ocular fascination

ancient

2008-02-25T02:25:00.000-08:00

slumber party

2007-08-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

its been a week since i'm back, and i'm loving the singaporean life already. the girls and i had a little slumber get-together, and that was great fun. pictures!

jianning with the fake nemo hat.

jianning looking like fairy godmother.

the princess and the frog.

we had some butt slapping fun.

lydia looking like a dead crab.

woof?

here you see many thoughts occuring at the same time. no wonder they say women are complicated creatures, no?

post-supper-attempts-at-sexy-pose.

kya?

2007-07-15T23:39:00.000-07:00

i was clearing my ntu email when i found this picture of me and my colleagues at a some swanky indian restaurant that serves gujarati thali. nothing like some good old thali, there, enough to make you grow as fat as a fat cow. and damn, i've put on some damn weight.

bangcock

2007-07-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Its been a long time since I last created an entry, and this time I'm creating it from Bangkok. This time, unlike in India, I have the luxury of (almost) 24/7 access to internet, via the glorious LAN cable made available to me at my workplace. oh, glorious modern technology! you never appreciate it until you lose it, i say.

recently, a friend ambitiously experimented with giving up her mobile phone for 2 weeks, just to see what it was like to live without the trappings of modern technology. i thought it was a fantastic experiment.. do you even remember the days when we survived without the mobile phone? meetings were planned as usual and everyone turned up on time, and there was no need to make harrassment calls to that oft-late bugger (haha, that's me.), and neither was there a need to make any last minute changes to the plan. (fickle, fickle ladies)

brave as she was to undertake such a potentially-social-crippling experiment, crazy as she was to even attempt it in the first place, she finally gave up after 2 weeks (i think). she quoted "work commitment" as the reason for the failure of her sociological-technological experiment.

anyway! coming back to the point of this post, which is to tell you where i am and what i'm doing right now. i'm in bangkok, the land of a thousand fake smiles, working with an NGO called ActionAid Thailand, which aims to fight poverty. and i quote from the action aid website "ActionAid is an international anti-poverty agency working in over 40 countries, taking sides with poor people to end poverty and injustice together."

haha, a little too idealistic, i say, but what the hell, we need these inspirational quotes to get through the dreary of life in reality. we need a superhero. i'll bet that's why we had VR man.

its interesting how everything on my computer screen is thai. even the blogger interface is in thai. luckily, it doesn't take a lot of sense to realise that the only orange button on the blogger interface says "publish". one more interesting thing: i couldn't sleep the night before because the couple in the next room was having some loud sex at 5am in the morning. 5am in the morning! it was kind of disturbing, my room looked creepy enough (its a super-budget room at 150B/S$7 a night), and she had to creep me out even more with the incessant moaning. ugh.

still, i'm doing quite well and good, i'm feeling pretty useful around the workplace, which is a good thing, i guess. but its always nice to have someone to converse with online (since i want to make full use of my almost 24/7 internet connection), so do drop me an email if you have the time, to make my day.

alrightey. back. to. work.

so long, farewell.

2007-06-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

saying goodbye was so much more difficult than i thought.

as much as i really wanted to go back to singapore to see my friends and my family and my dog again, as much as i was painstakingly counting the days till i could fly home again, i still really really hate the part where i have to say my goodbyes to colleagues who have amused and annoyed me to no end.

so we hugged, gave each other lots of presents, said our farewell, and wished each other all the best. it really is so much harder than i thought, i even almost wished that i could have stayed on longer in india.

almost.

i hate saying goodbyes.

homecoming queen

2007-06-05T05:42:00.000-07:00

I'M COMING HOME!!

i can't tell you how good that feels. i can almost see the end. unless, of course, i die on the plane trip to kashmir, or die on the plane trip to delhi, or die on the plane trip back to mumbai, or die on the plane trip back to singapore. but aiyah, what are the odds?? HAHAHA.

sooo i'm finishing work next friday, then i'll be going to see kashmir. YES! i've always wanted to go see the place. my colleagues have been telling me so much about how beautiful kashmiri women are - and i think i saw one of them once - she had the most beautiful harmonious feautures and perfect skin and a pretty pink glow about her cheeks. i must say i couldn't stop ogling at her. but danny told me that kashmiri men are even hotter than the kashmiri women, a la bollywood, so i'm hoping to be able to bring back one cute kashmiri boy as a souvenier to put in my cupboard in good old bishan. WOOOO.

i wanted to post pictures, but its so difficult. no time, no internet. but i really should post some pictures i took at a hindi wedding. the groom is damn cute. sitting on a white horse some more. (although the horse was looking a little disgruntled) haha. gotta do that before i leave! still, i'm really glad i met up with more singaporeans here, most of them from NUS and SMU who are participating in a similar program, but for a 10 week internship or something. i wish they came earlier, i'm having so much more fun with them here.

26 june!

hasta la vista, baby!!

indian boys special

2007-05-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

here's the guy who usually wears black-and-white tights.

he looks really tame today. :( but he was very nice to me when i took these pictures, so i shan't make fun of him.

six pack, anyone?

they like lifting heavy weights

okay this is the crazy bugger.

six foot one, he instructs me to take this picture of him, while he looks macho-ly somewhere else.

he huffs and puffs and grunts his way through his workout.

this guy is normal.

he checks himself out as the trainer waits to count his reps.

his name is asif.

gab and i both agree that this bears an uncanny resemblance to childbirth.

and he really sound like he's in labour. seriously.

*grunt*

this crazy man presented me with a host of gifts on valentine's day, a day after i talked to him at the gym.

when he saw that i was holding a camera, he took ALL the weights in the gym, piled them up onto this machine, to create an extremely macho shot.

guess the amount of weights he's lifting.

1500 freaking pounds.

well, enough about asif.

this is seriously FHM-worthy.

we move on to the guy doing bench press. bench press, right?

close up shot.

*snarl*

*grrrrr*

*roar*

check out his armpit hair!

oh joy, a whole range of torture tools for you to choose from!

butt crazy

2007-05-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

alrightey.

i did a little excursion into the gym to take a couple of photos, because i was so amused by the indian gym culture. now for those of you singaporean gym rats, you'll find that the indian gyms are overcrowded by testosterone laden hairy young men who like to lift the heaviest weights. and you might find it a little annoying that the indian gym rats grunt (or squeal, depending on how manly their voices are), shout, and make orgasmic sounds through their weight lifting routines. oh oh, plus they like to throw their weights around. erm, both literally and figuratively.

now, i originally wanted to take these pictures to make fun of them. i thought it made an interesting subject because you have men in black-and-white-striped tights (think zebra) working out in the gym, oblivious to whatever international standards of decency there ever was. but you know what? these boys were so obliging and sooo nice when i took these pictures, that i decide not to make fun of most of them, save for certain wierd ones. you might potentially spot some cute hairy boy with big muscles (xiaofen, please restrain yourself!)

to tempt you and keep you salivating while i resize the photos, which might take a while, i decide to first post a teaser. aaaand here's a preview of what you might see in the coming pictures. enjoy! :)

5 reasons why i hate eating chocolates in india

2007-05-02T22:38:00.000-07:00

pathetic choice of chocolates available
chocolate is always soft and squashy when i buy it
there is almost always a layer of dust coating the wrapper
three layers of wrapping to be uncovered before i reach the chocolate
can't find a bin to get rid of the dust-and-chocolate-coated wrappers

in a flesh

2007-05-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

for those of you who have seen the previous post, i replaced it because when i re-read it again, it really looked like a rambling sort of article to me, which disgusted me, so i removed it. haha. and replaced it by a shorter and more succint quote so that you get to that point of the story and i don't feel stupid reading a rambling article that seems to make no sense when i read it a second time. but oh look, here i am rambling again. HAHA.

nah, i know exactly what i'm talking about in this entry. today i'm going to talk about the flasher that i met last friday. i wish i could continue this entry with an amazing story about how i kicked his dangling balls, slathered him with enough pepper spray to kill an elephant, and then squashed him into a sorry pulp, but NO. that didn't happen. what i had mentally prepared myself for the moment i stepped into india vanished at the sight of the man standing in a dark corner of a relatively deserted street, at about 8pm on the friday evening, saying excuse-me-madam, with his pants unzipped and his balls dangling merrily in a phantom breeze.

i must say i have never been more shocked and surprised and disgusted. in a split second he turned around to leave, i can't remember if he walked off or ran off, but i turned around and slapped him on the back and screamed fuck-off-you-fucking-pervert. for the life of me, i couldn't understand why i didn't attempt to beat him up in that instant, and just let him go off like that. i mean, at any given rational moment i would have slathered his balls with pepper spray (i later discovered that i didn't bring my pepper spray out with me that night), but well, i didn't do it.

i do remember being incredibly pissed off, though i wasn't sure if i was angry at myself for not attacking the attacker, or if i was angry at the attacker for attacking me (means visually assaulting me with his ugly balls). but i was on my way to meet gabriel for dinner that night, and when i first met him i remember shouting at him at the top of my lungs because i was so angry. (he later called it noise pollution) i wanted to make a police report, but first i called mahzarine, who is the HR person in charge of us Singaporean interns. i said i wanted to go to the police, but she said she wasn't sure if that would help matters, or if the police would even take the case seriously at all. she later called her lawyer, who confirmed that the police will not take this case seriously. and so there i was, angry because i was helpless.

damn.

oh well, think i shall end the entry here, i really need to go to the bathroom, i'd been in one hell of a long meeting today, and now i'm sitting in some dinghy internet cafe furiously typing out this entry (because i need to go to the bathroom, haha). sigh.

7 weeks and i'm counting every damn minute.

quote of the last week

2007-05-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

"indian porn is boring."
- gabriel

munich

2007-04-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

it was a last minute decision for me to hop onto a plane to fly to munich to meet my family. there are so many adventures to tell and i don't think i can quite properly say that all in one entry. and i've been procrastinating with the updates for this blog. well, i can't say its entirely my fault - its so incredibly difficult to find internet access in India. right now i'm in gab's room using his wireless internet access (lucky bugger), and i feel like i'm overstaying my welcome already,by uploading so many many pictures. but well, you gotta do what you gotta do. its 12.30a.m. in mumbai, and the thought of walking back to my apartment is quite a dreadful one. but well again, you gotta do what you gotta do. geez i'm sounding like a broken recorder already.

anyway! i apologise for the slothful rate of updates, and i solemnly promise to do more updates soon. come to think of it, i seldom ever bring my camera around india to take pictures anymore: maybe the novelty of being in a new place wore off, and all i'm trying to do now is to survive in it.

anyway! about how i landed up in munich: my dear absent-minded mom told me a few days (before she flew off to munich for a business trip) that she was going, and asked if i wanted to join her. in a split second i surveyed my options and the things i had to do (buying air tickets, taking leave with my supervisor, packing my bags, locating mumbai airport, each of which is no easy task) and decided what the hell, i'd go anyway. so i ended up on a russian aeroflot airline on a mumbai-moscow-munich flight. (m&m&m).

there are so many things that i could talk about: but its kind of too late and i'm REALLY overstaying my welcome in gabriel's hotel room.

so enjoy the pictures, and more about the experience coming up real soon!

pretty buildings are dime a dozen in munich.

we love munich!

okay, this is just cam-whoring.

rub the lion's nose for good luck, quite like chinese superstition, don't you think? ron was so intrigued.

my mom looks terrified of the camera.

my mom took a picture of me taking a picture of her.

poing station. why don't we have cute names like that for our mrt lines?

i love ron!

lost in munich.

we spot a surfer surfing..

in a canal!! haha.

this sign here says surfing is forbidden.

and what lies beyond the mysterious looking trees?

we came past a tunnel full of graffiti. and the lighting made pictures look really good!

sexy right? (erm. the girl, not the car.)

there's actually a rainbow in this picture. seriously.

ron's fingers on the left, frost bitten van's fingers on the right.

what pretty sunset, don't you think?

the town square.

when the bell chimes, everyone stops to look. well, almost everyone. i can't tell those who're not looking to get the hell out of my picture.

Munich's cathedral and landmark: the huge late-gothic Frauenkirche with its onion towers, visible from far and wide.

i stumbled upon a nice church while shopping.

the scenic streets of munich.

the detailings on the building is actually painted on: there's a french name for this technique, which is known as the illusion of the eyes. but i'm not french and i don't have a good memory, so i can't tell you what the phrase is.

you know what? al fresco in singapore just doesn't work.

more pretty buildings. lydia don't you like it?

my mom looks like a robber.

but i love her anyway!!

we enter the main shopping district and 3 trumpet boys welcome us.

ron says, don't spend too much money.

and me, i'm just absolutely delighted!!

i wonder what my mom is looking at.

disneyland looking architecture!

angel of peace (also made of gold)

i think this statue is quite amazing.

i'm a quack!

my mom is beautiful.

me and ron had a beer drinking session at hofbrauhaus.

this WAS a one-litre glass of good old german beer. :)

2007-03-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

the picture that symbolises the scene at indian train stations

gabriel cooked us some amazing pasta

colourful gujurati costume

he let me wear his crazy horse costume

i caught a kid trying to catch some bubbles

oh, this artist is drawing a portrait of me. makes sense?

my girls

2007-02-18T00:13:00.000-08:00

just today i was looking through some pictures, and then i came across these. i spent the last christmas day in val's house, together with lydia and jianning, and we were attempting to cook ourselves a christmas feast. looking through the christmas pictures increases the homesick feelings, haha! but anyway i had fun looking through them, so i thought i'd put them up anyway.

lydia and val PRETENDING to cook.

what did they say about too many cooks spoiling the broth?

jianning feels bloated

and val finds that very funny

they're very happy girls after opening the christmas presents

and then we got ourselves pretty nails!

2007-02-18T00:05:00.000-08:00

gopi, my roommate's favourite dog. she took this picture!

pretty buildings put a colonial era touch to bombay

a little beggar girl who came to ask for some money, but we gave her biscuits instead. check out the streams of mucus running out her nose, haha. so cute.

cow peeing on the road.

chowpatty beach

2007-02-17T23:25:00.000-08:00

toiling for the beauty of the landscape in the background.

happy lovebirds by the beach.
happy singaporeans by the beach.

colourful ballons dot the beach

this is call the queen's necklace, because of the pretty string of lights along the beach

i can't make you feel the breeze, but i hope you can see the breeze here, haha.

pretty pretty sunset.

stuff on the road

2007-02-17T23:12:00.000-08:00

musa is checking me out. and he's really happy doing it!

look what i found, a happy old man on a swing.

a dog sleeping on the road, nonchalent to traffic.

human powered swing! i found this while walking around the slums.

its a big dog and it wants to chew my fingers off, right?

right.

gateway of india

2007-02-15T06:57:00.000-08:00

the famed taj mahal hotel. legend was that this man was rejected entry at a posh hotel during colonel times. and so he build the posh-est hotel ever in india (which is this taj mahal hotel), and then put up a sign outside that says "dogs and white men not allowed in this hotel".

the dean getting harrassed by a ballon seller.

the beautiful port and a lovely sunset, by the gateway of india.

the dean and i and an unidentified indian man, by the gateway of india.

happy birthday, val!

2007-02-14T05:34:00.000-08:00

okay

its happy birthday to valarie, my best pal of 8 years, not happy birthday to valerie, my sister of 14 years. hehe. i always thought she had an awesome birthday date, on valentine's day! but that means she'll get only one gift instead of 2. i just gave her a call after work, and the call was really freaking expensive. i spent a 100 rupees for all of 15 minutes on the phone with her and lydia, and that 15 minutes barely fit in all the latest gossip, even if lydia was talking at machine gun speed. haha! you know what the wierd part is? i was really happy talking to these 2 girls, i mean, i haven't seen them in the longest time, and getting in touch with someone from singapore is such a rare and precious experience, considering i don't readily get internet access here. yet just 2 minutes after i hung up on this super-charged and happy telephone call (actually, the phone operator cut the line because there wasn't enough money to continue the call, those mercenary bitches), i felt like the most destitute, most lonely, and most homesick thing in the world. now what the hell is wrong with me?

in any case, i am now at another internet cafe, and i think the time has come for me to post more photos. so! do stay tuned and check out my trigger happy moments. its valentine's day today, and i can see all those indian boys lining up to take me out already. there are still more getting ready behind those coconut trees. and then we are going to sing and dance and do sexy limbo rocks around the coconut tree, haha!

love
van.

suburban blues

2007-01-27T04:02:00.000-08:00

My guess is that you probably will not be able to see me on MSN anytime soon. The worst has just happened: my laptop seems to have given up on me, and my biggest worry is that I will be able to recover the information inside. i have been in Mumbai since Wednesday, having moved from Pune. If anything, i like Mumbai better because everything moves faster, its a super cosmopolitan place unlike sleepy Pune, but the weather is terrible. It is hot and humid, just like in Singapore, but the pollution here is infinitely worse.

Now I have started work at the Tatas, which is this big-ass organization in India dealing in everything from trucks to hotels to tea. I have been posted to their IT firm, and I will be in charge of maintaining the content in their web portal. The organizational culture is great, it seems like an efficient and dynamic place to be in, and everyone was pretty excited to see a fresh new face working with them. So they're all pretty nice to me.

On the downside, my accomodation is some damn ulu-mama place in the suburbans of Mumbai. Which means I have to travel like, 2.5 hours to get to my office. Outside my apartment are mostly slums, and its pretty far from the train stations, and since I'm a foreigner (or expat, in this case, haha), they like to cheat me of my money. the auto-rickshaw guy likes driving me in circles before i arrive at my destination. but i'm not familiar with the place, damn it, so there is just about nothing i can do right now.

i have to tell you about the trains. its crazy. i would like to swear, but my parents are probably reading this right now as well, so i shall refrain. ****. but the train is crazy. its so crowded, i think about half of india's 1 billion population is crammed into that rickety train. and then i have no bloody clue how and when to get off. being lost here is no joke. i was going to buy my train tickets, but there was this long queue, right? actually there were a couple of long queues, so i joined one of them to wait for my turn to purchase the tickets. then suddenly, without any indication, the ticket counter guy decides to take a break, leaving everyone in my queue stranded. see, india is like that, full of surprises. and see, when people queue for such a long time and then find out that they are not going to get their tickets, they get bloody pissed. so there i was, trying to buy my tickets, with a lot of very angry indians around me. so people started pushing and shoving around to try to get to the next available counter, so it was total chaos. chaos. chaos. chaos. somehow i managed to wrestle my way among all these angry people to get my tickets.

if you're wondering how i managed to post this entry with my dead laptop, i'm now at a super-rundown internet cafe in the suburbans. i'm not even complaining about win98, man, this is screwed up. the keyboard is DUSTY. my fingers are turning sooty black as we speak. and i'm surfing on 10mpbs. i'm so exasperated, i'm finding this funny. i think i shall take a picture of the internet cafe and post it when i am able to.

love
van.

sunset on sunset point

2007-01-21T04:52:00.000-08:00

we watched the sunset from a place called sunset point, and the sight was magnificient. i felt like i had the world on my fingertips. *ahem*

we took turns to hold the sun. haha! this is my bus driver, he is the most reckless driver i have ever seen. he overtakes on downslopes and honks at every car in the way. he makes the rickety bus feel like a lamborghini (did i spell it right?)

and our pe-on (another word for slave, but the indians are too civilised and modern to have slaves) anyway we all had fun with the sun. ooooh that rhymes.

a very pretty sunset

so we decided to try out some bollywood dance moves.

2007-01-19T07:09:00.000-08:00

saw a really interesting number plate. haha but i doubt james bond drives tata indigo cars.

my fellow travelers: terry, musa, gabriel, and vance.

gabriel attempts a cirque de soliel along a scary looking cliff.

breath taking scene, from one of mahabeleshwar's many magnificient heights and drops.

even the monkey was enchanted by its beauty.

this monkey attacks humans. i risked my life while taking this shot.

we came to a field where there were sheperds and lots of sheep.

sheperd and sheep.

more on mahabeleshwar

2007-01-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

these strawberries look extremely suggestive.

the camel says hi, how are you doing today?

we went boating.

this smiley old woman came up to talk to me.

mahabeleshwar

2007-01-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

yummylicious strawberries!

now you see them.

now you don't.

we passed by a sunflower field and there were happy sunflowers smiling happily at us.

my sister.

sadhana village

2007-01-15T08:16:00.000-08:00

i think he looks like mahatma gandhiji.

went to a home for the mentally challenged, called sadhana village. it is situated in a rural village, about 40km off pune (pronounced poo-na). she is one of the "special friends" who reside in the home.

these are the kids from a day care centre in the rural village, they were really amazed to see foreigner with big camera, haha. classic expressions.

this is my favourite kid, she is shy and timid.

the kids have fun with my sunglasses.

5 birds please.

2007-01-15T07:37:00.000-08:00

now, i’m most probably the last person you could think of who would actually bother about keeping a blog, when for the life of me i can’t seem to keep my room tidy. and then i got sick of sending the same picture to about 10 different people for about 20 times (because MSN is screwed up), and i finally snapped when i had to relate my horrifying experience in india for the 30th time to the 40th person. that simply doesn’t work when internet time here is so precious and hard to come by. i have to pay 10 rupees for every half hour i use the lousy older-than-ancient computers in the mosquito-infested internet café, which by the way, runs on win98. windows 98! that system was used about a gabazillion years ago, no? my first reaction, when i encountered the appalling state of the internet café, was to laugh my huge ass off. really. i thought it was pretty funny that the computers were running on operating systems dating a decade back. then realization dawned on the fact that i actually have to live here for the next 6 months.

*screams*

anyways. if you have been messaging me on MSN and i don’t seem to be replying, please don’t give up on messaging me yet. the problem here is that this lousy internet café closes at 10pm, classes here end really late, and in between i actually have to make it through gym, dinner, and really cold showers (because they freaking don’t have freaking hot water here, ****, its 20 freaking degrees outside). and then there’s the mountain of assignments here to do, and for the 60th time I’m bitching about this, internet isn’t freely available. so really, if you’re at home right now lounging around on the couch on wireless internet connection, you really should kiss your damn lucky stars.

now, for all that i am bitching about India, it really isn’t half as bad. for a start, nothing works around here in India, and if you want it too, you’re probably going to have to bribe your way through. haha otherwise known as the “10 rupee syndrome”. but Indian culture is so very fascinating, so very different from ours and so rich in their heritage. oh and the saree is a really sexy lah. (and i bought 2 of them, ahem.) well i must say that i never actually immersed myself in a developing country yet, i mean actually living and working in one, and this experience in itself has been enlightening. i don’t mean that i’m having the time of my life here now, but hey, having had the most enriching experience doesn’t mean it’s the best time of your life, me thinks.

in any case, the main purpose for the setup of this blog is to post my photos, so at least it’ll be a window for you to explore my Indian world here. i have to say that i’m not exactly the best photographer, but i do hope these will do. and if you think there’s anyway to better improve my pictures, do tell. pictures are currently the best mode of telling my experience here in India, but of course, you’re not getting the complete picture because the sounds and the smells that you get traveling along the spit-and rubbish-infested roads of India really completes the experience. i'm going to have to touch on that really interesting topic sometime.

meanwhile, here are my pictures. my very first pictures are dedicated to my family. ron and val and venus and the little twit ivan, i miss you guys very much, surprisingly. to my mom, for attempting to call me often to ask me how i've been (as well as to give me the permission to buy hot water for showering, haha.) and especially to my dad, for getting me my very first SLR.