It was already 10am in Malaysia. Even in my own bed in Melaka I hardly stayed until 8am every day. So I got up and began to reorganise the stuff that I had taken out from my bags the previous night.
As summer was approaching, days were longer than nights. The sky was growing bright very early, which allowed me to jot down notes on my stopover in Bahrain and do some Bible reading without the table lamp on at seven o'clock.
I twisted the handle to pull in the window pane. Fresh cold air immediately flowed. I had a combination of green leaves, red tiles, yellow bricks, piles of wood and grey stones in front of me. And I could hear birds chirping, announcing that the day had started.
I felt a bit bored staying awake for hours in the room. I decided to go upstairs with only socks on my feet and slippers in my hands, trying not to make noise when when stepping on the wooden stairs which crackled sometimes.
The sun was shining through the windows everywhere in the house.
But Ernest and Nicole were still having their sweet dreams.
I noticed a wide new mirror behind the cupboard on which they had put pictures and souvenirs and inside which they were keeping dessert plates, crystal glasses, etc. It must have come from their fur coats shop.
The previous night, Ernest told me there were three Macintosh computers in the house instead of his very first orange one I had known in the beginning of the new century.
The white one on the dining table was bought second hand especially for Nicole to keep her thousands of digital pictures.
The one in the sitting room was mainly for his mailings and research on the Internet.
The one on the pineapple-shaped table near the shower room had been removed to be sent for repair. Ernest had made some changes of file names during some video editing, which had disturbed his old computer.
Apparently the rest looked almost the same as six years ago.
What I liked about their house was that everything was placed so naturally. Since they started travelling in the early 1980s, they had been bringing back souvenirs from all over the world. And thanks to their hospitality, it was no doubt the most visited house by foreigners in this small village situated somewhere in Eastern France. As their guests increased, they received more and more presents. They just displayed all of them here and there without throwing away any of the older ones.
On the mantelpiece of the fire place, I saw the lamp in the form of a shell that I had offered to them from my first university holiday in Malaysia in 1996,
and the golden lighter my brother Ah Yu had bought for them from Japan before his first visit in France, assuming that Ernest was a smoker.
When I went into the toilet, I found the two pieces of yellowish printing paper which had been there since 1995 and even earlier! On the papers were greeting words in Japanese-French and English-French.
On the left was Eriko's writing. Eckhard and I were the authors of the one on the right. When we pasted the paper, Eckhard and Eriko were just friends, maybe in love of each other. Now they were already married with two children.
Although I had lost contact of them for years, I never forgot them. Without these two kind people, I would not have met Ernest and Nicole...
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