Tutup sepenuhnya

Wanna know what that means? It means ‘Fully closed’. This was the words I got when I reached the doorstep of the library a while ago. I had purposely set the alarm at 10 am (though I only woke up at 10:30) so I could make it in time to borrow another novel before they close for prayers at noon.

But surprise, surprise! From 18th to 30th September, the library will be opened from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm from Sunday to Thursday and will be FULLY closed on Fridays and Saturdays. And it’ll be fully closed again during the Raya celebration and two days after that. If you’re wondering why it’s open on Sundays and not Fridays, that’s because the week starts on a Sunday here and Friday is their big day. I’m trying my best not to be sarcastic.

So now, HALF closed makes complete sense to me. If they can say things like FULLY closed, half closed should be a regular word for them.

Now I have to make sure I carefully hang on the what quarter of The Glass Castle I have left for the weekend. I don’t know if it’s just my luck with the library. I think I’ll just take it as a morning stroll.

I promised I would tell about the toilet here. From what Malaysians know, Kelantan is a place where different sexes must line up in separate lines, and there are no cinemas, or karaoke, or whatever. Well, they’re partly true. I still haven’t come across any ruling which segregates different sexes. But what I did come across was a unisex toilet!

There’s one in our hostel café. It’s a lone unit with a label ‘Tandas’ on it which means ‘toilet’. When we saw men and women going in and out, we were intrigued. I knew I had to at least go in that Ally McBeal toilet once.

When me and my friend were done, one guy walked in and was shocked to see 2 girls there. He made a 180 degrees turn, paused and made another 180 degrees turn back and into one of the cubicles. When he got out of the toilet he started to investigate its door for labels other than ‘Tandas’. Man, that was funny.

There’s also one unisex toilet on all the floors of the sad two-storey library. However, I suspect it to be staff toilets because they’re squeaky clean. Or maybe it’s because the library is a ghost town. The staff toilets in the departments in the hospital are a disappointment. This shows what kind of staff they hire.

And last night I discovered that this place transforms into a scary world at night. Me and two of my girl friends walked out of the campus for supper and on the way back around midnight, there were motorcycles passing by that would call us out, and one even slowed down beside us. That was freaking scary. After that fella, another car drove up next to us. My friend saw him roll down the window and smiled a mischievous smile. Other cars honked when they passed us. I’ll never go out for supper here with just girls ever again.

There’s nothing positive here to brag about except the intriguing toilet.