Wednesday, March 30, 2005

On Statues and Shopping

Holiday Villa Subang is a sprawling resort over 8 acres overlooking a small lake. Where we spotted a turtle. What was a little strange (to me at least) was the abundance of Greek-ish statues all over the place. That aside, it was a pleasant evening that we spent there. Food at the Coffee House was excellent.



We also discovered on the table in our room, a large box of chocolates shaped like F1 cars, courtesy of the organisers. Very nice and thoughtful of them. The chocs provided a final twist to the tale, which I shall reveal at the very end. Bittersweet too - both the chocs and the twist.

Anyway, given our physical condition, we cancelled our plans of driving up to KL, getting dinner there and partying the night away, and instead opted for a quick linner at the aforementioned Coffee House, followed by shopping at Sunway Pyramid. Sa was naturally very thrilled on discovering that British India had a 70% discount outlet there, and we spent the better part of 2 hours (and the better part of my life’s savings) in that shop alone. Walked around a bit more and returned to the hotel. My eyes were swimming in my head and my vision was getting blurred (really!), and I needed sleep. Got back to the hotel and ordered some pita bread with babaghanoush for supper and slept the sleep of the dead.

Ok, now where the h*ll is the F1 track?

It's 12:00 noon. There’s a flurry of phone calls and raised voices up front. The other bus in our contingent has broken down and a few passengers from there have to be transferred on to our bus. These people had signed up for tickets for the 1st qualifying session (1:00 pm on the Saturday), so our bus would now take a ‘short’ detour, stop by the F1 track, drop them off, and resume the journey to our hotel at Subang. The new passengers clamber onto the bus, and we chug along.

Our bus driver loses his way at the entrance to the track. Yes, the combined navigational might of an experienced driver and a guide are overcome by the confusing layout and lack of signs at Sepang. The result is a series of U-turns and much confusion. Not to mention a profusion of views of the large mosque from a variety of angles. The mosque, by the way, is the landmark for the area. Finally a bunch of us in the back of the bus pull out our maps and shout a chorus of instructions to the stressed out driver – “Left here! Straight! Right there!”, and we finally pull up at parking lot PA3 at 2:00 pm, right after the qualifying session has ended. The driver’s confusion has cost us 45 minutes, and this entire detour will cost us 3 hours. My sympathies to the folks who had paid for the qualifying tickets - I hope they got some money back.



After much more driving, and much more confusion again at Subang, and a bunch of instructions from the back of the bus, we finally alight at Holiday Villa Subang. Very hungry, tired, and in my case sleep deprived.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

We went to Sepang, and returned significantly tanned

Note to self: next time, remember the sun tan lotion.

Quite an adventurous trip, it was. We were supposed to meet the rest of the cohort at Orchard at 7 am on the Saturday morning, with the bus to depart at 7:30. We reached home on Friday night (Sat morning acherly) at 3 am, late and high. Knowing that I wouldn't be able to wake up on time if I slept now, I decided I would stay awake until 7:30 and sleep later on the bus.

3:00 am to 3:30 am - American idol rerun on TV
3:30 am to 4:00 am - Surf Engadget.com and about a hundred useless articles on the BBC site
4:00 am to 4:30 am - Days of our Lives on TV
4:30 am - I decide staying awake is madness and trudge off to the bedroom, set the alarm and collapse on the bed.

Naturally we overslept. At 7:30 am, my phone rang - “Hi, is that K? I’m Ricky here, the trip organiser. Are you guys coming?” What a way to wake up on a Saturday, more so when you’re hung over, and sleptunder. Fortunately, I had anticipated that we would oversleep and had packed our bags the previous night. All we had to do was comb our teeth and brush our hair, pick up the bags, and RUN.

I called Ricky back, “Hi Ricky, this is K, it looks like we won’t be there on time (hehehe). Can we meet you guys directly at Tuas at 8:15?”. Tuas is the checkpoint between Singapore and Malaysia, and is about 40 minutes away from home by taxi. We ran downstairs, took a nice white Mercedes cab, told the driver to hurry scurry, and crashed back into sleep.

As it turned out, we reached Tuas a minute before the bus got there. Paid off the cab, and were about over to the main building when we were suddenly accosted by a serious looking policeman carrying a serious looking AK-47. “Donchew know you’re not allowed to walk here? Pedestrians are not allowed in this complex!”.

“Ah pardon me sir, I didn’ch know, but if you could just let us walk 20 metres more, we will give a convincing impression of having alighted from that orange bus that’s just pulled up there”.

Naturally, the cop didn’t have a sense of humour, but Ricky came to the rescue. His keen eyes had spotted us from the bus and he jogged over and explained the situation to the cop. After a dressing down (“Don’ch do that again hor!”), we walked over to the counter, successfully negotiated the immigration officers and gratefully clambered on the bus. Phew!

It was 9 am, we hadn’t left Singapore yet, and what an adventure.

Five minutes later, we crossed the causeway, and pulled up at the Malaysian checkpoint. This was painless and we were soon on our way. By now we were accompanied by a guide, Roger, who exprained to us what we would do on our way to Subang: “In one hour we will stop at Yong Peng, where you hungry people can grab a quick bite. Twenty minit oni ah.”.

Yong Peng café – the name conjured up visions of fresh hot steaming roti pratas with nice chicken curry (this is Malaysia after all), and our tummies started rumbling in pleasure and anticipation. But when we pulled up at YP, our dreams were cruelly shattered; we encountered stall upon stall serving nothing but rice with ‘ikan bilis’ (anchovies) infested vegetables, noodles etc etc. We were quite disappointed, but somehow found something to take the edge off our hunger - nasi lemak and some non-infested vegetables. So much for being seasoned travellers – we couldn’t find anything decent at a rest stop. The good part was we found clean loos and had coffee and tea.

Back on the bus. I’m a lousy bus traveller, and can’t sleep at all on buses. You might recall we hadn’t slept much the previous night, so I was quite out of it. Sa had no such problems – she curled into a comfortable position and drifted off.

Monday, March 21, 2005

Remember to check your passport.

I've been silent these past few days. It's been a busy time, with us running around getting ready for our trip to Sepang (which happened last weekend, more later).

So last Friday, over a week before we were to leave, we went to apply for our Malaysian visas. This normally takes 3 days to process, so we were confident that we'd be ready by Wednesday.

On handing over the passports to the travel agent, we realised that Sa's passport had just one empty page left, and that it would not be accepted by the Malaysian authorities (why?). We felt even worse when we flipped thro the passport and found at least 6 pages with just one rubber stamp (entry or exit stamps) on them. If all of these stamps had been made with a little more care, we'd have had 5 pages more. It was worse that all these renegade stamps were made by Indian immigration. I have this theory that they work hand in glove with the Foreign Service to ensure more revenue from NRIs, from adding additional passport booklets.

As they say here, bohpien, so Monday morning, we went to the Indian High Commission, joined a queue of at least 50 others (at 8:30 am), and waited for half an hour. To our dismay we again realised that this additional booklet would take 2 days to process, which then implied we wouldn't have the time to get the Malaysian visa done.

To cut a long story short, we paid a (huge) express service fee, got the passport back immediately, went to the travel agent that evening, submitted it, and picked up the visas on Friday evening, about 12 hours before we were to leave.

And that was just the beginning of our adventure in Sepang.

Moral of the story: Remember to check your passport at least 3 weeks before you leave for anywhere.

Friday, March 11, 2005

The Source

I've just started re-reading "The Source" by James Michener. The last time I read it (and didn't finish) was a couple of years ago, and the book has been languishing on my bookshelf ever since.

A brilliant story - it attempts to trace the development of three of the great religions of the world - Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and in parallel the history of the Middle East. This is done by the telling of short stories spanning tens of thousands of years, between 10,000 BCE and the early 1900s. Michener cleverly uses the archaeological levels of a tell (mound) being excavated In Israel, each level becoming a chapter moving up from the bottom level which is earliest history, to most recent. As the contemporary archaeologists unearth foundations and shards, the story of people whose dust forms the tell is told.

Naturally the short stories are (in the style of Michener) a mix of fact and fiction. The protagonists of the story are based on typical characters existent at the time, but real historical people are as much a part of the story as the fictional characters are.

I'm now about half way through the book, so far just tracing the history of Judaism, and Christianity is just beginning to get prominence; Islam is yet to be born. And I have already learnt so much about the history of the Jews. Some very interesting links follow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Jewish_Revolt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Jewish_History

Friday, March 04, 2005

My other blog is an airplane

I started a new blog a couple of weeks ago, focusing on the burgeoning (and increasingly crowded) aviation scene in India - one of my interests...

Yes Minister celebrates 25 years



One of my favourite BBC comedies ever celebrated 25 years of existence last month, and 25 years of (along with its follow-up, 'Yes, Prime Minister') not-so-gently and humorously dissecting the British political system. To quote the referenced BBCNews article about it:

It is "one of the best political textbooks about the British system", according to the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler. He is not referring to some complex academic analysis of the workings of Whitehall. Rather strangely, he is actually talking about a sitcom.

But one of the secrets of Yes, Minister was that as well as making people laugh, it did reflect the way that British officialdom actually functioned - at least sometimes, anyway.

The twists and turns of the complex machinations between the Machiavellian permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby and the dogged but bumbling minister Jim Hacker have become part of our political folklore.
And here's the BBC Comedy Guide to 'Yes Minister'.

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Petronas Towers



I last visited Kuala Lumpur a couple of years ago (I know, it's sad, being so close by and all), and took this photo. I think it's quite good, given it was a long exposure and, not having my tripod with me at that moment, I had to hold the camera in my hand.

A few years ago, these towers were the tallest in the world. They are still very very attractive to look at, especially when lit up at night.

I haven't yet been up on the bridge, but I'm sure that will happen eventually... :)

We're going to Malaysia!

Here we go again! In 2 days, the 2005 Formula 1 season will commence with the Melbourne Grand Prix. I'm normally a Ferrari, and in particular Rubens Barrichello supporter, and this year won't be different. However, my loyalties will be shared for the first time between Rubinho and Narain Karthikeyan of Jordan, with whom I share an interesting connection.

Best news is that Sa and I will be at Sepang in a little over 2 weeks to watch the 2nd race of the season! Should have lots of photos from there. I was kind of surprised that we got to go for such a low price. The package is quite inexpensive and covers transport to and from KL, one night's stay at a 4 star hotel and the tickets themselves.