Sweet salt

When I was in Malaysia with my Smaller Half, we got an el-cheapo internet booking in a hotel in Georgetown which had a partner resort on the tourist strip in Penang, Batu Ferringhi.  The resort would have been cripplingly expensive to stay in, but we were allowed to jump on a free bus at our cheap hotel and tootle up there and lounge around under the palm trees beside their expensive pool all day and pretend we were rich bastards.  It was awesome.

Every now and then the staff would wander by and ask if you'd like any drinks (which were really expensive so we refused), foot massages (which were really expensive so we refused) or yummy little fruit platters (which we free so we gobbled them up).  Whenever anybody got up from their deck-chairs to go for a dip in the pool, the staff would have to scurry over and clear up the wreckage from whatever food the rich bastards had been eating because there were some really clever crows which would swoop down and make off with chips, corn cobs, noodles, and anything else that was going.  I saw one of them dipping its beak in a milk jug.

It was an odd experience because the beach that we were about 3 metres from was a public area and was swarming with touts trying to get you to go horse-riding, camel-riding, parasailing, jetskiing, snorkelling, and so on.  There were security guards standing on the paths to and from the beach stopping the riff-raff from coming into the pool area, but if you glanced towards the ocean someone would invariably catch your eye and call out, "Watersports?  Horse-riding?" - so it was less hassle to sit with your back to the ocean and face the hotel, which felt wrong.

In the late afternoon the wind picked up and the staff ran around picking up the towels from the empty deck-chairs, so we assumed that there was some rain coming in from the sea, even though we had our backs to it.  It was getting gusty and we could see and feel some ocean spray pitter-pattering onto us.  Actually, it felt odd, it wasn't wet at all.  I looked down at myself and saw that I was being delicately sprinkled with fine white crystals.

"Hey look!" I said to my Smaller Half, "the wind is blowing salt crystals off the palm trees!  The sea-spray must evaporate on the leaves and leave a crust of salt!"  We marvelled in astonishment at this for a moment and I decided to taste the salt.  "My taste buds must be going crazy", I said, "because this tastes sweet, not salty."

It continued to sprinkle down on us from the tree, so I looked up to see where this mysteriously sweet sea-salt was coming from.  And that was when I saw a big fat crow above me trying to eat the sugar out of a packet that it had stolen from someone's coffee-cup and spilling most of it on me below.