Sometimes I wonder how my head doesn't fall off

As I sit here typing my newest installment of "guff wot I done lately" my eyelids keep dropping shut and refusing to liift up again. I am right now what is mostly referred to as bloody jiggered. It's been quite a week. Where shall I begin.



Saturday: The esteemed and long awaited arrrival of my parents (would you warrent it, the day they flew here was the day after that miraculous non-fatal plane crash at Heathrow. When was the last time a plane crashed in the UK? How many years has it been mercifully accident free? Then the day before mum and dad come a sodding plane scooches it's arse on the perimiter fence and bellyflops onto the runway. As if mum isn't utterly neurotic anyway without being reminded - half a day before she gets into a plane to the other side of the world - that from time to time they happen to fall out of the sky). I went to the airport and picked them up, took them on the marvellous superhightech train that takes them to the doorstep of their hotel - this no embellishment, you practically fall over the thing on the way out of the lobby.



They are both seeming very delighted with the Hilton, they were on the 27th floor with a lovely bay window view of KL. The hilton is super swanky and no mistake, so they get to fell the raw pleasure of a nice bit of luxury living at a great height. Took them for a bit of grub, then i recieved the 1/4 tonne of food, presents and supplies (i.e mega overdoses of marmite and twiglets) that they dragged 8000 miles with them. Thanks for my pressies everybody, they're

brilliant. Great to see them both, but there never seems enough time for us to finish our sentences, we just keep on jabbering. Which is great, cos malaysians just don't seem to be able to keep up the pace of a good old fashioned yabber like we can.



Caught up on all the wotnots and that from back home, and got to see a lot of lovely photos of various younglings, in various states of being not-so-young-as-you-were-last-time-I-saw-you-lings. All very jolly.



SUNDAY: Mum and dad did a fair job of jetlag recovery. We took them out to Chinatown to see some of the sights, sounds and bargains on offer. This is usually the best place to take people when they're feeling woozy and spaced out by the travel and the general culture stuff (it's a kind of instant noisy bright, colourful, pushy, tasteless - oh so tasteless - and sinky dose of culture shock, but with lots of bargains i you willing to haggle). Mum and dad took it all in their stride, although I could sense mum getting a little weirded out by the hard sell of certain fellas and the heat, which there is no escaping from.

We took them for a taste of local food, in an environment that is - shall we say - a little less pristine than the hilton. It's dirty, but it tastes great.



I took dad into the buddist temple there, whilst mum and vanessa had a bit of a shop (which I remember several years ago me saying that hanging out in temples is a brilliant way to waste an afternoon and being greeted by his usual cynicism) and he seemed to really enjoy it, found it very peaceful I'd wager. You never know, maybe there is time to pare away a few layers of the cynic from him yet, now he's retired n all.



MONDAY: Mum got a slightly dicky belly (standard for any new arrivals just a bug you need to get used to, nothing to do with yesterdays chinese food, however I'm sure that it helped her become more "acclimatised" to malaysia, if you know what i mean) so she stayed around the hotel having a lazy day. Nothing too serious, but she feel it would be prudent to go on a long walk away from the toilet. Dad and I went into town to see the Petronas towers, which are quite a sight even after all this time. I go past them most days, I stomp past on my way to work and to meet people, but it does me good to look at them properly with somebody who has never seen them up before. The best way to do this is take the LRT whic goes underground (so you don't get to see them getting closer and get a bit bored of looking), then you climb the steps and look up, then up more, then up a bit more. They're mega big huge massive innit. Dad I believe is suitably impressed, not only with their engineering and stature, but by the fact that they're just so bloody shiny and clean.

We walked off to the traders hotel behind, for the (now almost customary) pint or 2 in the skybar. My favourite drinking spot, on the 33rd floor with no roof. Here we chewed the fat and discussed how good it is getting new lenses for Nikon DSLRs, and how he should just go ahead and buy himself a nice new telephoto or macro lens and start having a bit more fun taking pictures. A storm passed over, depositing very generous amounts of wind and rain along with a brilliant lighting display in the distance. A couple of pints passed the afternoon away merrily. Oh crap, we better go and check on mum. Anyway, I hadn't eaten for ages so I nipped into a shop to get a quick bite to eat, after paying I look around for dad. Oh he's in a camera shop, oh oh, he's talking animatedly to a shop assistant, oh no, he's got a camera with a nice big telephoto lens in his hands. Eeeek. So over I go, look at the lens box, eeek RM5999 (about 900 quid) it says. Waaah, must stop this happening. Anyway, long story short the man tells dad he can give him a good price of 400 pounds. Dad ponders this, then points out that he read in a magazine that in the UK you can get for 210 pounds. Shock horror, he's been rumbled, out comes the calculator "I must have made a mistake" he says, whatever. Anyway, dad gets it for 170 pounds in the end (or RM 1170 instead of the listed RM5999). Wahahahaaaaa

TUESDAY: I had to go to a meeting in the morning, then I met mum and dad in a coffeshop. Today was to be a day of pampering and massage for them. I took them to my favourite local massage place, where it is proper nice and spa stylee, a bit more expensive, but you do get a proper good work over and it's not in the least bit dodgy. I left them there for 2 hours getting rub and contorted in the name of relaxation. And very good they seemed for it after. In fact I could hardly get them to move after. Took them to my flat and mum told me "well it's not as awful as I thought it would be" which I took to mean, "quite a nice place you got here" would go in my hammock though.
Later on we went into town and had a meal with them and vanessa. Opted for the super asian choice of fish and chips - don't you know it's as asian as you get dear (I had pie and mash). Mum and dad were reet impressed however, as they opted to eat the Garouper (or groper as dad insisted on calling it to the usual hilarious results), which I think blew their minds out cos it were mega tasty.

Next 3 days they went to singapore, don't really know what they did, but met up with Ira the quilt woman, rode on dads train and ate a crappy meal someplace. I can giev you better details when I got more time. Over the time they were in singapore I was busy Producing 2 adverts (my first adverts ever) but this is not going to get mentioned now cos I in a lovely hotel next to a beach in Langkawi.

Right, I gonna go now and catch u more on the rest of their holiday tomorrow, namely cos I 'm a bit drunk and the internet is a silly expensice price (i tried to use dads laptop but typically I pressed the ON switch and it broke, why me? Why is it every time I try and use mum or dads computer it breaks? I use computers all the time, I got my own and it hardly ever breaks, but then I touch the flippin on switch one flippin time and it flippin goes to the "someone just broke your omputer, please allow windows to spend an hour trying to fix it" screen. Why god, why?

Sorry about the messy advert, it'll be gone soon

I thought about signing up to put ads on here and make some money, read the terms and changed my mind, but the thing is still there, hopefully it will be gone in 10 days or less, that's what they say.
Ho hum, you'll just have to live with it for now

Wet and Wild

Yes, last week was a jolly one indeed. A bit sad because all of Vanessas family returned to Australia to continue their work and studies, but they got sent off with a big meal. It was all quite random though because our mate Brendan and his Frenchie girlfriend finally turned up here in KL. They been on a climbing holiday in Thailand, and stopped by on their way back home. Brendan was the chap who took us to South Africa and drove us all around, and I was kind of hoping to show them around asia a bit, but they seemed to do alright on their own. They stopped on the mattress in our gaff and we got to indulge in copious amounts of beer and recounting old tales, as well as catch up on 2 years worth of Bristol gossip, as well as visiting some of our local watering holes around the corner (footnote: these are actually semi hooker bars it would seem, or GRO bars - which stands for Guest Relations Officer a very fancy term for an Escort or a Taxi Girl), which was all jolly good fun.

On the Thursday we all got a day off (public holiday, don't know what religion but great all the same) and Jess booked a whole bunch of us to go white water rafting down the Kampar river (in the state of Perak just north of here, where I did that location shoot and took all those jolly nice photos a few months ago). So off we trooped. Small problem was that Brendan and I had been up drinking on the hammocks all night - as in quite literally all night as we had a lot of fat to chew. The first realisation of quite how much we had been rambling on was when the morning prayers started drifting out of the local mosque (a very clear indicator that it is 5am sharp). Small issue was we were supposed to be waking up a 6am, so kind of buggered my oppotunity to go to bed in a rather large way - obviously Vanessa was smart enough to hit the hay at a fairly respectable hour, what with her being much brainier than me (not brainy enough to be nowhere near me, but that is just one of those things for which I am truly grateful). Er where was I?. Oh yes, very pissed on a hammock and about to get up and go spelunking, shoot down a flying fox, climb up some rocky stuff and then get very wet on a raft ploughing down a very fast river. Lucky I wasn't hungover, as I was simply too drunk for that. I only got some photos here, but will provide other ones when Julian gives me his camera to plunder.

You may note here that these photos are of us in a raft, however the raft is not in the water. Well that was the very safe and fun ride we took to the river (note the photo with the 2 rafts that have just been unloaded from the ultra safe lorry, and the ultra safe well maintained bridge we went over, add to this multiple very safe potholes on a winding jungle road with a marvellously safe 3 metre ditch on one side and super safe low hanging branches and you get some idea about quite how brilliantly safe that trip was. Crash helmets were not just incase you crack your head on a submerged rock, no siree bob).

The caves we went into were amazing, but stank of fruitbat shit (apparently fruit bats are the key pollenators of the Durian tree - the worlds most unpleasant smelling fruit - which explains why their poo is so maloderous). At one point we turned all our torches off to see quite how dark dark can be, but there I was with all these colours and shapes and stuff flashing in front of my eyes, I thought to myself "this cave isn't that dark" then I remembered I was still a bit drunk and hadn't been to sleep for over 35 hours and had just exerted myself a lot by climbing through a cave. I'd say it was a sobering thought, but it actually wasn't

Miraculously I managed to not die due to being drunk in a pitch black cave with precipices all around and little bits of old rope to haul myself up with, nor did I drunkenly drown in a rainforest river, I did kind of bang my elbow a bit and got a nasty knock, but that was OK cos the booze was a marvellous analgesic. Vanessa had a nasty injury when we barrelled into a big set of rapids, got totally submerged and then popped up minus our boatman (isn't he supposed to be the professional rafter?) who unfortunately smashed into Vanessa on his way out and nearly broke her elbow. But she's ok now, just ruined the day for her a little bit.

Apart from that it was all very good fun.

The hangover that evening wasn't.

ps: I know it's not big and it's not clever, but I tell you one thing, it is bloody interesting and there s no finer way to sober up than being dumped at high speed into fast moving freezing cold river rapids, whooo, that is one serious wakeup call, they should try and use it on coma patients

It Ain't arf 'ot mum

Indeed today is rather on the warm side. I woke up this morning and had a lovely 20 minute suntanning on the balcony, listening to the sounds of birds and motorbikes. Then had a bloody good go at tidying the appartment (along with scrubbing at the nasty stain that was left by a cat, I forgot to mention that in my New Year blog, when we got back home and paid the theif taxi driver, then we discovered a lovely big steamer on the doorstep, a present from some local toerag moggie that I hope for his sake I never catch in the act, or he'll get some free flying lessons from the 6th floor, then we'll see if he lands on his feet after I've rung his bloody neck) and trying to make it look passable and cosy for tonights party. Yes it's once again my birthday and I am feeling decidedly past my prime (ably assisted by my post festive season gutrot and general lethargy). Yes 27 years old, knocking on 30 in a rather unpleasent manner. However it's nice to know I still got a mental age of 4 and a half.

I went shopping yesterday to some delightfully dodgy booze shops in Brickfields (an indian part of town). All this booze comes very much grey import from Thailand, much of it is totally dirty and undrinkable, but highly alcoholic and exceptionally cheap (got a litre of Vodka for around 3 quid) so I bought, 1 litre vodka, 1 litre rum, 1 litre Thai Song (odd Thai not-quite-whiskey-not-quite-rum-not-quite-potable-but-potent) and around 1 and half litres of assorted unknown other high proof liquor. So punch it is tonight then kids, and what a mighty punch it will have.

On Thursday night it was the 26th wedding anniversary of Vanessas aunt and uncle, so the whole lot of us went out for a very tasty buffet dinner at the Mandarin Oriental. A very posah hotel next door (literally) to the Petronas towers, where the door staff all look a little bit like the genie from aladdin (minus blue skin of course) and the variety of buffet curry was delectable. Yum yum indeed.

Well, after tonights birthday festivities I should be able to settle into a slightly more normal eating routine, and hopefully shift a couple of the extra tonnes I piled up in the gut department over this festive seasons festivities, maybe I'll give my liver a few days to metabolise all those lovely coagulated fatty droplets too. It never hurts to try and stave off cirrhosis for a few more weeks now does it.

Very soon mum and dad will be popping over for a flying visit, sadly only 2 weeks, which isn't very long over in this part of the world I can tell you, but there we go, it's a start and I'm pretty certain they'll be desperate to come back ASAP.

Last night a tree round the corner from Vanessas parents place got struck by lighting, cleaved in twain and deposited across the road. This was a bit unnerving for me, as only an hour before I'd been stood underneath that tree (though not in the savage storm, just before as I walked the dog) and watched monkeys vigerously copulating on somebodys garden fence. Yes, copulating, yes I was watching. It wasn't so much out of voyeurism, or even that much out of the David Bellemy sense of "Oh wow, a monkey taking another monkey from behind on a fence, now isn't that a beautiful bit of nature in action". No in fact it was more out of plane old shock. There I was, walking the dog (not a euphamism) minding my own business, when suddenly the dog tried to drag me off towards what turned out to be a troupe of simians. One of them looked like it was going to try and savage the dog, or me, or both, whilst the dog kept straining at the lead because it wanted to go and sniff the nasty little buggers poo-pipe. So there I was, one eye on the potential attacker, another eye on the 6 other potential attackers. When low and behold, a small female (I presume it was female, but knowing monkeys it could go either way) lifted her tail, bent right over and waved her buttocks. A very large male sauntered over, lowered his gaze to check the proferred buttock offering, nodded his approval and then with both hands grabbed a good grip on her cheeks, shuffled himself up and started monkey humping. In broad daylight, have you no shame.
Well I do monkey boy, and it wouldn't do much for my Face for me to be caught gawping open mouthed at monkeys doing it doggy-doggy, but the doggy would budge cos it was staring at another monkey. So I was obliged to wait this out (luckly only 30 seconds and with no frantic ook-ooking to be heard at all thank goodness).
No I didn't get any photos, you dirty buggers.

So there we go, at least I can go to my grave saying "well at least I got to watch some monkeys having a shag".

What did you do this week?

Provided by florida web design company.

Barbeques

Yes in this part of the world the partys never stop. This is the New Years Day Barbeque (good way for me to sweat out the hangover).

My god was there ever a lot of food there.

In the words of the Aussies,

"G'day mate, let's chuck anather shrimp on the barbie"

so we did, and then about 50 more.

yum

HAPPY NEW YEAR

who are you calling big nose, big nose?
vanessa somehow improsoned herself in the goldfish bowl


julian discovers exactly how painful it is to pull his own face out of his eyeball (whilst eating his own thumb)

People in a lift. Stuck

Well, as far as portents for a new year goes, I think this year has some sort of bizarreness in store for Vanessa and myself. Hopefully not dark portents, but certainly surreal ones. This is the story of our New year celebrations, I hope it comes across as bizarrely in the translation to text as the events themselves seemed (however in the true style of, well, me and a million other alcoholics in the world, it is suffice to say that I was ever so slightly drunk for the majority of these proceedings, but nonetheless, they were all a bit odd. Enough preamble, here goes.

New Years eve 2007, 7pm:
Arrive at KLCC, next to the Petronas Twin Towers, at the very nice, very expensive and very plush new apartment belonging to Vanessas aunt and uncle, where we are to see in the New Year. Everybody all dressed up and ready for dinner. Jimmy (Vanessas youngest uncle, the pickled one) plies me with very nice Johnnie Walker Blue Label and 21 year old Ballatines. I accept. Photos and exchanges of pleasantries, the girls go and get ready.

Around 7.45pm:
Myself, Mr Chia, Mr Hii (uncle, owner of apartment),Oma and Opa (Grandmother and Grandfather), Cousins Claudia and Darius, sister Jess and boyfriend Julian all get into the private lift down to the lobby (this is a lift with no Floor buttons, they just put their keycard to the reader and it whisks you up to the 23rd floor), the others go out to Delicious (a nearby restaurant) and I linger in the lobby to wait for Vanessa, who is right behind us in the next lift load. I light a cigarette. I wait. I finish cigarette. I look around, getting a bit concerned, is there another way to the restaurant I don’t know about? I wait a bit longer, vexed. It occurs to me that there are at least 6 women in the next lot, so maybe they are just procrastinating with their hair or some obsessive clean-up project. I go to the restaurant to see if they snuck past me.
Claudia conforms my suspicions about possible last minute preening, by saying, “well there you hav it, that’s my family for you”

Around 8.05pm:
I’m now decidedly baffled as to Vanessas whereabouts. Opa comes over and says “lif stack, ho ho ho” with a big smile. Hmmm, what is this? Lift stuck? I go out to the doormen of the apartment and the conversation went a bit like this:

ME: “you know your lift? It’s….”

DOORMAN: “oh lift, that way” (pointing in a very helpful way to where he know’s I already know where the lifts are because he watched me go into it a few hours before and come out of less than 20 minutes hence).
ME: “No I’m on about the private residents lift, it’s..” (point to private residents lift)

DOORMAN: “Oh that’s private residents lift. Private residents only there

ME: Yes, well you are a mighty intelligent fellah aren’t you, I can see they only pick the cream of the graduates from the Acadamy for super-sharp doormen here. Did you by any chance get a first? (OK, I exaggerate, I obviously didn’t have the quick wit to articulate such a scathing retort on the spot, in fact I just said)

ME: Yes, that one. Over there, it’s broken.

DOORMAN: Huh?

ME: Broken
DOORMAN: Huh?
ME: Broken, stuck, eee no workee, kaput
DOORMAN: Huh?
ME: Oh for f@*ks sake, come with me idiot
DOORMAN: Huh? (follows)

We enter the lobby to find a member of the maintenance staff (in blue shirt) standing in the doorway of the very high tech lift maintenance room, with his hands at chest height doing the classic dance of the incompetent fool:

One step into the room, shake head, one step into lobby, look for boss, alarm rings in room so step back in, waggle hands around, repeat for around 15 minutes with a look of complete uselessness on your face, going “errrrm”. (deee dee-dee, dee dee dee dee deeee deee, cha cha cha)

So by this point they’d all been stuck in the lift for 15 minutes and nobody had been alerted (fortunately the system has an automatic call out to the maintenance guy, but he was over 30 minutes drive away from the centre of KL, which is normally very jammed, but on new years eve, with a big fireworks display planned in the park behind Petronas and several roads closed, it was just pure chaos). By the time I got to the random useless dancing caretaker, Mr Chia, Mr Hii and Opa had all arrived in the lobby. Mr Hii, the owner of said very expensive and exclusive apartment was no a happy man at all, Mr Chia stood there looking like the building manager was telling him a series of increasingly funny jokes (such as “it’s going to be at least half an hour”, “yes there is a manual over-ride, no I don’t have the authority to use it, why not? I know I’m the building manager but I haven’t been trained to use it” and a lot more besides.) My favourite comment from the building manager would have had me in stitches in some other time and place, I asked him to come and help me force open the lift doors (as they were only stuck between 1 and G), his reply was amazing……

“we can’t do that, oh no, oh no, if you open the doors then the lift will fall automatically, it will go straight down to the basement”

Now call me a bit ignorant if you will, but in all seriousness, did he truly believe that the lift manufacturers would have an inbuilt mass-murder/suicide system for when the meddling firemen turn up and try to save the people trapped in said lift. The lift descends, detects problem, emergency brakes go on, alarm pressed, firemen come, prize open doors and then whoooooooommppphhh, straight from the 20th floor to the sub-basements and all inside are turned to puree. Genius.

"Don't worry madam, we'll have you out of there in a jiffy" Wheeeeee splooorgge!!! "oh well lads, I must try and remember that suicide catch next time, always slips my mind"

So I ignored him.

Needless to say the 3 elder males were not a very happy crowd, as they are men who are accustomed to saying “I want this done” and the immediate response is “certainly sir, as quickly as possible, in fact it was already done before you asked for it, perhaps you'd like me to remove my trousers and drag my testes accross broken glass and chilli sauce as way of apology” (or something a bit like that anyway).

Opa was very angry indeed and shouting things in Hokkien at the manager, no idea what he was saying but he didn’t look very happy and sounded even less so. I decided (ina very rare moment of sensible clarity) that another person shouting probably wouldn’t be much use (or less of a lie is that I thought "bugger me, this is all a bit frightening, these chaps don't need my help to rip this guy apart, I'm getting as far away from here as I can feasably can in case they suddenly turn on me, I'm off!!! But the truth sounds so much less heroic doesn't it), so I went up the stairs to go and check on the unfortunate captives.

Would you believe they were playing cards? Of all the things. There was a battle of concerned fathers meets the blur-blur doorman going on in the lobby (shortly to be joined by the rest of the family) and the buggers in the lift were having a very jolly old time of it.
Jimmy (on the inside) and myself tried to prise open the doors, but to not much avail as they were bloody hard to budge, so I went back down to get some lads to help. I went back into the lobby and much to my surprise 2 metal bars had appeared from somewhere (god only knows where they came from) but as I walked into the lobby Vanessas granddad was smacking one metal bar onto the marble reception counter as an emphatic counterpoint to his Hokkien rage (bit scary, somehow moreso coming from a near octogenarian), Mr Chia was shouting at the man to just phone the fire brigade, and I managed to grab a hold of Darius, Julian and Krishnan (the driver) and get them to help pull the doors apart (the metal bars came with us),
So we had about 5 or 10 mintues of door wrestling in order to create a 3 inch gap (Uncle Benny started shouting “there’s people fainting in here!!! It’s so hot!! Help us!!!” The joker, but it put the fear in the manager, who ran off to get cups of water) and then the bloody lift man turned up.

What happened next was just a sheer shock, I had to restrain myself from punching somebody (anybody) because there we were, 4 lads and 2 metal bars jammed in the bloody doors, and the lift guy saunters up, cool as a cucumber with a very thing piece of metal with a little bend in the end. We took the metal bars out, closed the doors and he just pushed the little pokey device into the gap at the top, moved it about 2cm and then CLICK, the doors opened.

THAT WAS ALL IT TOOK?????!!!!! I could have bloody done it with my glasses, for pitys sake.

In the name of all things good and right in the world I prevented myself from smashing his smug git brains all over the polished floor tiles.

So then we all had fun pulling 13 people out of a lift that was half way down in the most dignified manner possible(it didn’t plummet to the ground and slaughter everybody by the way, a point I felt compelled to make to the manager afterwards) and so like some crazy fire-brigade reality show we started to haul them all out into the fresh air-con. 10 minutes of shouting followed (all the escapees felt like venting it onto the manager, I’d say I felt sorry for him, but he was a total doink so no sympathy from me) and we went and ate food.
Dinner was very nice, service was shit, but food was nice, and everybody was quite happy to be alive and no longer stuck in a lift.

MIDNIGHT: So we all went back to the apartment after dinner, drank more and awaited the coming new year. We thought we’d have a pretty good view of the massive fireworks display at KLCC, what with being less than 100metres away and eye level to it. But, unlucky for us, in our assumptions we hadn’t bothered to check which way they would be launched. Ooops, didn’t take into account the building in the way now did we. Whoops, so we got to hear a lot of loud bangs, saw they sky flash lots of colours, we even got to see some reflections in a building opposite, but sadly the only way to see the real quality of the display was on the frigging TV. 100 meters away, on the 23rd floor, and we had to watch the pissing thing on TV. Bugger that, what a gyp. Eh? Never mind though, we should have done us homework (more to the point I should have laid a bet with Vanessas uncle Jimmy, then I could have won back the 300 rinngit I lost to him at poker in Langkawi, cos I did have a sneaking suspicion that Sods Law would come into play a little bit there). Never mind. Somebody in the carpark below did set off some mortars and we got the novel experience of being directly above them when they exploded (ever had that? Me neither, until then, it was quite bizarre, and fun too), which made some attempt to recompense us for the loss of the Million rinngit fireworks display going on the other side of a big building from us. Some way, but not all.
Oh and somebody had been sensible (and bling) enough to buy a few bottles of Dom Perignion 1990 from Langkawi duty free. Which made up for quite a lot.

3.30am: After a lot of very silly drinking games, being drunk on the balcony and sticking playing cards to our foreheads (for a reason that quite escapes me now) we went home to bed, but not before a bastard Taxi driver charged us 50rm to back to my apartment, the shit left the meter running too, just to rub it in, it came to 8.20rm – which after midnight is double time, so say 16.50rm, plus a bit extra for new year, I would have been magnanimous to give the bastard 25rm, or maybe even 30. 50!!! 50!!!! I told him to choke on it.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL (except taxi drivers, I hope you all get savaged by rabies monkeys)