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.
Some others go hysterical, or even come up with interesting theories surrounding a crisis.
For me, as long as the unexpected situations do not manifest themselves in the form of cockroaches, flying prawns (there really are such insects, I swear), lightning or someone tickling me from the back, I generally remain calm and composed.
Until the next day, when the reality of the situations start sinking in – I spent pretty much the whole day thinking of the events that happened over last weekend and playing every scene in my head. I think this is what psychologists would have analysed as a case of delayed shock (or in layman’s terms: v e r y s l o w ).
Before you jump into conclusions, nothing disastrously bad happened to me nor someone I know personally. But one thing was for sure: it was a very bizarre weekend.
I wrote in my previous post that I was going to have a weekend trip to KL for Future Music Festival Asia 2014. It was meant to be straightforward – reach KL early in the afternoon, get changed, head to the festival and take a bus ride back to Singapore the next day.
But of course nothing in travelling is ever that straightforward.
We reached KL two hours later than expected due to the traffic, and the moment I had access to WiFi from our hostel, I was greeted by a text from a friend informing me that the festival had been cancelled.
Cancelled. The festival we took a 5-hour bus journey for. The festival where Pharrell Williams was supposed to play! Poof. No more.
In our disbelief, we searched the net for more news and found a few articles confirming our news and when the official website finally released some sort of confirmation, we knew that it was time for Plan B. Except that we did not have a plan B, so we had to come up with something on the spot.
Apparently this A4 piece of paper is the only sign that could be found at the venue. Photo courtesy to ST Communities.
So I think it is of utmost importance that I write a guide of what you can do, should you find yourself stranded in Kuala Lumpur for 23 hours because the festival you came all the way for was cancelled at the last minute:
As I was sieving through my London pictures on Facebook to write my last post, I discovered something about myself: I may have a secret love for the London Underground. Not sure whether this is because of my love for trains, or that I keep roaming around the city which forced me to spend a lot of my time in the tunnels or whether I am just plain weird, I seem to be taking pictures incessantly of anything related to the Tube.
Let’s face it: I think the Tube is fascinating.
Now I know some of you will jump in protest. I am perfectly aware that the London railway system is not the most reliable thing in the world. And despite having only been in London three times, I have had my fair share of disrupted railways, Tube not running on important days like Christmas and getting lost in the tunnels (no surprise there). In fact, when Singapore recently introduced TV screens to indicate the service operation for each of its MRT lines, I joked to my friend that we have dropped to London standard since this means that the service will be disrupted often enough to warrant such investment.
Having said that, you’ve got to admit that London Underground is fascinating. Being the oldest metro system in the world, it is still functioning until now since its opening in 1863. It now has 270 stations with 402 kilometres of track. So I suppose we just have to be more forgiving for the slow upgrades because to be frank, most people would not have the foresight of 150 years or so?
Anyway, whatever your views towards the Tube are, some love just can’t be explained. So here it is, in pictures, my love story with the London Underground.
You can say that I’m lucky. It has been a childhood dream of mine to visit England, London in particular, thanks to all Enid Blyton’s books, Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe. And now in the past four years, I have visited London 3 times and loved it very much there. (I did have to wait for 21 years before my first visit, but hey, it is still a dream come true!)
Being one of the most visited cities in the world, London should hold little surprise for anyone: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, London Bridge, the royal family, Hyde Park, Harrods, you name it. But I guess that’s the beauty of travelling, no matter how much you read about it, the experience you have is your own and no amount of research through travel guides could foretell what you will see there nor the many pleasant surprises that you may encounter.
Like the fact that after all this day-dreaming, the first picture I took in London was actually of the DLR.
One of the perks of being a part-time badminton journalist is that you get access to all the press conference rooms and speak to all the world-renowned badminton players. In most places, you get to sit at the best seats for free since you will be the one telling the whole world about how awesome the tournament is. For an avid badminton fan (okay, almost maniac) like me, it was more than I could have asked for.
But another less known perk of being a badminton journalist is that you get to meet other non-badminton famous people. Like the minister of sports. Or a prince.
Yes, you read it correctly, a P R I N C E. I still can’t believe it till this moment. I have met and spoken to a real life PRINCE. Even though it was more than a year ago, I’m still hyperventilating as I’m writing about it. It all happened so fast that I did not even have time to faint right there and then.
I was just doing my post badminton match ritual at Copenhagen Masters 2012 in well, Copenhagen. It always pretty much goes by this sequence: you sit and watch a badminton match, when a match finishes you run off to the press conference room to interview the players if they interest you, then you return to the media room to jot down the quotes into your computer and return to the stadium again to catch the next match and repeat the same steps.
But that day I decided to break the cycle. I guess it was because I was rather tired from running around the stadium, but after interviewing one of the players, I did not return immediately to the media room. Instead a few of us decided to just hang around after a press conference and rested our feet. It had been a long day.
Suddenly the door opened and a few important looking men came into the room.
missruslee 