It was a cold and rather gloomy morning on my last day in London back in December 2012. I was flying to Copenhagen that night on the eve of Christmas Eve (if there is such a phrase) before the tubes stopped working, and I did not plan for any itinerary for the day (because it completely slipped my mind). I knew Little Venice was just around the corner to where I was staying at Paddington, so I decided to test my sense of direction and just explored the area by foot. Which was a really brave move considering I practically had no sense of direction and had no idea how to get to Little Venice. So I set off from my hostel shortly after breakfast, turned left instead of right as I had done all the days before this on my way to the tube, and started my little walking adventure. I walked for a distance till I reached the end of Westbourne Terrace, and I decided to look back to the street that I have been treading every single day over the past 7 days to find this.
As much as I like travelling and will go the distance (literally) to be somewhere I want to see, there is one pet peeve about it that has never quite grown on me: visa application.
To me, the trouble and the money spent seem to serve as a rite of passage to see how much you really want to visit the country. Unfortunately, being an Indonesian who aspires to see as much as the world as possible, this is something that I have to live with unless my dear homeland ever allows for dual citizenship. It is doubly annoying when everyone around you in Singapore never seemed to have to apply for any visas – they can just buy a ticket and hop onto a plane to virtually any countries they wish.
I’m ranting so much clearly because I am in the midst of applying for another visa. In anticipation of my BIG trip in July, I would need to whip myself up a UK visa before the end of next month. Even though this is the fourth UK visa that I’m applying over the past four years, I still am nowhere good at it. Partly because the amount of information they requested is ridiculous, and partly because life would be so much easier if I had had the sense to just retain a copy of my latest application form as reference. Which I obviously had not.
So here I am, flipping through my passport to jot down the list of countries that I have visited over the past ten years. TEN years. Good thing they limited the entries to 10. Otherwise I would spend a whole day just flipping through my passport till the pages tear and still I would not be able to complete it properly.
As I went through each entry, I realised over the years I have collected quite a considerable number of visas. For the benefit of those who almost never have to go through the pain of applying for visas (no bitterness here), here are how visas of different countries look like.
For a start, the Chinese visa – one that most people who have been to China would have seen.
As you can tell, I haven’t been travelling for a while, as testified by the number of ‘throwback’ travel posts and an increase in the content of ‘When Not Travelling’ category. It is not necessarily a bad thing since this gives me time to write my past travels before some interesting facts fade permanently from my memories (I have a lot to catch up, I’m not kidding you!). Staying put also gives me opportunities to enjoy what Singapore has to offer.
In this case, seeing world-famous celebrities live in action. Singapore is a really good place for that. With generally law-abiding population and world-class security, watching concerts is relatively safer and less life-threatening compared to countries like Indonesia, where overexcited people have proven to cause deadly stampede. I consider myself very lucky to be able to catch both Taylor Swift and Ellie Goulding in the same week!
Taylor Swift’s Red concert was nothing short of amazing. She was an incredible performer and her whole concert felt like a very perfectly-planned show. Her script was very well prepared and the transition smooth. It is no wonder that her two shows in Singapore were both sold out. I spent painfully a lot to get my seats, but it was worth it. Amidst the crowd of screaming teenagers, I felt like one again and I’m not embarrassed to admit that my throat felt a little sore the next day for singing (screaming) along to her songs.
Although I am slightly more embarrassed to admit that I did go hysterical at the first sight of her shadow.
It’s funny I’m writing this post the day after my face was smacked by a ball during my football game, but I have been trying to show the world that football can be girly. And since World Cup is going to start tomorrow very early morning (in this part of the world at least), there is no better time wager on this belief.
After my bold statement of shocking pink football shoes (what can be more girly than pink, seriously?), last weekend I decided to combine football with another thing that is as girly as it can be – baking cupcakes.
Okay, I wouldn’t lie and say that I did the whole baking because no one would ever buy that. My role for the day was more of a cupcake decorator, using whatever limited knowledge I had on football and even more limited knowledge on cupcake decorating to whip up something that people could tell was related to football, Team England and worthy to enter a contest. It was all a trial and error process and stay with me till the very end to see the result!
Let me start with less appealing pictures. Shaky photos were the result of me attempting to take photos with my icing-covered hands.
Cupcakes, before they were.The state of the kitchen while the work was in progress.
I recently rediscovered a hidden ‘talent’ of converting famous songs into parodies. Although I can’t share the one that I composed two days ago just yet (since there is a high chance I might get sued by someone), here is one that I wrote and dedicated to my awesome trip in Myanmar last December (which I had to sing and dance to on our last night there, thanks to the request of my demanding friends and travel mates).
Please play the Lion King’s ‘Circle of Life’ in the background, to fully appreciate this song.
The Epic Myanmar (Inspired by the song ‘Circle of Life’)
From the day we arrived in Mandalay
And blinking step into the sun
There’re more temples than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There’s far too much capcai we eat
With fried rice, pork curry and noodle
But then in Bagan we got diarrhoea Mbak and Tika* never fell sick at all
Yesterday felt like a day of second chances. When my brother announced a few months ago that his laptop got stolen along with his camera SD card which contained pictures from my family’s Europe trip last summer, I was pretty bummed. I spent weeks after that trying to get over it and trying not to think of what pictures in there that I would never see again. Of course, the more I tried, the more I would remember what were in there.
So when my brother told me yesterday that apparently his SD card had not been lost with his computer, I was thrilled beyond words. After an unbelievably long week for so many different reasons, my spirit was considerably lifted up.
I have then decided to take the initiative to back up all these photos into a few different places because really, how often do you get second chances?
Well as it turned out, you may get second chances twice in a day! Just a few hours before this happy discovery, my friend managed to get us tickets to Taylor Swift’s Red Tour in Singapore – a concert that had been sold out the first day the tickets were on sale and because we did not sit and wait in front of our computer to purchase them, we did not get our hands on them. However, since her sold out concert in Bangkok is cancelled due to the political situation there, the organiser had decided to hold another one in Singapore and voila! the tickets were miraculously available again. We snatched them up in no time and I am going to see Taylor Swift live in Singapore on 9th of June!!!
Anyway, I have digressed. What I really want to show you through this post are some photos from my brother’s camera that I’m glad could see the daylight again.
So let’s start with my photo looking naturally lost at Copenhagen Central Station. I guess this is how I look most of the time, with my close-to-nonexistent sense of direction.
Bearing in mind that this was probably my 50th time there.
I’m having a slight sore throat, most possibly because of my rather unhealthy lifestyle over the weekend. What made it worse was the lack of fruits in my fridge that I can just pop to my mouth to soothe the throat, or more importantly, to soothe myself psychologically that I have eaten healthy today.
So since I can’t get my fruits instantly, I shall do the closest thing that can get me to them – writing about them. And no, I’m not going to list down the health benefits of different types of fruits, but rather, I will transport myself back to March last year when I chanced upon the most copious mountain of fruits that I have seen in my life: at Yau Ma Tei Fruits Market in Hong Kong.
As always, the best things during travel are the ones that you stumble upon accidentally. We certainly did not plan to visit this fruit market, not at 2 am in the morning at least. What we were doing before that was definitely not of people who were sophisticated enough to appreciate how fruits came about to our table every morning.
I was too busy thinking that Aaron Kwok and I were meant to be since our hands fit perfectly into each other.
Anyone who has travelled with me knows that I have extremely low standard for accommodation. My logic is that since I will spend most part of the day travelling, I just need a bed to sleep and a clean bathroom to shower. I will normally opt for a hostel or a very cheap hotel, and so far both have worked fine with me. Rarely has an accommodation given me a bad impression that I do not wish to set my foot there again. In fact, I would recommend most of them to friends travelling.
Up until two weeks ago, I only had two places that I would advise anyone to avoid at all costs. First was the apartment that I stayed in Hong Kong. It was actually clean enough considering it looked very old, but for some reason it gave me the creep. As we were sitting down in the living room chatting away at night, we suddenly heard a surge of water bursting from the pipe in one of the bathrooms. We were understandably surprised and in a desperate attempt to push away any thoughts of ghosts from my mind, I went to check the bathroom and somehow came up with a scientific explanation to calm myself down that perhaps it was because the water in the heating system overflowed. As I’m writing this, I had no idea how I managed to talk to myself and my friends into believing that. As if to prove me wrong straightaway, my friend found a few sheets of test papers on top of a shoe rack and the name of the student was ‘Demon’. Now I know that Hong Kong people have an interesting way of naming themselves (Apple, Orange, Kitty, Ice, Star, Bambi, etc), but when a Demon appeared together with bursting water pipe, it was enough to scare all of us that we had to watch funny Bollywood videos to calm ourselves down.
Second was a hotel in Copenhagen that I stayed in summer 2013. I have never been so sure that poltergeists exist until then. I distinctly remembered putting my earrings on the table only to find the next morning that they were gone. After turning the room upside down, my dad found each side of the earrings at different corners of the room. What was even creepier was that they were not the only items that had moved overnight. I was charging my camera battery and in the morning the battery was no longer in the charger. Instead, we found the battery separated from the charger below our blanket. Either one of my family members had a case of violent sleepwalking that none of us knew about or my memory was certainly failing me or…
Anyway, the point is so far, only these supposedly supernatural encounters have created an impression so deep and deterring that I swear I will never go back again. Montigo Resorts have somehow found a loophole in this theory and gave me the next scariest experience than demons and poltergeists: cockroaches.
Yes, you read that right, cockroachES. With ES. Plural. Four to be exact. And I only stayed there for 2 nights. For a place that we paid quite a considerable amount for (even with the 1-for-1 voucher that my friend had, it was still quite a pinch), I was expecting at least a basic level of hygiene and that guests can be pretty much cockroach-free. But no, our first encounter of a huge cockroach was during our late-night dinner right on the first night and my friend saw something fly across the room. We (I) tried to ignore it and pretend that it COULDN’T have been a cockroach – what were the odds?
But as we were finishing our dinner, one of my friends exclaimed, “OMG, I see it now. And it really is a cockroach.”
Very understandably, I screamed and jumped up the couch, barely being able to stand because my knees had turned jelly.
We all stood in suspense until the cockroach crawled out of the villa. Only then did we dare to head back to our room, only to find another one was waiting inside our bathroom. And the next day, I saw another one at a different toilet. As an added bonus, we were also visited by a hairy giant spider. I felt I was right back in Nepal whereby everyday was a battle with a new species of crawling and flying creatures.
Spider hunter.
If not for the extremely comfortable pillows in the villa and my energy completely drained out from the shock of seeing cockroaches, I would probably have been insomniac over those two nights.
I think I have a thing for royalties, and I would like to think that my paths cross with them quite a lot.
And by a lot, I mean my one-time encounter with the Crown Prince of Denmark in 2012. And then last week, I was invited to an event at the British High Commission for the second time.
Okay I know the High Commission was no prince. And I mean he was not even there during the event. But how often do you get to visit a colonial office house in Singapore that has the Queen’s insignia in it? And also where Prince William and Kate Middleton paid a visit last year?
So I thought I would give you quick tour of the pretty mansion situated right in the middle of Singapore. Since I was not quite sure whether I was allowed to take pictures, I just did what I could so hopefully you’ll enjoy this little glimpse of the House.
When we came into the house, we were greeted by a pretty garden and the house was located after a little drive-in.
It feels like being transported into sunny little Britain.
In a society where girls are expected to stay put, learn how to cook, dress up and hone skills to be a good wife, frequent travelling is certainly not the conventional thing to do. What with the many horror stories that befall on girls who travel, it takes a certain courage and sacrifice from a mother to let her daughter roam and discover the world.
I bet it is hard for her to understand, the mother who spent most of her life at her hometown and only after she got married did she move to a different city, to have a daughter who is only 25 but has lived in four different countries and travelled to a lot more.
It must be hard for her to comprehend, the mother whose life after marriage has always been to fulfill her duty as a wife and mother and spend every single waking moment with the family, to have a daughter who is still flighty as a bird and always dreams of living at faraway places.
It must be hard for her to accept, the mother who left her job to be able to spend more time with her kids when they were young, only to find that when they grow up, they all live away from her to pursue their education and career.
It must be hard for her to appreciate, the mother who never spent a single cent on herself, not on expensive bags nor clothes nor even on good food in cafes, to have a daughter who spends considerable amount of her savings on flight tickets, but never once has she ever questioned her on her use of finances.
missruslee 
