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Tym Blogs Too!

The random web scribblings of a person with too many thoughts and too little time

Friday, January 04, 2008

The year 2007, in books

Wahj and I were recently talking about how we each evaluate the last few years of our lives: he sees distinctly good and bad years, while I recall the past more in terms of individual events rather than in yearly blocks.

What I didn't say was that, obviously, this year's been different.

I still kept reading books, though, and buying far more than I oughta have. I read more non-fiction (occupational hazard, I'm writing such a book myself), chalked up an impressive amount of reading during the third-quarter vacation, and ended the year by caving in to the Borders discount card (I've already had a Kinokuniya discount card for several years).

The final tally: 30 (would've been 31 if I'd been more diligent the last few nights of the year). It's the second highest number since I started keeping this annual record, and only three books were rereads --- yay me!

1. Guns, germs & Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years, Jared Diamond (January)

I like books like this: big, bold and compressing heaps of history into several hundred pages (okay, closer to a thousand in this case, but still). Plenty to learn about how agriculture spread from the Fertile Crescent to the rest of the world, how 168 Spanish conquistadors defeated 80,000 Inca warriors in 1532 and what exactly Australian aborigines were doing on their continent for the millennia that preceded European arrival. Whatever the extent of geographical determinism, it's fascinating to know where we might've come from and how we got to this point today.

2. Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie (February)

I'm a big fan of Rushdie and this was a good one. Not too weighed down by talk of terrorism and politics, and always beautiful.

3. A History of God, Karen Armstrong (March)

Heavy-going stuff. I'd be a liar if I said I understood all of it; at some points, I was just flipping the pages to get through it (I find it almost pathologically impossible to give up on reading a book halfway). Nevertheless, I liked seeing how ideas about God have changed through the centuries. I'd need to learn more about Judaism and Islam to really get some of these ideas, though.

4. A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain (March) *

My idea of light reading, after the preceding three tomes. Plus if one can't go on vacation just yet, reading about Bourdain's travels are the next best thing.

5. The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes, Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves (April)

More non-fiction: jokesters write about the history of the joke. Entertaining without trying too hard or being over-the-top, even though there are jokes on every page. I wanna write books like this!

6. Down Under, Bill Bryson (April) *

The almost-annual reread. It's a good pick-me-up when nothing else will do.

7. Arthur & George, Julian Barnes, (May)

I'm not usually big on historical fiction, but this was absolutely engrossing. I don't know (or care) if any of it was based on historical fact; the story had its own sense of purpose and life driving it forward. Now that I think it, the character George in this book reminds me of Oscar from Oscar and Lucinda (which I read in 2006).

8. On Beauty, Zadie Smith (May)

Another solid fiction read, this time about a dysfunctional family in a college town setting --- the better to conjure up scenes of academic posturing and college student angst, all in one. Maybe the characters' preoccupations are a little too precious, as a result, but I still liked how it all came together.

9. Old Man's War, John Scalzi (June)
10. The Ghost Brigades, John Scalzi (I forgot what month I read it in)

I've been reading John Scalzi's blog for years; this year, I finally got around to his books. I like the premise well enough, but I've never been big on action-adventure science fiction, so this was entertaining but not entirely my cup of tea.

11. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (July) *

I keep rereading this in the hope that more of the science he expounds will stick in my head. What I find most engaging, though, is all the drama behind all the dry facts that have come to inhabit our science textbooks. It makes me wonder what really goes on at today's science conferences before they decided whether to delist Pluto as a planet and the like.

12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (August)

I read it because I had to finish the series. It was too long, too circuitous and tried to mention everyone in the dramatis personae. This is what happens when you wait till the last book to start really killing people off.

Oh, and the epilogue? So self-indulgent. I don't care and it's very confusing to have new characters named after the ones that just got offed.

13. A Home at the End of the World, Michael Cunningham (August)

A great recommendation from a friend. More dysfunctionality, this time with gay men and their, uh, woman. For some reason, it's all the scenes to do with mortality, particularly parental mortality, that come to mind right now.

14. Paris: A Secret History, Andrew Hussey (September)

I finished this on the day after I arrived in Paris, then toted it around for a few days to track down a couple of neat places like Passage Denferth. I had other notes about the place where Abelard used to teach (I think) on Ile de la Cité or less well-known old churches with piquant histories --- but I'm too lazy to go dig up my notes now.

Anyway, as a book it didn't quite rev up as much sordid steam as I'd hoped, but I enjoy these "alternative" histories.

15. Theft: A Love Story, Peter Casey (September)

I suppose it's a strange thing to read a book that's predominantly set in Australia while I was in Paris and London, but the idea of fakery/forgery and the international art shenanigans in the book were quite at home amidst all the museums I visited.

16. How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff (September)

I pulled this off Stellou's shelf and it was such a good read for a "young people" book. Sometimes the narrator got a little too Holden Caulfield on me, but the unexpected turns in the story (I'm trying not to give anything away here) helped to keep things going. I actually think this could be a little too intense for its "young people" label. Surely it belongs on the fiction shelf with A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and its ilk.

17. Paris Out Of Hand: A Wayward Guide, Karen Elizabeth Gordon (September)

A very different kind of guidebook, and best read --- as I did --- after one has just visited Paris. One of those whimsical, imagined journeys that always makes me wonder, how did anyone get this green-lighted at the publisher's? Not because it's bad, but because it's the kind of richly imagined (there's that word again) narrative that one hardly expects to be able to pick up anymore.

18. On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan (September)

Stellou gave me her galleys of this --- it's lovely to have publishing connections --- so I read it with typos and all, none of which impeded my enjoyment of the book. Very internal as McEwan tends to be, and I always wonder how he manages to keep control of everything without making these multi-layered narratives seem like schizophrenic skips through the park. I would like to write a book like this: one man, one woman, one night --- and all that unfolds before and after.

19. Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong (September)

I picked this up for a couple of pounds at --- damn, I've forgotten the name of the second-hand bookshop already, but I'm sure Stellou will remember. 200-plus pages of a crash course in Islam that I found very handy. I'm not sure that I'll ever read the Qu'ran cover-to-cover, so I think this might be a handy cheatsheet of sorts for me.

20. Goh Keng Swee: A Portrait, Tan Siok Sun (September)

Oh dear. I was so looking forward to this and then on the very first page of the narrative, the name of the man whose biography this was got truncated in a typically Singaporean fashion to "GKS" --- and that was the end of it for me. I mean, I read the whole book, but it didn't have any of the zest or oomph that one would expect from a biography at once personal and political. Oh, I know, it's hard in Singapore to tell certain stories at all, the moment they show any sign of diverging from the official narrative. But there better be some damn good notes or excised chapters lying around in someone's safe, otherwise I'm not sure what the whole exercise was for.

21. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (October)

Wahj loaned me this because it's one of those sci-fi classics that I've been meaning to read forever. I'm glad I read it now because I don't think I would've fully gotten into it at a younger age --- after all, it's mostly about boys learning to fight a war while bouncing around in a scenario room. What surprised me was to see it in Kinokuniya's children's section a few weeks later, with a cover that would suggest it was all action-packed adventure as opposed to one big scorching mindfuck.

22. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel (October)

I'd like to read more graphic novels, but I never know where to begin. This one came recommended by Salon some time ago, and I was thrilled to finally track it down at Kinokuniya (thanks to Wahj figuring out how their apparently-convoluted-but-actually-alphabetical graphic novel section is sorted). The book is a very vivid personal memoir, but mediated through the graphic novel format and so it doesn't read as "heavy" as, say, any number of the abovementioned narratives about dysfunctional families --- but it's still a solid, good read.

23. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy (November)

Another one I finally tracked down. Short and sharp, making a clear and compelling argument about why tarting or slutting it up does not make for women's "liberation". A must-read for all girls and women, alongside Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.

24. The View From Castle Rock, Alice Munro (November)

I bought this because Nardac had highly recommended Munro and I wanted to see how she turned family history into memoir (I'm trying to figure out what to do with my family narrative too). It read like historical fiction, but I suppose with that added quality of the reader wondering what's "real" and what isn't. I was just amazed at the fact that Munro could go back to the village where her great-great-grandfather had come from and find family records, including personal letters and the like (at least, I'm assuming those are actual letters, not fictionalised ones). Those aren't typically the sort of resources one finds in a village in China or Sri Lanka.

25. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Jared Diamond (November)

It took me a few months to get through this, mostly because it was too heavy to lug around so I made it my bedtime reading. More fascinating case studies, and more esoteric ones too. I finally know what might have happened to the Easter Islanders who raised their magnificent statues, and learned a lot about Norse and South Pacific societies as well. The case studies are the best bit, really --- but then I always love a good old-fashioned story.

26. iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon, Steve Wozniak & Gina Smith (December)

An impulse buy --- I'm not that much of a Machead. It's an interesting narrative: the guy did originate many computer interfaces and accessories that we take for granted today after all, not to mention the universal remote control. But it sounded very much like a guy chatting into a tape recorder and less a structured, studied story with proper context and everything. Then again, if it really is Steve Wozniak's voice we're hearing throughout the story, I guess that's the sort of story he'd tell anyway.

27. Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith (December)

So beautiful and lyrical --- and I'm fairly certain I didn't completely understand it. I need to go read it again.

28. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein (December)

Another long overdue read, especially after reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War. I definitely glossed over all the military jargon (repple-depple, anyone?) and tried not to get bogged down in the politics. I must say the protagonist was much more engaging than I thought he would be.

29. Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, Bill Bryson (December)

I was surprised to see this lying on the best friend's bookshelf because I thought I a) knew had heard of all of Bryson's books, b) had read most of the travel ones. Turns out this is one of his early ones, which you can tell because the tone and writing isn't as tight as his later books, not to mention there's quite a bit of unfathomable whining about some aspect of his travels or European culture that seems quite at odds with the more charitable approach I'd gotten used to. I think I'll stick to his more recent titles.

30. Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood (December)

I bought this off the internet and promptly read it, which makes it two collections of short stories by female Canadian writers that I read within the span of two months. This one's entirely fictional and more introspective, I think, which sorta makes it an appropriate book to end the year on.

For next year, I'm going to start keeping notes throughout the year as I read. As you can tell, my memory of the books I read earlier in the year is sketchy compared to more recent reads. Which is totally unfair to the books, plus I obviously need to supplement my wilting memory.

So: more note-taking and more reading. Also more borrowing of books from the library or friends, I think, because the place I'm moving to is smaller and I just can't keep buying books the way I do. As always, reading recommendations are welcome.

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Related posts: The year in books 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003

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posted by Tym at 5:40 PM

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Wednesday, December 05, 2007

A sole comparison

The last piece of lemon sole I had before last night was as delightfully light as its name suggests, served on a white plate with some sparse vegetables. It was at Le Chien Qui Fume, a seafood restaurant off Les Halles in Paris that my cousin brought us to for dinner, after a day at Versailles. She had a splendid platter of fresh seafood that she happily plucked off its mountain of ice, and later we shared a sublime sabayon, the first I'd ever sampled and what she assured me was a very good specimen thereof.

A big hunk of fish

Last night's lemon sole was a whole different matter. At Big Fish, the friend whose birthday it was wanted oysters and rainbow trout, then there was seafood chowder too, and I thought the lemon sole would be a nice light wrap-up to my meal. But how wrong I was because at Big Fish, they give you the whole lemon sole, slathered in a sauce that my tastebuds are too feeble to identify other than that it was tomato-based.

Needless to say, I couldn't eat dessert afterwards.

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posted by Tym at 10:30 AM

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Thursday, November 08, 2007

Why I'm not getting any better at this travel thing

So there I am, standing at the check-in counter in the departure lounge of Terminal 1, twiddling my thumbs with glee that Bali is just a few hours away, when the service staff behind the counter says, "Your passport expires on May 4 next year."

"Uh-huh." Still gleeful, still twiddling. Or rather, still chattering to Ondine, who won the free hotel stay in Bali and graciously invited me to go along.

"You need six months' validity on your passport," says the service staff.

"Uh-huh." I nod, I smile, I bob --- and then I think, today is November 4, so ... SHIT.

The service staff is counting off the months on her fingers. December-January-February-March-April-May. Six marks the spot, six marks the fact that my passport would expire six months from my date of departure from Singapore.

"How long are you staying in Bali?" she asks.

"Two days only." I believe I was starting to whine.

Nevertheles, next came the "please wait by the side, ma'am" request while one of her colleagues made a few phone calls. It must have taken less than ten minutes to sort it all out, but it felt like much longer and I felt like the biggest dolt for checking everything, including our dates of departure and return (this has previously been an issue), except the requirement that I know well enough to recite backwards in my sleep in Latin: six months' validity.

"I hope they let me go," I whined some more while Ondine and Packrat, to their credit, did not panic or chastise me.

Then I had a happy thumbs-up signal from the service staff, who said they'd spoken to Indonesian immigration, who'd given the go-ahead. We checked in, we had a quick dinner, we caught our plane --- we were on our way!

Except that at the immigration airport at the Denpasar airport, the immigration officer gave me the old stink-eye. "You need six months' validity."

"I know," I said in what I hoped sounded like a quiet, contrite tone.

He counted off dates on his fingers too. Then he repeated his point in his best officialese tone.

"In Singapore, they called Indonesia to ask if it was okay," I ventured. It was the only card I had to play, other than the US$10 bill in my wallet.

"They called who?" he wanted to know. So young, yet so determined.

"They called Indonesian immigration and they said it was okay," I said haplessly.

He said something in Bahasa to his colleague at the next counter and did some mulling on his own. I quavered where I was standing and wondered what exactly is involved when one is turned back by a country's immigration services.

Maybe I showed enough fear, contrition, general guilelessness or combination of all three, but he said, "You leaving when?"

"In two days," was my prompt response. Did I need to show him my air ticket to prove it?

He flipped open the passport to some random page and proceeded with his stamp-and-scribble routine. "Okay, this time I let you. Next time, six month's validity."

"Yesthankyouokaythankyouthankyou." I took the passport and stepped quickly towards Ondine before he could change his mind.

Ondine's assessment of the affair: "Your mother sure scold you."

*gulp*

Too lazy to go out

Fortunately, I didn't need my passport for anything else during our two-day stay except to get out of the country, so my little gaffe didn't get in the way of our sunbathing, lolling about, and consumption of Greek food, room service and Khong Guan or Marks & Spencer biscuits. The hotel staff were very nice to us even though we were, essentially, freeloaders, and there were a surprising number of cute, cherubic babies around the swimming pool.

Alas, no good male eye candy, and I didn't get as much of a tan as I wanted. For future reference, I'll try to make beach vacations at least a three-day affair.

Thank you, Ondine!

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Related posts: More sleep, less blogging, Getting better at this travel thing

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posted by Tym at 6:55 PM

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Wednesday, November 07, 2007

More sleep, less blogging

I was going to blog about why I'm not getting any better at this travel thing after all, but I've been really beat since I got back so I'm going to go to bed instead.

Yes, go to bed. Before midnight. On the eve of a public holiday.

In lieu of an entertaining yet edifying travel anecdote, have a picture of what I was looking at for the last two evenings.

Bali sky

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posted by Tym at 11:30 PM

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Sunday, November 04, 2007

Getting better at this travel thing

I did not pack at the last minute. I did not pack four pairs of shoes (and certainly not five). Perhaps most importantly, I can lift my baggage without any difficulty.

Okay, so I'm only going to be away for 48 hours.

However, I didn't make it to the money changer because I got complacent after my mom passed me some extra currency. So for my back-up stash, I'll resort for once to the airport's currency counter.

Oops, I should get probably quit chatting with kk and head to the airport now ...

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posted by Tym at 4:35 PM

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Tuesday, September 25, 2007

On foot in Paris and London

"How are you going to blog about all this?" Stellou wondered towards the end of my vacation. Good question. She's done a better job of it so far than I have, with her accounts of my close(ish) encounter with the mouse, our visit to the Imperial War Museum (if not for working on the Army Museum of Singapore, I admit that I wouldn't know of the Imperial's existence), our practically nonstop chitter-chatter, and my last couple of days in London.

Across the Channel, my cousin records only the night of gay karaoke --- during which I did not sing, so you could rightly argue that I didn't earn even a mention in that blog entry.

Outside Notre Dame

How to blog this then, sixteen days spent six, then seven timezones away, listening to everyone whine about how they didn't get a real summer while I merrily danced between my choices of two jackets (one brown leather, one black cotton), four pairs of shoes (oh, alright, I only wore two most of the time) and countless combinations of sweater-over-long-sleeved-T-shirt. Some afternoons were warm enough to make me wish I'd snuck a tank-top along as well, and in London, Stellou was happy to loan me a pink-and-white striped one.

But I landed in Paris first, where I tried not to be the dork that describes everything as looking like a movie set, but sometimes it seemed that no matter down which little street I turned, there it was, a pretty movie set waiting for me to walk on. Must be nice, to live in a city where most buildings seem to be older than one's grandparents, if not their grandparents, and where so many neighbourhoods average at a comforting 4-5 storeys high. Plus there seemed to be a patisserie on every street corner (my daily walk to the Metro station took me past three, at least) and a balcony outside every window. How much more charming could it get?

Bicycles on Rue des Boulets

It was my first time in Paris, so I dutifully hit all the tourist stops: the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, Versailles, Sacré Coeur, Moulin Rouge, Champs-Elysées, Arc de Triomphe --- plus the final jackpot of three museums on my last day: Musée d'Orsay, Centre Pompidou and Musée Carnavalet. Not that this means I spent any time queuing up to climb to the top of the Eiffel or the Arc de Triomphe. More like, I passed by and checked out the tourist spectacle as spectacle in itself, then maundered off to see some art or have a coffee.

So I also saw the Musée d'Art Modérne, which cousin Nardac says no one ever goes to --- and indeed there were not more than ten people there (excluding the security people) when I visited. Nardac's Dacnar took us on his personalised tour of the Père Lachaise cemetery, where we saw the greatest hits like Jim Morrison and Frédéric Chopin and Abelard and Heloise. But we had to give Oscar Wilde a miss because the cemetery was closing and an eagle-eyed security guard on a scooter was trailing us to make sure we really left the place.

Even in as tourist-infested a location as Versailles, Nardac and I blithely walked through a doorway that happened to be open and found ourselves this:

In L'Orangerie

See what I mean about feeling like I was on a movie set?

Actually, the word that kept popping into my head as I flitted about Paris was "stupendous". My aunt, with whom I was travelling then, had used it to describe Notre Dame on our first day, and the word kept recurring whenever I saw something amazing. The Louvre --- stupendous. Musée d'Orsay --- stupendous. Versailles --- stupendous. The gardens of Versailles --- even more stupendous.

And the art ... You'd think I'd have been all art-ed out after the Louvre on the second day, but no, the secret, you see, is everything in moderation. A couple hours of one kind of art, then a break for tea or the toilet or to take photos of tourists, looking at art.

Gawking at the <I>Mona Lisa</I>

And then more of the art itself. Géricault, whom I'd forgotten I liked, and David, whom I'd never really looked at before, and old favourites Matisse and Picasso and new possibilities Robert Delaunay and countless others I've forgotten. Art I loved and art I didn't understand, and art I stumbled upon in the park at Le Jardin du Luxembourg.

And not just in Paris, but in London too: in Sir John Soane's and the Tate Modern and the British Museum and the V&A. We didn't make it to the Design Museum , although Stellou assured me --- as she did repeatedly with many museums, she's the museum cafe queen, that one --- that "it has a very nice cafe". I think I understood even less of the Tate than I did of the Pompidou, so we stepped out for a breather onto the little balcony on the third? fourth? level. Millennium Bridge looked great, but what was up with the clangingly modern piece of music being performed there?

The dome at the British Museum

At least in London the museums were mercifully free, although Naomi Klein wanted to charge me £12 to attend her book launch (pish-posh, is what I believe Mary Poppins would say to that). But what really got my goat is that Macbeth opened three days after I left with Patrick Stewart in the lead. Also, that by the time we discovered during London Open House what a great little theatre the Almeida is, there were no more tickets available for its shows (with Stockard Channing in the lead!) during the remaining days I was in town.

Patrick Stewart! As Macbeth!

I didn't see any Shakespeare this trip, because none of the plays at the Globe were particularly appealing to me. In fact, I didn't see any shows at all unless you count a BAFTA screening of Hula Girls or an Institute of Contemporary Art screening of Helvetica (both were priceless in their own ways). Instead, I burrowed my way through parks and markets: Hyde Park and the neverending Richmond Park in Kingston, Borough Market for cheese and pies and UpMarket for "bohemian/indie" wares.

Since I got back, people have been asking me which city I preferred and I don't know that one can make a choice. Paris was fresh and new (my first time there), the French (people and language) were not as fearsome as some anecdotes had led me to believe, and by the end of my week there, I was thinking that if I had a reason to hang out in the city long enough to get my French up to scratch, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

London was a grey and grimy second city, but I got to stay with Stellou and Olive, and Stellou and I got to hang out and giggle a lot like we haven't done since we were in university together. How does one weigh the relative appeal of a fresh pain au chocolat from the corner patisserie with that of a fresh pot of homebrewed coffee and all sorts of breakfasty marvels (Cantal cheese, fresh walnut bread from the corner bakery, fig jam or blackcurrant yoghurt) coming out of the kitchen where one can comfortably sit with one leg up on the chair?

Mint tea

I remember the first time I met Olive in Singapore, I asked him how he was enjoying hanging out with Stellou and her sister, to which he responded, "You never know where you'll end up, but there will always be something tasty there." Which is true, because with Stellou and Olive in charge, there was gastro-pubbing at The Charles Lamb, okonomiyaki in Covent Garden (we were keeping in the spirit after seeing Hula Girls), Pieministers from Borough Market, the brunch spread at Otto Lenghi, and finally French food in The Fox Reformed. Sure, Canteen did disappoint, but it was more than compensated for by the home-cooked paella and beef compote that Stellou and Olive respectively whipped up (despite their misbehaving oven).

With all this on the menu, it should come as no surprise that I did not once taste either shepherd's pie or fish'n'chips during my visit.

Yet London's offerings paled in comparison to Paris's, about which I'm certain countless cultural treatises and newspaper commentaries have been written. I will only add that under Nardac's confident tutelage, we had very lovely seafood at Le Chien Qui Fume (the one near Les Halles), Bistro Chantefable off Gambetta and her favourite restaurant somewhere in Belleville. Plus I OD'd on freshly made chocolate eclairs and pain du chocolat almost every day. Good thing I only discovered Nutella crepes towards the end of the trip.

Dinner

On one of our first days in Paris, Nardac mentioned offhandedly that we should let ourselves get lost in Paris, since even the natives do. I didn't --- deliberately, because I didn't want to have to ask for directions in my mangled French --- but there were times between museums when I wasn't so much following street signs as loosely heading in the general direction that I oughta be.

London actually proved to be more of a challenge in this regard, maybe because I rarely had a map with me when I was on my own. Somewhere after heading south from Oxford Street for Piccadilly Circus, I ended up on the Strand, then near Trafalgar Square instead and it was only the providential appearance of a mounted tourist map that saved me from circling the streets endlessly (sure, I could've asked for directions, but where would've been the fun in that?). Then there was the time I came out of the British Museum and again needed to mosey south to Piccadilly Circus --- except that I wound up going north by mistake and had to get my bearings by navigating by the setting sun. Who needs a map when one has heavenly bodies on your side?

I guess I didn't quite get lost enough, because at the end of the day, I still had to make my way home.

The Louvre

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posted by Tym at 11:57 PM

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Monday, September 24, 2007

I need to get more sun

But the weather in Singapore is just too damn hot.

Lazing in the park

Vacation photos are up on Flickr, after I spent the weekend sorting through them. I really need to stop my hand from quavering whenever I snap a picture, or overexposing my images because they seem too dark on the small camera viewscreen.

No vacation blog post yet. I'll try to crank it out one of these nights.

In other news, I am almost over jetlag (just in time for the work week!), took my first motorcycle ride on Friday, watched 881 in the theatres and today ate a heap of Gouda cheese. Now I really, really need to psych myself up for work tomorrow ...

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posted by Tym at 12:27 AM

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Friday, September 21, 2007

Easing back into things

This is my current status on Facebook: [Tym] is mildly jetlagged, swamped with email and missing fresh fromage.

I got back yesterday, spent most of today accepting the fact that I'm jetlagged and reading email in comprehensible dosages, and maybe by tomorrow will be able to kick into gear for some measure of real work. Of course, what I really want to do is sort through the 500-plus images from my camera and cameraphone, so that I can upload them onto Flickr.

I was gone for just over two weeks, but it's funny how much has happened with friends at home during the interim. Everyone is calling or SMSing with, "A lot has happened, we're moving house/switching jobs/exploring a whole new business opportunity/giving you a free trip to Bali." Okay, there's been only one of the latter, but it's a nice way to be welcomed home.

I would like to think that there'll be a travelogue of some kind here soon, but meanwhile there's mountains of work foo standing between me and the weekend.

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posted by Tym at 12:52 AM

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Monday, September 03, 2007

At the last minute

I couldn't remember where I'd left my passport and took ten panic-stricken minutes to find it (I did use it just three weeks ago).

I decided to squeeze everything into one piece of check-in luggage. I may not be able to lift it for long now, but I'll be able to offload some of it at my first port of call.

I decided to stop blogging and go eat my last bona fide Asian meal for 16 days.

Ciao!

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posted by Tym at 5:41 PM

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Saturday, August 18, 2007

Did you know ...

... that the first CD ever produced was The Visitors by Abba? So says BBC News, as the "Compact disc hits 25th birthday".

I've never been a real musichead so I don't think I started buying CDs till the early 1990s. When I graduated from university in 1997, CDs were still something you bought in a music store ("CD store", though they didn't sell blank ones), while data storage to the average person meant 3.5" floppy disks or Iomega zip disks with a whopping 100 MB capacity.

I don't remember the first CD I bought (though I remember that the first cassette tape was a 1983 compilation of Grammy Award-winning songs). I do know that I did a double-take after seeing Discmans for sale in Ho Chi Minh City last week (alongside pirated music CDs, no less) and I almost wished I hadn't given my mother permission to sell mine some years ago, otherwise I could add it to my growing Collection of Obsolete Technology.

When I cleaned house a couple of months ago, I accumulated at least 100 used CDs for recycling. My mother now hangs some of them outside her windows to scare the birds away. How far we've come.

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posted by Tym at 2:45 PM

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

We're not in Ho Chi Minh City anymore, Toto

Red marks the spot where the bomb landed

Therefore:
  1. Don't stroll across a road and expect oncoming traffic to slow down or stop. In fact, no more rampant jaywalking, period.
  2. Don't expect the made-at-home morning coffee to jolt me off my chair. My coffee is as strong as it's always been, but now it's sorta bland-tasting. I suppose my tongue will acclimatise to the missing sharpness eventually.
  3. Don't smile at the waitstaff, even at expensive cafes. They don't smile back.
  4. Stop measuring walking distances in terms of how they compare to the walking route from Kim Hotel in Pham Ngu Lao across the park to Clinton's Pho (i.e. Pho 2000), then down Le Loi to downtown Saigon.
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posted by Tym at 7:32 PM

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Sunday, August 12, 2007

Give the people beef, said the Communist paté

We had a lot of beef, but we didn't get around to any banh mi with paté, mostly because every time we walked past a banh mi stall, the sight of the hefty baguettes made me think I wouldn't make it beyond two bites before I declared myself full.

But we had pho everyday, from street stalls and airconditioned eateries (Pho 2000's broth and menu is superior to Pho 24's, which must be why Clinton dined at the former back when he was still POTUS) --- with beef slices, beef balls or other cow parts which aren't on the average foreign traveller's diet, and, one time, pho with a baguette on the side. After one mouthful of soup-soaked bread, the only thing either of us could say was: "Now why the hell didn't anyone think of that before?"

Pho, glorious pho

I swear the pho in Vietnam tastes better simply because all the ingredients are locally grown, which means they not only taste fresher but also taste of, well, Vietnam. No Australian beef, no imported leaves and the soup's probably been brewed in the same scraped-up pot they've been cooking in for the last ten years. Don't look too closely at the pot or the dishwashing area --- it might put you off your meal. Just concentrate on the bowl of hot soup in front of you, never mind that the same shop's separate translated menu gave pho tai chin and pho chin vien the same description in English, all the iffiness has been scalded away anyway.

In between overdosing on pho, we traipsed up and down the streets of Saigon (meaning District 1, not some fond pseudo-American affectation): pondering narrow buildings and indecipherable shop signs, waving off offers of motorcycle or cyclo rides, sidestepping the inevitable puddles in the streets or cracked sidewalks (it rained everyday we were there), gawking at expert capteh players or neighbourhood aerobics classes in the park.

View from the room

Ho Chi Minh City was not as crowded, nor as grating, nor as smelly as I'd been led to imagine. People were generally friendly, and most people who tried to sell us something backed off quietly when we declined with a smile and a shake of the head. Shopkeepers tried to get the best price outta us, of course, but we never paid more than we wanted to for anything. It was generally the young guys who were easy to bargain down, not the cheerful but adamant aunties. Flinty they could be, and completed uninclined to coddle our rudimentary bargaining attempts.

When we wanted a break from the street scene, we hunted down some of Travelfish's top 10 Saigon cafes. Creperie & Cafe was the perfect antidote to a waterlogged afternoon in serious propaganda-filled museums. La Fenetre Soleil, though tucked away in a splendid second-floor space, offered plenty of people-watching opportunities.

La Fenetre Soleil

Other times, it was back to our daily diet of cafe sua da (iced Vietnamese coffee with copious dollops of condensed milk); I probably consumed an entire month's worth of sugar in my four days.

Museums, sightseeing and urban rambles aside, we decided towards the end that what we really liked to do was to park ourselves streetside on the edge of backpacker district Pham Ngu Lao and watch the people stream by. Locals on bikes, of course, but also foreign tourists of both the amiable and the sketchy sort, or child street performers with fire-breathing or shoe-shining talents. Not to mention what seemed to be the nightly ten-minute blackout that would prompt the crowd's cheer (jeer?), as the only light left came from the individually-powered food stalls.

One last bowl of pho, one last T-shirt stuffed into an over-full backpack --- and then we flew home.

Baggage labels

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posted by Tym at 6:40 PM

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Tuesday, August 07, 2007

So long and thanks for all the tea

As reflected by metal

I'm not sure what the deal is with tea and me lately, but the last work-related meeting I had this week was on Monday at Zen Bone Tea Mind. It was budak's suggestion and a very fine one, because the place is a) pretty, b) quiet on weekday afternoons, and c) operates on the assumption that people will order one tea and then sit there for as long as they like while the waitstaff keeps efficiently topping up the hot water. Now if only it had wifi ...

Tonight, I'm sitting here with a mug of most excellent Stash peppermint tea (thank you, sarah and Little Miss Drinkalot!) and trying to remember if I've forgotten anything work-wise before I go on vacation. It's oddly quiet because Ink isn't here (Terz is cat-sitting him while I'm going to be away) and the flatmates aren't home yet.

Okay, let's see: Yahoogroups switched off, vacation email autoresponse set, perishable food consumed or otherwise cleared from the fridge. Now I just need to pack my vacation wallet, phone and camera chargers and a few remaining toiletries, and we're good to go.

PS: I am bringing 3 pairs of footwear for a 4-day trip, which edges out the previous record.

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posted by Tym at 11:29 PM

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

In search of fresh pho and French food

In a month, I'll be in Ho Chi Minh City (or is it more kosher to refer to it as Saigon?). I have four days, I have Travelfish's downloadable e-guide, and I have no travel objectives other than to consume as much fresh street food and inexpensive good French food as I can.

I'll be scouring noodlepie, Nibble & Scribble and The Travelling Hungryboy for tips, and Woof!'s already passed along his recommendations, but if anyone has any other advice to offer for my little jaunt, I'd be glad to hear it. Given how busy work has been lately, this is my least planned-in-advance trip ever (despite having booked air tickets more than three months ago).

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posted by Tym at 8:07 PM

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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

An unlikely nightmare

Last night I dreamed that I was leaving on a vacation with Terz and some friends, but even though I had three huge bags with me as I met them after work, I hadn't actually had the time to pack properly (who knows what was in those bags) and hadn't packed any toiletries.

So then there was the dashing off to some kind of convenience store/pharmacy to pick up random toiletry items, but when I got back to my bags and my friends, it was time to go and I didn't have a toiletry pouch to put the items in. Why this should seem like a gargantuan crisis, I have no idea, but I was panicked enough in the dream that I woke up in real life --- and then wondered why the hell I would be panicking over not having toiletries when, hello, vacation? Even an imaginary one.

Potential vacation spots for January have been narrowed down to Myanmar and Laos (Adri's current adventures there helped to swing my vote that way). But I haven't sealed the deal by booking air tickets or accommodation yet...

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posted by Tym at 1:12 PM

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

I've forgotten how to blog

So now I have a little bit of breathing space between work, but I've forgotten how to blog. I sit here, I stare at the blank Blogger screen, and I wonder what it is that one writes about when one blogs. I think about the day that's passed, or is passing, and I can't think of anything that's worth committing to words, as such.

I mean, of course, there's stuff. There was Terz's birthday last Friday, which involved a considerably amount of alcohol, semi-public humiliation and silliness for him, and not very much of any of that for me (because I had to put him to bed eventually, see).

There was the Museum's soft launch on Sunday, which involved showing people around the place so that they'd know exactly where the help they'd given us had gone. If anyone wants a personal walk-through, I'm available for one-on-one tours till December 13, all for the low, low price of a good meal and a glass of wine.

And then there was the usual whining about how much I need a vacation. At last recitation (last night), I have the following places on my to-visit list (in no particular order): central Vietnam (currently in the path of the most creatively named Typhoon Durian), Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bali and Beijing (which I've been talking about visiting since June). I have booked not a single air ticket. I have no travelling companion (Terz is otherwise occupied). My window of travel is in January only. At the rate this is going, I will still be talking about the proverbial well-earned vacation come next December.

I do believe I now remember what blogging is all about after all.

For the record, I am still in the office, drinking cold Tiger beer out of a white Ikea coffee mug, while we try to complete everything in time for a certain midnight deadline.

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posted by Tym at 10:24 PM

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Sunday, August 21, 2005

The vacation

I'm long overdue on a post regarding the vacation proper, but the funny thing about me and vacations is that I find it so damned hard to write about them once I return. I've only ever done it once, for last year's jaunt to the Pacific Northwest; every other vacation has been an unaccounted-for blank in this blog's record.

It doesn't help that people keep telling me to give travel writing a go, since I seem to be halfway decent at writing in general, and it's not as if the travel reports we see in our local newspapers or magazines are that eloquent in the first place. But while I have no trouble accumulating plenty of facts and travel tips about the places we visit, or in maintaining a thoughtful handwritten journal during the trip, it's in getting down to summarise the experience overall that writer's block hits --- big time.

So I say, screw it. Here's my version of the vacation, eloquent or not, and it'll just have to do:


Bali
Originally uploaded by Tym.

We zipped down to Bali for my best friend's wedding and all we did, really, was loll around on the beach like torpid teenagers. There was one day when we took ourselves off on a drive around the central part of the island and up into the mountains, but frankly, that was just an excuse so that we could resign ourselves to the beach again the next day. When someone asked me a few nights ago what we did in Bali, I had to shamefully admit, "We mostly just stayed in Nusa Dua." Upon his look of disapproval (it came pretty close to 'scorn', actually), I hastily appended the excuses: "Yah, I know, we'll have to go back again and do Bali properly. But it was a short trip, just zipped in and out for the wedding --- " and so on, and so forth.

I do want to go back and do Bali 'properly'. It would involve the black beaches in the north, more time in the mountains and villages, and zero time at Kuta. G-man might've thought that Terz and I were more Kuta/Legian kind of people, but I think we've outgrown that phase of life. While Nusa Dua and its attendant luxuries --- they turn down your bed while you're out to dinner! they bring you $8 Bintang beers on the beach! the bridal couple's villa has its own pool and indoor/outdoor shower area! --- were fun and precisely the sort of mindless indulgence that we were craving this time around, those were just trappings of the touristic Bali. They could've been replicated just about anywhere in the world that there's tropical weather and a good beach.

As for the wedding, needless to say, it was beautiful.


BaliPhoneCam-0508-014
Originally uploaded by Terz.

My part in it was deceptively simple: make the best friend's speech. Ha! One of my test lines for it went something like this: "When I got married, [the best friend] was my bridesmaid and she got the easy job, you know: drawing up a to-do list, sorting out flowers, and so on. She decides to get married, and what does she ask me to do? Make a speech. (droll laughter)"

I didn't use that line, because it's a very bad line indeed, but I did feel increasingly panicked as time wore on and the speech that I'd sat down to draft in late June just wouldn't materialise. After many drafts (including last-minute scribbles on hotel stationery at the dinner table, a scant hour before I was due to speak) and one-woman rehearsals (including practising on the porch of our hotel room on the day itself), it all fortuitously came together in a reasonably seamless expatiation of less than five minutes in which I did not embarrass the best friend (a high priority, when you've been friends eighteen years), did not "try too hard" (I think) and did not accidentally say a bad line from an earlier draft that would make me sound like a complete doofus (e.g. see previous paragraph).

As you can tell from the list of don'ts, I was aiming to not screw up rather than to excel with flair.

I'm going to have to watch the video of the wedding dinner some time, to see if the speech actually came off as harmlessly as I remember it. Without a doubt, it was overshadowed by the boisterous antics of the groom's best friend immediately after. But the best friend laughed at the right moments during my yammerings, which is all that really matters in the end.

So those were the two big moments in Bali: the beach and the wedding speech. Everything else is burnt out by the tropical glare: the brief reunion with an old schoolmate who now lives Down Under, the brief encounters with the groom's energetic friends, the brief moments of kindness from the couple's family (I say 'brief' because there was so much going on, not because they were stingy with their kindnesses), the brief two hours spent luxuriating at Ku De Ta.

Thank you to everyone who made lovely suggestions. We couldn't take up every single one of them, but will certainly file away useful bits for the next trip.

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posted by Tym at 12:10 PM

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Wednesday, August 10, 2005

The bubble

Maybe it's all the Murakami we've been reading, but it strikes me that a vacation is like a bubble of time: protected, enclosed, but temporary, fragile, and all the more appealing for its gossamer impermanence. The person you are, the things you see when you're on vacation aren't so much in a different dimension from your real life --- as Darren suggested tonight, recounting everything in his life that changed while we were away --- as they are momentarily suspended, segregated, compartmentalised in a different realm of possibility.

The lead-up to a vacation is, after all, packed with realness: With a finite number of days or hours remaining at home, there's laundry to do, clothes to pack, TV programmes to record on the VCR, perishable food to eat or toss out, trash to flush down the rubbish chute, windows to close, and, if the vacation's a long one, electronic appliances to unplug from the wall sockets. At work, there's work to finish, that must be finished, before one can depart with a truly free spirit, without fear that the cellphone will ring, unwelcome, or that one will, upon return, be blamed for things left out of place.

The vacation truly begins when one finally leaves home for the airport. The bags are packed: anything forgotten must be acquired en route. The air tickets are in hand: any changes to the intinerary are at the discretion of the airline or the governments concerned. The posture is straightened, a quiet metamorphosis from the worker bee into the leisure traveller.

Forget work. Forget anything to do with the mundanity of life: family (never mind the startling updates the night before that half the cousins are either pregnant or getting engaged), friends, colleagues, blogs, bills, news, obligations, plans, goals, dreams. All is on hold, all can wait till you get back, till you're ready to take up them up again. For now, there is only an air ticket, a seat on the plane, a journey across time and space.

What happens on the vacation, stays on the vacation. The people you meet, you'll likely never meet again. The things you see, disconnected from their real context for tourists' eyes, you may never fully understand (and certainly not in a matter of the few days in that foreign land). The money you spend, you tell yourself it's from a different budget, your conscience eased perhaps by a translation of the foreign currency into manageable, equivalent amounts. And the person you are, you choose. Nobody knows who you are, back home. You are who you are, right now.

You forget to set the alarm clock.

Then it ends, inevitably. Bags are repacked, the vacation mood folded away with the clothes. The journey home doesn't seem as long as it took to get there; the familiar is just around the corner. Things forgotten begin to nose into one's consciousness: news headlines on the airport TVs, news magazines on the flight, cellphone beeps after touchdown.

The key twists in the lock, the door opens, the week-old air rushes to greet you like a forgotten puppy. The bubble bursts.

And everything's right where you left it.

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posted by Tym at 11:27 PM

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Friday, August 05, 2005

A first time for everything

Well, I've never gone on vacation with five pairs of shoes before.

And three of them slippers.

Whee!

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posted by Tym at 4:54 PM

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Sunday, July 31, 2005

Info, please!

We'll be going to Bali for five days next week for the best friend's wedding. We're putting up at a hotel at Nusa Dua and, other than the wedding day itself, the rest of the time is ours.

This will be our first time in Bali. Even though I cringe at resorting to such a shamelessly lazy request for information, I plead for mercy on account of the fact that we really don't have the time this week to engage in our usually thorough pre-trip research at the Lonely Planet website and other online resources.

So I am shamelessly, lazily appealing for travel tips and suggestions, pretty pretty pretty please. We will probably spend a day or two soaking up the sun on the beach with nothing more intense than the latest Harry Potter novel for company. But other than that, what's fun to do? We don't dive, but we walk/hike/swim and the husband, if you didn't know already, is a photographer.

Ideas that have been tossed our way so far: dinner at Jimbaran, not the sunset dinner cruise, some local crafts village, $15 steaks at Hard Rock Cafe.

Oh, and how much cash should we bring? We're not really big spenders, although we'll probably indulge in a nice seafood dinner or two and perhaps the charm of the whole bargain shopping thing will finally appeal to me. I've been advised that we'll need 100,000 rupiah (S$16-17) for airport departure tax, but other than that, suggestions have ranged from $200 to $1000 per person (hotel is already paid for), and I confess I'm pretty lost.

All suggestions are welcome. Particularly good ideas will be rewarded with a Kuta trinket of your choice or a lovely photograph autographed by the husband.

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posted by Tym at 11:32 AM

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Friday, July 15, 2005

It's amazing what the nose can do

The really nice thing about Project Shop Cafe is that once you enter in its glass-walled space, it doesn't smell like you're in Singapore anymore. I'm not sure if it's the dark wooden floorboards, the attentive stalks of lemongrass in the vase on each table, the blend of East-West spices wafting over from the kitchen, or a combination of all three --- but it just doesn't smell local.

I can't say what it smells like, either, though my brain tried the darnedest to figure it out during dinner last night. For all I know, it could be the air freshener that they use. That was sufficient recently to trigger my olfactory memory at one of the shopping malls --- my eyes told me I was in Singapore, my brain was convinced I'd been magicked to Woodfield Mall, Illinois.

Even the smell of jet fuel the other night instantly catapulted me elsewhere. As I stepped off the Skytrain at Terminal 2, the signature scent of kerosene stole in between the cracks, and for a splitsecond, I thought I'd just stepped off a plane in North America, at the start of a sparkling new adventure.

(I suppose I could've imagined a sparkling new adventure in any country with an international airport, but most of my flights have been to/from North America, so therein lies the bias.)

Back at Project Shop Cafe last night, my friend EH was also transported elsewhere: she was convinced that the place was the spitting image of a cafe that she'd frequented in Nepal in 1992. Her memories were purely visual: the blackboard scrawled with daily specials, the abnormally tall cake slices waiting patiently under clear glass cake covers, the glass-bottled drinks ranged harmonically on the shelves over the kitchen counter. The likeness was so strong that she spent half the evening reminiscing about all the other cafes she'd visited in Nepal.

Project Shop Cafe does not, in fact, serve Nepalese food, but they have a number of Asian fusiony numbers that are a treat for the tastebuds. We didn't linger for dessert, but that big honking piece of chocolate cake will be mine the next time I'm there.

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posted by Tym at 2:59 PM

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