Summer Love II - Of Kelantan and Pulau Perhentian.

RIGHT GUYS I'M GONNA DO THIS FOR ONCE AND FOR ALL.

*deep breath in*

Friday, 01/08/14
Spent the day doing final preparations for my brother's wedding. Well, more like me nudging my mom to buy new tudung and find new kain, actually. Went to Pasir Puteh with Ummi and bought some stuff. And we had KFC there! TWICE! We had our first KFC in the car on our way back, and the second one after we came home to realise no one was cooking lunch (not me, not everrrhh), so we went out again to Kok Lanas KFC. So much of wanting KFC man. The rest of the night was spent arguing who should iron one of the dresses for hantaran - it was quite tricky and no one wanted to take the risk. But oh well, all was well.

Saturday, 02/08/14
Abang kita kawen waweeee! It's akad nikah on the bride's side.

I love love looooove this picture! My Adam looks soooo giant at one end while Little Adam looks sooo tiny at the other end. Hahahaha! As for my brother, who needs friends when you have truckloads of male siblings and cousins in the family? Yes these are all the grown up male cousins in my family - leaving myself, my sister and cousin Nadirah as the only girls. Hmphh.

Pretty much the only ones left after the akad and makan makan ceremony. It was almost noon and everyone just wanted to go home by that time. 

And this, is the excited faces of Nabilah and her husband (who was forced to look excited, btw) with her sister's monopod and a fish eye lens, the whole time being watched and laughed at by the younger ones. 

And by this time I'm pretty sure it's already very apparent that I was so tanned from the sun. Spending  a month in UK summer only to go home to the tropical weather of Malaysia did that to me :(

Sunday, 03/08/14

TWO YEARS OF BEING MARRIED OMG I'M SO OLD.

Muka pengantin lama. Lol. No we did not tempah the outfit just for our wedding anniversary. That would be too much hahaha. It was reception on the groom's side, aka our side, so everyone was wearing brown, which I had no pictures of. Sads. But yeah, it was the day our marriage turned 2.

Somewhere during our stay in Kelantan, I finally got to meet cousin Alisya after two years, and I think she liked Adam a wee bit more than me. Grr.

Boo!

Monday, 04/08/14 - Wednesday, 06/08/14

We made our way to Pulau Perhentian as a stop before going back to KL. Just the two of us - the old married couple. Haha. Stayed there for 3D2N on a full board snorkelling package. One thing that I always wonder when I go somewhere with Adam is - why didn't I take more pictures back then? For a start, we don't do selfie that much, so most our pictures were taken by someone else. And I'm too lazy to carry my phone or camera around. And our time together is limited, every minute counts for we know we would have to eventually go back to being the long distance couple, so pictures are not really in the priority list. But everytime after we get back from somewhere, I always feel a tiny bit terkilan for we don't have proper pictures together. Rant ends here.

Admittedly this is the ONLY picture of us throughout the trip - taken just so that we could send it via WhatsApp to our family back home. Had they not discussed about dinner or anything, perhaps we'd end up with no pictures at all.

But anyways, I think I learnt a great deal from this trip. It was admittedly the first trip we had, just the two of us, in a veeeeery long time. I think our last couple trip was when we went on a Euro trip covering 5 countries, and that was in December 2012. Most of the times we spent lazying at home and did nothing, or went out with the family - we went on a family day on Adam's side at Bukit Merah Laketown last year, it was amazing. And this Perhentian trip was our first couple holiday in Malaysia. Ever. That if you didn't count the road trip to East Coast we had before we got married la. Even with that one we went with our teachers. See? Haha.

It's a great deal of lesson in the sense that, honeymoon - expectation vs reality. To be completely honest, we always thought we're the honeymoon couple, considering how we spend most times apart,  so every waking day that we spend together is a honeymoon day. But that only applies to our normal life - the long weekends crashing at each other's place either in Belfast or Leicester.

But Perhentian is a foreign place. A strange place. I've been looking forward to this trip even before I came back for summer holiday. My love for islands and beaches is too much, that I wanted us to go on a beach holiday. What I didn't prepare beforehand was, the practical things.

1. Weddings are tiring.

We just got back from my brother's wedding. It was very ultimately tiring. My parents even said to the younger siblings - no one gets married in the nearest time, we're dead tired. Of course it didn't help that Adam and I had a very simple wedding, that we feel too thankful for that, that we (or at least I, myself ) wondered why do people have to make wedding a big deal. It is soooo tiring! So by the time we got to Perhentian, we were both knackered. We just wanted to rest. Or best said, to go back home - KL.

2. Malaysia is a very hot country. 

Apologies if I sound rude, but it's very true. I love the sun, don't get me wrong - in fact I'm one of the biggest sun-freak in the family. But it's just too hot it drained us. I got tanned and sun burnt, I got cranky. We had no aircons in Kelantan where we spent our days before going to Perhentian, when I got heat rash. And inevitably I got very tired, leading us back to point no 1.

3. You can't wear glasses when snorkelling. 

This, we hadn't considered at all. AT ALL. I felt guilty for missing this one very crucial point. Adam's vision without glasses is worse than mine even before I had LASIK done. But at least back then I could wear contact lens. That doesn't apply to Adam because he has a history of corneal abrasion, where he can't wear contact lens for a very long time (or maybe ever). And he left his power swimming goggles in the UK. AND WE DID NOT THINK ABOUT IT, AT ALL. 

4. People get sick even when they wish they hadn't. 

Adam slowly became unwell in the evening of the first day. We thought it was the heat, and he had tons of iced drinks (which were amazing, btw) in the afternoon when we first arrived. As a result to that, he started to get chills and slight fever in the evening. Which lasted throughout the whole trip. And I only had ibuprofen that I carry around with me most of the times, thankfully. He barely jumped into the water on the second day when we went snorkelling for feeling a little unwell (and the power goggles, remember?). I was frustrated. I was upset. I felt bad because he was ill and there I was, being in my elements enjoying every view of the underwater creatures, and he couldn't see them, he couldn't enjoy them, and I thought he probably wished he didn't have to be there. I was torn between guilt and self-indulgence, which in the end we compromised. He came with us for the snorkelling trip, albeit staying on the boat most of the times, but in the evening stayed in the room as I wandered the beach by myself. The things you do for love.

Still, I had a good time, albeit being very very very tired and knackered at the end of the trip. We left first thing in the morning on the last day, and I drove almost all the way back to KL with Adam sleeping most of the times. And Adam went on being unwell even after we got back to KL.

There you go, expectation vs reality.

It made me think - this is the reality. People get sick. People get tired. We've never lived together more than 2 months, thus we hadn't seen enough of each other at our worst. But we also hadn't seen enough of each other at our best - the early morning snuggles, the lazy strolls in town when we know we have all the time in the world and not worry about our flights not being checked in. 

Whatever the reality brings, I look forward to the day when we can finally stop counting the days.