Day 1 of self sufficiency again was a bit sad because I started to miss home for the first time since I had left almost 3 years ago. Just not having to be on guard and not having to work everything out every day and to be somewhere clean was a wonderful feeling. I was alright by the afternoon again however, there is nothing like a good taxi driver argument to lift flagging spirits.

The taxi driver took us not to where we wanted to go but a shop somewhere else and quite forcefully tried to get us to go inside.

“The shopping center is closed so you go here and look around.”

“No thanks.” I stated.

“You can’t go where you said because it’s Sunday so it’s closed.” The taxi driver tried.

“Actually, it’s Saturday so we’ll try our luck.” I pointed out.

He kept persisting so I went to go and look for another tuk tuk. So he drove 2 minutes to a deserted street, stopped and again tried for 10 minutes to get us to his shop. We finally convinced him to actually take us were we wanted to go. We’d test our luck on whether it was open. Surprisingly, it was.

Nothing much happened of importance except for the rat attack at our 4 star hostel. I was sitting on a chair minding my business reading a book and see this massive rat just wander out towards me. I did a double take and nudged Hannah. She screamed and jumped onto her chair. I casually and carefully got into the standing position, on top of the table. We tried to shoo it away but it must have assumed we were trying to feed it and came closer. Hannah screamed louder and called for the staff to come and save her from the vicious rat. The staff just laughed at us jumping around on top of the chairs and tables wildly and did nothing to help. The rat finally stopped directly underneath our chair and looked around for a minute or two. Then in order to rid us of the rodent I began jumping up and down madly on the chair, holding on to the arm rests to get more leverage and chair height. Everyone of course took it for me in panic stations, which I clearly wasn’t. I was merely trying to rid us of the creature seeing as no one else would.

Then we left for Kerelar.