We call her “Shu1Chuan2″ in Chinese. “Shu1″ means book, and “Chuan2″ means Ship. Do you think that we have given her a good name in Chinese? I believe that she attracted many visitors here because MV Doulos is the only “Book Ship” that reached Kuching. [She currently holds the biggest floating library in the world. Normally there is somewhere around 3000 to 5000 books on the shelf and half a million in the hold.] - quoted from Wikipedia. :p

There are 2 staircases attached to MV Doulos (book fair side), one for going up and one for going down. They are adjustable because the ship would be taller during high tide, and lower during low tide.

Hehe… My uncle, autie and cousin were inside this picture.

We went there in a late afternoon on a Sunday. It was quite crowded. We met our uncle, auntie and cousin at the entrance. They were going to leave but we were just arrived. My auntie advised us to have a quick visit because it was going to rain. However we took at least an hour or two to visit the book fair. It rained. Lucikly it was not heavy and stopped after we have enough time with the ship.

We cannot walk directly from the entrance to the staircase, we have to walk a big circle following the canopy. I guess it was for safety reasons, and can cover visitors from rain (partially), and the third reason is to let visitors to have a look at the welcoming poster which were drawn by local students hung along the walkpath. I think the position of the staircases might change in between high tide and low tide, I wonder whether they need to change the walk path and move the canopy a bit.

Visitors walking down the staircase.

These ladies walked quite carefully and slowly because the shape of each steps is quite challenging.

The shape of the steps look like this, it is rounded to fit any angle of the staicases during high tide and low tide.

Finally we reached the book fair. We encounter an incident right after we enter the book fair. A kid was eating ice-cream there and the ice-cream had dropped onto the wooden floor, the kid was not happy and his mom was communicating with the kid. We wanted to inform the staff to come and clean it but we have not found one yet. Later when we came back to the ice-cream again, it had been clean up already. The MV Doulos staffs were really fast.  Actually, eating and drinking are not allowed in the book fair area.

[Whether captain or cook, administrators or book fair staff, all crew and staff are dedicated volunteers. Most people joining the ship have to raise financial support to cover their living expenses while serving onboard.] - quoted from Doulos.org website. The volunteers are from 40 over countries. It is great because they can travel around the world.

This was another section of the book fair selling specially priced book.

We have bought some books as SiewPeng’s teaching resources. MV Doulos use a special currency unit, where 25 unit is equivalant to RM2. We thought the books on the ship might be very expensive, but some of them are really cheap. We also bought a ecology-safe shopping bag for RM4.

This type of shopping bag is made of cloth. It is getting popular here now. Some supermarkets here have started to encourage shopper to use this type of shopping bag instead of plastic bag. A reminder for you if you go to some supermarket here that sells this type of bag, you better make a mark on your bag when you reuse it, because the supermarket cannot differentiate if the bag is from the shelf or owned by you. Another solution is to use different bag from the one sold in the supermarket. A doctor told me that he wrote his name on his bag so that the casier won’t charge him for his bag.

Bringing knowledge, help and hope by MV Doulos. I hope that she can come to Kuching again.