.  After this Wan introduced me to an American cartoon series double-bill which was doing a Star Wars special followed by a whodunit, which is now itself followed by a live-action whodunit.

While Timothy and Wan simultaneously conquer Europe and watch a moustachioed detective on a second screen, I have tried to regain some focus and have been checking out various resources on that far-off land of mystery, mainly journals by those working in its jungles and towns, and I am beginning to realise how far off and exotic it all is.  Things I have learned that I’m not excited about: it’s very hot, there are gigantic spiders that children play with (rather than flee from with arms raised), the earth is reddish in colour, insects are large, and there are man-eating creatures roaming about.  I once saw a possessed dog, and a rat, but these 2 things are the only things I have been afraid of here.  I’m sort of glad it’s still 2011 as it keeps me far away from all of this.

Added after midnight:

An explosion took us surprise at midnight!  Though out in the sticks, we could feel the detonation of fireworks rippling up through the night to us.  Interestingly 4 minutes later the locals staged their own primitive fireworks show.  New Year is slightly delayed out here, or the fuses are longer.  2012.