On my latest trip to Penang, I had a mini reunion with two of my university friends. It was like first year in Manchester all over again – it was winter of 2005 and we were 19 once again.
During this trip, we talked about:
• The horrible school dinners in Owens Park, where fish ‘n’ chips were served every Friday night and everything else was pasta and potatoes
• The bathtub incident in Yew Tree Court, where one of them fainted after getting out of a hot bath, and I rushed over to cook him the worst meal of his life – bland porridge with cabbage
• Hanging out in Trafford Centre, and how one of them said if anyone stared at him like that in Vietnam “we would beat him up”
• Failing our GV1601 exams, and how unfair it was that Economics students had to take a compulsory Politics module
• How much we missed ASDA’s marvellous deals, where a whole fish cost merely £1.50. What, so cheap? I asked. Yes, one of them answers. Simply weigh fish at self-service counter and press tomatoes.
• How one of them never slept in his ground floor bedroom in Rusholme, after a brick was thrown onto his window pane and the thief took off with his laptop and mobile phones
• How disappointing it was that no one told us about the Unirider in first year, and how a UK North weekly pass cost only £2.50
• How three of us squeezed into a single room in GP after getting drunk at Scubar opposite the Aquatics Centre
• How one of them is always in his long black coat and the other actually threw it away because it was so dirty
• How one girl was so chatty she was “worse than a radio”
… and how we should definitely see each other again and make Vietnam-Singapore-Penang our golden triangle!
Wan Phing Lim 