Tuesday, March 07, 2006
The disappearing DVDs
A lazy rest day today. Lots of reading in the morning, then this afternoon the remaining 7 of us (the other 4 are away diving in Sipidan) took a ride into Mile Four with two main objectives:
- Girls wanted scoop ice creams,
- Boys wanted DVDs.
Neither proved possible there, so quickly hopped on the bus into Sandakan main town.
DVD sales are strange here. Some days they have lots, other days they seem to deny having any. Take today for example, we headed into a supermarket where before they had had many hundreds of titles stored in ring binders on several shelves. Today we go in there and they say "no DVDs" and all the shelves are turned around back to front. Weird...
So we ask in several other stores and while they all have Video CD titles, no one is selling DVDs. It's almost like there has been a temporary block on sales.
After a couple of hours we eventually found one place with a fairly good selection. But then later on we head back to our original supermarket to stock up on essential foods (chocolate, Oreo biscuits, crisps, Pringles, Milo, Red Bull, rice wine etc!) and all the "missing" DVDs are now back on sale once again. Spooky.
Maybe there are regular copyright raids here or maybe these dodgy DVDs are only sold between the hours of 4 and 5 pm each day??!!!
So finally we head back to Sepilok by minibus, tums full of ice cream and bags full of "resthouse essentials".
Back at the resthouse, we find that Karen is here. Karen was a volunteer here at Sepilok just over a year ago and stayed on in Borneo to work at the NIC at Rasa Ria. She was one of the people who designed our program there, so it was a good opportunity to give her some feedback about our experiences... :-)
We also had an update about Sogo Sogo - she's still fighting hard and is stable. Good girl.
A fairly early night for me as it's going to be live Barca v Chelsea in the early hours tomorrow.
- Girls wanted scoop ice creams,
- Boys wanted DVDs.
Neither proved possible there, so quickly hopped on the bus into Sandakan main town.
DVD sales are strange here. Some days they have lots, other days they seem to deny having any. Take today for example, we headed into a supermarket where before they had had many hundreds of titles stored in ring binders on several shelves. Today we go in there and they say "no DVDs" and all the shelves are turned around back to front. Weird...
So we ask in several other stores and while they all have Video CD titles, no one is selling DVDs. It's almost like there has been a temporary block on sales.
After a couple of hours we eventually found one place with a fairly good selection. But then later on we head back to our original supermarket to stock up on essential foods (chocolate, Oreo biscuits, crisps, Pringles, Milo, Red Bull, rice wine etc!) and all the "missing" DVDs are now back on sale once again. Spooky.
Maybe there are regular copyright raids here or maybe these dodgy DVDs are only sold between the hours of 4 and 5 pm each day??!!!
So finally we head back to Sepilok by minibus, tums full of ice cream and bags full of "resthouse essentials".
Back at the resthouse, we find that Karen is here. Karen was a volunteer here at Sepilok just over a year ago and stayed on in Borneo to work at the NIC at Rasa Ria. She was one of the people who designed our program there, so it was a good opportunity to give her some feedback about our experiences... :-)
We also had an update about Sogo Sogo - she's still fighting hard and is stable. Good girl.
A fairly early night for me as it's going to be live Barca v Chelsea in the early hours tomorrow.
// posted by storri @ 9:08 pm 
