Sooo tired....
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Istanbul!!
A very nice city, but have yet to explore it because of the exhibition. Learnt some new things (how to annoy people the Italian way!) and the many styles of kebabs! yaay! Anyway, will post later!
Sooo tired....
Sooo tired....
Monday, August 11, 2008
Incredible !ndia
So says the back of the immigration departure card that my colleague showed me (while I waited 3.5 hrs for the Singapore Airlines ticket counter to open in the international airport because of the four days of non-stop rain that hit the city this side of the monsoon season. Multiple parties informed me of horror 5-hrs trip to airport stories and missed flights that I decided to play it safe and came straight to the airport rather than risking it out there. Already the news said flood killing people in this city because of the rain, so what am a sane person to do?) and the first thought that came to my mind was: "Incredible Smell!". I have smelled it first hand in the rented car that one of the more adventurous potential customer got for us to show his corporate office in the city proper (the airport and the hotel was located at the outskirts of the city), claiming it to be his company car during conversation, but with the reality of a brightly painted logo of tourist company advertising its services on the sides. The guy is a crook, never manifesting it directly in words but the arrogant behavior and illusions of grandeur gave it away after several meetings with him. Two of my regular customers already warned me about him. His office was crap too, even worse than some of our Chinese customers' office. For some reason (or made up one), he thought that we were looking for a partner to open a factory here and because of the government regulation here limiting foreign ownership to 74%, maybe he thought that he was the one! Anyway, I'm getting side tracked about Incredible !ndia (and yes, that's how they typed it in the card, with the !)..
This country is indeed incredible:
1. Incredible Smell (legions of unwashed people assaulting your nose with their aromatic hair and maybe armpit odors)
2. Incredible Service (or lack of it, which might be limited to my hotel but I seriously doubt it after my observations about the people)
3. Incredible Traffic (loads of small taxis and bajajs littered the street) and dont start about the road! (to be fair, it was Surabaya's road 3-4 years ago after the rainy season)
4. Incredible Poverty (if you think people living in triplek houses under freeway overpasses in Jakarta is sad, here they live on the sidewalk with plastic sheets for walls. Maybe the corpses on the street story came from here)
5. Incredible Food (the best part of visiting really! I didn't dare to try the spicier ones but the ones that I have tasted were very good and most of them are vegetarian!)
6. Incredible Weather (it was raining the whole time except for my first half-day)
7. Incredible Shameless Self-Esteem (which doesn't hold up to the rest of the world. They are proud of it except that they dont know that it's crap!)
8. Incredible Airport (it is constantly under renovation and for an international airport, the roof is leaking and the water drops were contained with torn newspaper. This was happening at the immigration counter!!! and also all over the airport)
So it is the sums of all these things that leads me to give this suggestion to you:
Don't go to India unless you really really have to (Taj Mahal supposedly) and cut all of your expectations of any international standards by half. A forewarning is that maybe the Taj Mahal is also crap based on what I just wrote. So for example if a hotel advertises itself to be a 5-stars hotel (as in the case of my hotel, the incredibly shitty Park Plaza Mumbai), it's really a 2.5 stars, based on the following:
1. It doesn't smell (1 star)
2. It has a working door lock (1 star)
3. The food doesn't give you stomach ache (half star)
All the missing stars:
1. The 4 batteries that are powering your room's small deposit box had only 3 batteries and they are sprawled outside with no one coming in to fix it for five days
2. The internet connection is controlled by some asshole in the front desk who picked up the phone only once during my stay to actually give me the password to login. The other times someone else picked up with promises that the asshole will call back (no one did for 1.5 hrs) and the other time the server was down
3. The fresh towel has a bright yellow stain on one of the corner which could be: squised papaya, squished orange, squished durian or more likely: squished shit (i wisely decided not to smell it to determine what it actually was at that time and just threw it inside the bath tub)
4. The shower box is sloped to better regulate the water flow, except that they put the drain hole on the UPPER part of the slope, so the shower is always full of water
5. On the last night of the trip, at 2:30am, the electricity went on and off for about 6 times in the span of 10 minutes, each with bursting flash of lights as the lights in our rooms are halogen, kind of like being flashed with a full camera flash right in front of your eyes. How did I know it was 2:30am? I'm always aware of my surrounding so i know :P To give the hotel credit they did give me 3 candles to light in case it happens (which according to one employee is common)
6. On the last day of the trip as I was checking out the same thing happened at the lobby, have these people no SHAME???
7. The waiter on the dinner buffet gave you nasty look and nodded to acknowledge that you asked for tea, except that he just stood there. After you asked for the 3rd time he brought you the tea mixed with milk, which when I sipped I immediately commented that this is not tea but rather 'banyu korah-korah'
8. The bells and lights in front of your room have pretty much decayed
9. The furniture has the looks of the furnitures that Vivi was interested to buy from Index at the PTC (yes, her taste is not that good, bwahahah)
10. The remote control has one dead battery, which was replaced with one of the 3 batteries from the room safety box and it's still a remote from hell, you have to squeeze reaaaaaaaaaally hard for it to change channel
So if you total all the missing stars, it comes out to be -7.5 stars! And they have billboards all over the city saying that it is a "LUXURY Business Hotel".
Now I have written for quite some time and still there is 2.5hrs to go, ugh! To make life interesting, as I was walking to the other side of the check-in counter, I saw a blue queue strap (that they have in front of the bank or any kind of line to help you queue up) and empty space behind it with this sign "Suspicious Article Ahead, Do Not Approach Within 100m" and suddenly I realized that there were soldiers lining up the strap and that there was a guy in full bomb suit moving forward slowly next to a bomb-sniffing dog, I'm NOT joking!!! I was like WTF???? and I just walked the hell out from there... Aren't you supposed to clear the airport for this kind of shit??? Fifteen minutes later apparently it was false alarm and everything went back to normal.... incredible indeed!
Sleepily yours,
Lord S
This country is indeed incredible:
1. Incredible Smell (legions of unwashed people assaulting your nose with their aromatic hair and maybe armpit odors)
2. Incredible Service (or lack of it, which might be limited to my hotel but I seriously doubt it after my observations about the people)
3. Incredible Traffic (loads of small taxis and bajajs littered the street) and dont start about the road! (to be fair, it was Surabaya's road 3-4 years ago after the rainy season)
4. Incredible Poverty (if you think people living in triplek houses under freeway overpasses in Jakarta is sad, here they live on the sidewalk with plastic sheets for walls. Maybe the corpses on the street story came from here)
5. Incredible Food (the best part of visiting really! I didn't dare to try the spicier ones but the ones that I have tasted were very good and most of them are vegetarian!)
6. Incredible Weather (it was raining the whole time except for my first half-day)
7. Incredible Shameless Self-Esteem (which doesn't hold up to the rest of the world. They are proud of it except that they dont know that it's crap!)
8. Incredible Airport (it is constantly under renovation and for an international airport, the roof is leaking and the water drops were contained with torn newspaper. This was happening at the immigration counter!!! and also all over the airport)
So it is the sums of all these things that leads me to give this suggestion to you:
Don't go to India unless you really really have to (Taj Mahal supposedly) and cut all of your expectations of any international standards by half. A forewarning is that maybe the Taj Mahal is also crap based on what I just wrote. So for example if a hotel advertises itself to be a 5-stars hotel (as in the case of my hotel, the incredibly shitty Park Plaza Mumbai), it's really a 2.5 stars, based on the following:
1. It doesn't smell (1 star)
2. It has a working door lock (1 star)
3. The food doesn't give you stomach ache (half star)
All the missing stars:
1. The 4 batteries that are powering your room's small deposit box had only 3 batteries and they are sprawled outside with no one coming in to fix it for five days
2. The internet connection is controlled by some asshole in the front desk who picked up the phone only once during my stay to actually give me the password to login. The other times someone else picked up with promises that the asshole will call back (no one did for 1.5 hrs) and the other time the server was down
3. The fresh towel has a bright yellow stain on one of the corner which could be: squised papaya, squished orange, squished durian or more likely: squished shit (i wisely decided not to smell it to determine what it actually was at that time and just threw it inside the bath tub)
4. The shower box is sloped to better regulate the water flow, except that they put the drain hole on the UPPER part of the slope, so the shower is always full of water
5. On the last night of the trip, at 2:30am, the electricity went on and off for about 6 times in the span of 10 minutes, each with bursting flash of lights as the lights in our rooms are halogen, kind of like being flashed with a full camera flash right in front of your eyes. How did I know it was 2:30am? I'm always aware of my surrounding so i know :P To give the hotel credit they did give me 3 candles to light in case it happens (which according to one employee is common)
6. On the last day of the trip as I was checking out the same thing happened at the lobby, have these people no SHAME???
7. The waiter on the dinner buffet gave you nasty look and nodded to acknowledge that you asked for tea, except that he just stood there. After you asked for the 3rd time he brought you the tea mixed with milk, which when I sipped I immediately commented that this is not tea but rather 'banyu korah-korah'
8. The bells and lights in front of your room have pretty much decayed
9. The furniture has the looks of the furnitures that Vivi was interested to buy from Index at the PTC (yes, her taste is not that good, bwahahah)
10. The remote control has one dead battery, which was replaced with one of the 3 batteries from the room safety box and it's still a remote from hell, you have to squeeze reaaaaaaaaaally hard for it to change channel
So if you total all the missing stars, it comes out to be -7.5 stars! And they have billboards all over the city saying that it is a "LUXURY Business Hotel".
Now I have written for quite some time and still there is 2.5hrs to go, ugh! To make life interesting, as I was walking to the other side of the check-in counter, I saw a blue queue strap (that they have in front of the bank or any kind of line to help you queue up) and empty space behind it with this sign "Suspicious Article Ahead, Do Not Approach Within 100m" and suddenly I realized that there were soldiers lining up the strap and that there was a guy in full bomb suit moving forward slowly next to a bomb-sniffing dog, I'm NOT joking!!! I was like WTF???? and I just walked the hell out from there... Aren't you supposed to clear the airport for this kind of shit??? Fifteen minutes later apparently it was false alarm and everything went back to normal.... incredible indeed!
Sleepily yours,
Lord S
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Wannabe
That is the word that describes this place the best. They want to reach the sky, but the stairs broke when you are 2m away from the ceiling. They want to impress you with a luxury car, except that it is a car made in the Soviet Union! They want to show you a brand new, 5-months old hotel, except that the floor is not polished and the roofs are dirty.... It's almost like that song Ironic by Alaniss Morisette. Even the jewelry here is the same, they have all the designs and the diamonds, except that the finish is not shiny... Either that or they just dont have a very high standard and think that their own standard is good enough for the world, except that it's not :P (the "katak dalam tempurung" syndrome).... The Indonesian term will be "Gak Nyucuk"
On my way back to the exhibition center and the hotel, there are many contrasts along the way. Houses made of thin wood (triplek) a'la Indonesia, people living below freeway overpasses, colonial style milk farms, very very old fire fighting cars (which is actually a tractor, which I think will pull water wagons), roads with holes in them, modern office building, dirty housing complexes with people having sex on the roof and also beggars offering you to grope their boobs for US$ 0.20, all good stuff!
In the exhibition itself the customers get going after lunch time (which is after 2pm) and not much was happening before then, Indians are very relaxed people. The food halls themselves are unique in that they use COUPONS!!! There are no cash transaction going on (except McDonalds) and you have to exchange cash with coupons then exchange the coupons for your food, like your high school bazaar (if you dont know what I mean, then maybe your high school's not so good). Basically what happens is that they will have a big hall set up with rows of long tables and it will have different stalls serving different kinds of vegetarian food (they are ALL vegetarians).
You just pick what you want, check the price, and pay them with the coupons. The coupons themselves come in different denomination, 5 rupees, 10 rupees, 20 rupees, 50 rupees and have the different catering house name stamped on them. One of them serves this very nice salted pineapple juice, which is exactly what it is (for 80 rupees, 1 rupee = Rp 220). They also have a very nice Mocha Coffee for 90 rupees that I buy every morning to start the day, go go Costa Coffee!
There are plans to go visit some of the factories on Monday and then maybe I can take photo for Imoet with the people pooping on the street. I did take picture of the people having sex on the roof but I want to keep this blog for all ages :P
Cheers,
Lord S
ps. No lip chewing! unless by hot, thin, hard bodied girls with big ( . ) ( . ), yeh!
On my way back to the exhibition center and the hotel, there are many contrasts along the way. Houses made of thin wood (triplek) a'la Indonesia, people living below freeway overpasses, colonial style milk farms, very very old fire fighting cars (which is actually a tractor, which I think will pull water wagons), roads with holes in them, modern office building, dirty housing complexes with people having sex on the roof and also beggars offering you to grope their boobs for US$ 0.20, all good stuff!
In the exhibition itself the customers get going after lunch time (which is after 2pm) and not much was happening before then, Indians are very relaxed people. The food halls themselves are unique in that they use COUPONS!!! There are no cash transaction going on (except McDonalds) and you have to exchange cash with coupons then exchange the coupons for your food, like your high school bazaar (if you dont know what I mean, then maybe your high school's not so good). Basically what happens is that they will have a big hall set up with rows of long tables and it will have different stalls serving different kinds of vegetarian food (they are ALL vegetarians).
You just pick what you want, check the price, and pay them with the coupons. The coupons themselves come in different denomination, 5 rupees, 10 rupees, 20 rupees, 50 rupees and have the different catering house name stamped on them. One of them serves this very nice salted pineapple juice, which is exactly what it is (for 80 rupees, 1 rupee = Rp 220). They also have a very nice Mocha Coffee for 90 rupees that I buy every morning to start the day, go go Costa Coffee!There are plans to go visit some of the factories on Monday and then maybe I can take photo for Imoet with the people pooping on the street. I did take picture of the people having sex on the roof but I want to keep this blog for all ages :P
Cheers,
Lord S
ps. No lip chewing! unless by hot, thin, hard bodied girls with big ( . ) ( . ), yeh!
Friday, August 8, 2008
Land of the Curry
I am now in Mumbai, India, land of the curry!!! And for first impressions, the look of the city here is actually like Jagalan, Pasar Turi (that's the outside of the NEW international airport, which is still work in progress) and the roads in Trawas/Batu. There are no beggars or dead people in the street as was rumored before but then I haven't gotten the chance to actually go to the city itself. The hotel is located on a hill (as advertised) but what was not mentioned that the hill itself was full of crap! half done building, slum neighborhood RIGHT across the high wall that the hotel built complete with barbed wire on top. To be fair, all the crap around the hill is quite cleverly disguised with trees and foliage so from afar you wont be able to see them. The street is full with antique taxis and tuk-tuk (bajaj).
As for standard of living, it seems that food here is quite cheap. Inside the exhibition hall, food costs around USD 2 and the portion will make you full. So food outside should be minimum half of that. Hotel buffet costs USD 20, cheaper than Surabaya Shangri-La's USD 25 and it's full of soupy food. Hungarian beef paprika, Mongolian chicken, and a bunch of other Indian names that I can't remember or know what they are made of, the similarity is that they are all soupy except for the Bashmati rice (long grained and soft, quite good).
So far the pace of life here seems to be very relaxed, with most customers coming in at the fair after 1-2pm after lunch, very few comes at the official opening time of 10am. It is rainy here also, being in the middle of the monsoon season, although it is not too heavy, more like drizzle here and there. I have yet to meet the gollywashers, which according to my Indian contact happened at the show three years ago and it flooded the exhibition hall and they had to cancel the show then.
The exhibition itself is not very furnished, it's more like big warehouses connected together. There are even birds living inside the hall, one of the them crapped on the information counter guy that I was asking about something. His backshirt and chair is full of bird poop, ewwwwwwwwwww.
Anyway, I will try to get some pictures posted later, but if you can imagine all the Indonesian locales I mentioned above, you already know how this place looks like.
Booyah,
Lord S
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
HELP! I'm ageing fast!
What IS wrong with me?
I have always enjoyed harlequin-ish books from time to time, indulging my self in a feast of what I told Ming "soft-core porn" stories, in which the guy is always too good to be true, cold, distant, yet passionate in bed. It's a phase. it's usually near my PMS.
I even told Ming one day, joking, how come he never kissed with "demanding" lips as described in one of those silly books (Ming absolutely hates kissing. he's usually down to groping, what a waste of those chewable lips -- believe me, I've chewed them as often as he permits it)
But then now, at work, with people who sat behind me and next to me are all gone out of town, with my dad in law away out of the office, I can browse the internet and the first thing I do is to check www.eharlequin.com !!
I laughed at some of the summary. is just too cheesy, but I also, surprisingly, can't wait to read some of them!!!
What is wrong with me?? I used to like better books such as The Life of Pi, Roots, The Alchemist, even satire comedy like Terry Pratchett's books. Then I downgrade to Chicklits. Now Harlequins????
I suspect ageing is one factor. AM a mom. HAVE settled down.
Is that it?
Ming called from Singapore and I told him about the website and he said immediately, Oh, the porn? Harlequin is not porn of course, though not lacking in the very sizzling description of great sex and kisses.
hhhh, anyways, I used to be able to buy Indonesian language harlequin books near my office for 30rb per book. a great bargain. But last time I checked, they told me they no longer carried the Harlequin series, they returned them already! can you believe it? If people in Indonesia had moved on to other books, how come I get stuck there?!
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
I mean, don't get the wrong ideas, Ming always meets his obligations "lahir and batin" if you know what I mean. No complaints there.
So tell me guys, have you been through this phase in your life when you seem to have endless need for the soft-core por..i mean, harlequin-ish books??
I have always enjoyed harlequin-ish books from time to time, indulging my self in a feast of what I told Ming "soft-core porn" stories, in which the guy is always too good to be true, cold, distant, yet passionate in bed. It's a phase. it's usually near my PMS.
I even told Ming one day, joking, how come he never kissed with "demanding" lips as described in one of those silly books (Ming absolutely hates kissing. he's usually down to groping, what a waste of those chewable lips -- believe me, I've chewed them as often as he permits it)
But then now, at work, with people who sat behind me and next to me are all gone out of town, with my dad in law away out of the office, I can browse the internet and the first thing I do is to check www.eharlequin.com !!
I laughed at some of the summary. is just too cheesy, but I also, surprisingly, can't wait to read some of them!!!
What is wrong with me?? I used to like better books such as The Life of Pi, Roots, The Alchemist, even satire comedy like Terry Pratchett's books. Then I downgrade to Chicklits. Now Harlequins????
I suspect ageing is one factor. AM a mom. HAVE settled down.
Is that it?
Ming called from Singapore and I told him about the website and he said immediately, Oh, the porn? Harlequin is not porn of course, though not lacking in the very sizzling description of great sex and kisses.
hhhh, anyways, I used to be able to buy Indonesian language harlequin books near my office for 30rb per book. a great bargain. But last time I checked, they told me they no longer carried the Harlequin series, they returned them already! can you believe it? If people in Indonesia had moved on to other books, how come I get stuck there?!
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
I mean, don't get the wrong ideas, Ming always meets his obligations "lahir and batin" if you know what I mean. No complaints there.
So tell me guys, have you been through this phase in your life when you seem to have endless need for the soft-core por..i mean, harlequin-ish books??
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