Where East meets West

Little Girl at Eminonu, Istanbul, with the Galata Tower in the background


Blue Mosque (or Sultanahmet Mosque), Istanbul, Turkey – Don’t ask me why it’s called the Blue Mosque. Coz the only blue thing I could find, was the sky


The Bosporus, with bridges connecting Europe and Asia

Taking a break from Singapore and my current boredom to post something from a trip made exactly 3 years back, in May 2010, when Justin was just a wee 5.5 months old.

Welcome to the city of Istanbul, largest city of Turkey and ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. But the best thing about Istanbul is its location. Half in Europe and another half in Asia, straddling the Bosporus, that tiny strip of sea that separates the two continents.

Wonder when we’ll be able to make another trip like this again, now that Justin is not as ‘easy-going’ as before.


Mosques of this type of architecture are common in Turkey. The one at the back is the Suleymaniye Mosque (I think), and the one in front, the New Mosque. Seen from on board the Bosporus cruise


Hagia Sophia, church turned mosque turned museum. Was once the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church and a rival of Rome


Inside Hagia Sophia (or Ayasofya in Turkish), Istanbul


Father and son in a dungeon-like stairway inside Hagia Sophia


Anu, at the Topkapi Palace, Istanbul


Gardens, Topkapi Palace


How can we not include a picture of a Kebab Shop in a post on Istanbul? Street cafes and restaurants are common in the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul, where we stayed


An Ice Cream man of Istanbul. They put on quite a show of tossing their ice cream around, if you show just a little bit of interest in them. Nope, finally did not try any, what a waste…


A Turkish Sweet Shop, Sultanahmet, Istanbul


Family picture at Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey


A picture of the neighbourhood mutt


Papa and little Duntin boarding a bus at Istanbul, bound for Cappadocia, central Turkey. Fathers should give this a try, 12 hours overnight journey on a bus. Try sleeping with the little one in your arms, …good for building endurance, and your arm and back muscles

In Lazy Mode

Justin and his ‘Siencik’ slouch it out at Jason’s home

Here, I’ve extracted the latest photos of us in Jason’s house with Stacey baby! Unfortunately, the photos aren’t that clear. Forgot to turn on Kid’s mode on the camera! Must be the age…

These few months must be one of the laziest times in my life since I started working. Spent about 10 days in Singapore, doing next to nothing. Visited the MacRitchie Reservoir, Sands and Gardens by the Bay. DID NOT visit the casino at Sands (thanks to yours truly, I forgot to friggin bring our passports!)

The lazy spell is continuing in Silchar. Activity of the day is feeding the little monster and getting him to sleep. That’ll take more than half of the friggin day. Getting sick of the boredom, I would’ve felt that I’ve achieved something if I did something fruitful, like watch a movie that I actually wanted to watch, or go somewhere I’ve never been before, or read a good book, or completed something important, etc. Instead, I have to contend myself with watching reruns of Megamind, the first half (in Butterworth) and Wall-E (in Singapore). Here (Silchar) I’m watching Doraemon, in Hindi, most of the time, thanks to the little fella. Who said bringing up a kid is easy??


Justin and his cousin, 7-month old Stacey


Little Stacey at her cot, right before she ripped out the grass and the monkey’s leg from the wall behind her


An afternoon out at MacRitchie Reservoir


The Shoppes at Sands Marina Bay, Singapore


Sands Marina Bay, and the Singapore Flyer from the walkway to the Gardens by the Bay


Family outing, Gardens by the Bay


Some scene from Avatar, …kidding, Gardens by the Bay, nice way of disguising the mushroom shaped water tank towers (which was what I thought they were earlier!)


A night out at Clark Quay, with Raymond Ho our ex-colleague from Dubai


Clark Quay, Singapore ...didn’t change much from 2006 – check out the post from June 2006

The New Singapore

New version of the symbol of Singapore, the tacky new Merlion complete with laser beam eyes and fluffed up mane, on Sentosa (the old one’s being renovated at the time of our visit). Honestly speaking, I prefer the original.

Here’s a little on Singapore. This post has been sitting as a draft since Chinese New Year. Was supposed to follow the Genting post before we wound up going on the wild goose chase for Anu’s passport. Now that I’m back in Silchar after 2 months, 3 countries (including Singapore) and multiple cities, here’s the post.

Singapore has come a long way (in terms of fun) since my first post on the city state (see post titled ‘Things to do in Singapore’ posted 2006 June). Guess Singapore finally realized that a little fun, nonsense and vice ain’t that bad, ...but might actually be good for business.

These pictures are from 2011. Will do a post of our recent trip soon (the pics are still in the camera, hopefully they’re good…). Can’t wait to have a picture of our cute little niece, Stacey, in the blog.


Marina Sands casino-hotel-mall, Singapore (the table with 3 legs). (Nope, I dunno what that half broken eggshell on the left is)




Scenes from a spruced up Orchard Road, the traditional shopping destination of Singapore


Cable car across to Sentosa Island, Singapore


Mount Faber, Singapore, the start of the cable car ride (…or the end depending on which side you board it from)


Lake of Dreams, near Sentosa’s casino


Universal Studios, Sentosa Island, Singapore (there’s a ton of pictures of the theme park, will probably sort ‘em out and put it in another post, …when I have time hehe)

The Eastern End of India

Sadarghat Bridge, Silchar, the only bridge across the Barak River at Silchar. This is a 'double decker' bridge i.e. a bridge built on top of another bride. I presume there must be some problems at the middle of the bridge, so the trusty engineers just built a bridge on top of the existing bridge to tie over the gap! Can't think of a better answer, lemme know if you know the actual reason. This type of construction seems typical around here. There's another across the Barak near Badarpur on the way to Guwahati which is a 'triple decker'!!!

Here’re some photos of the place we spent a lot of time in recently, our adopted home in India, Silchar.

This was where we sat huddled in front of a computer, any computer with an internet connection, every day at 3pm for our daily ritual of trying to obtain an online appointment at Guwahati’s passport office. (Read the previous entry and you’ll know that we failed miserably and ended up driving all the way to Guwahati for nothing.) This is where we’re at now, waiting for the police to verify that Anu is an actual person and not a figment of our imagination, so that her passport can be reissued. How a figment of the imagination can hold an existing passport containing so many visas and stamps that the passport is almost full, somehow doesn’t strike the passport officers’ minds as odd??

While Silchar is not exactly the eastern most point of India, it is the eastern end of India’s National Highway East-West Corridor Project (which traverses the entire width of India). It is the main city on the Barak Valley and the gateway to the states of Mizoram, Tripura and Manipur. It is also a melting pot of the diverse people and religions of the region, so much so that although it is located in Assam, the official language and lingua franca of the region is Bengali, of the Sylheti dialect (and not Assamese). This is where you can easily find broccoli, pucuk pakis and petai in the roadside markets. (Try asking for that outside North East India, and you’ll almost definitely draw a blank). While the rest of India sits around and rant about the lack of rain, it’s been raining dogs and cats here for the past 2 weeks. Assam by the way, has always had no problems with water shortage. This place is so conducive for habitation that it forms a favourite breeding ground for our blood sucking friends, the mosquitoes. They love this place so much that they have a singing contest everyday (…local joke going around). I don’t find it very amusing, especially when every inch of my exposed (and part of my unexposed) skin is covered with mosquito stings.


Silchar City, Cachar, Assam


Justin with his buggy at the alley in front of our house, Silchar


Karishma, Anu and Justin at our front yard


Anu's sister Rekha (right), a cousin sister from the father's side and her daughter, Nandini at our living room


A pond near our house. Ponds are typical of Bengali areas (due to their affinity for fish, maybe?) Nice to look at, but a very likely source of all those little blood sucking critters!


Justin at the Nepali temple in Silchar

A Mighty Exciting Time

2013 has been quite exciting so far. I have been jobless for the last um… 3 months or so. Gave up the job at the end of January, and have yet to start my next job, now scheduled for mid-May, …maybe. Meanwhile, we have been going around, trying to do some (or all) of our long outstanding errands (if I can remember), and putting in a few (ok, more than a few) holiday trips along the way.

This holiday and joblessness period has been an eye-opener. After 6 years of marriage, Anu’s starting to get irritated with my lazy ways while I am at home. On the other hand, my libido has definitely picked up since I dumped the job, so it sort of balances out the irritation hehe. My imagination, vocabulary and writing style are slowly (but surely) going down the drain, thanks to the contractual documents and letters that I have to read and write every day. Guess I have enough reasons now to restart reading novels and nonsense again, hooah!

My joints are starting to creak and ache (even without working very hard, that must explain the laziness huh?). I am becoming more forgetful by the day. Otherwise, I feel super. No receding hairline, my waist is still at 32 inch, and I have fixed my one broken tooth.

Anu’s fine (except for the occasional irritation with yours truly). She is still staunchly against having another kid, thanks mainly to my less than satisfactory after birth service when Justin was born. But I did buy her a nice zaatar croissant (from the hospital canteen) when I visited her the next day! (her first food after 36 hours with more than 24 hours of that, in labour)

Justin’s growing up just fine, but getting a little tanned due to activities completely of his parents’ making (like sitting under the burning sun for hours on the beach, and going on a spree of outdoor excursions at mid-day, after all this is a holiday, and we gotta see them all, right?)

Our adventures of these 4 months, has taken us to 5 countries, 8 states in India, and 8 of the 11 states in Peninsular Malaysia. We’ve flown 14 times, stayed in err… 22 different hotels, and travelled thousands of kilometres by road.

And I have India, and China to thank for, for all this fun.

India (or more precisely the Passport Office of the Government of India), because if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have driven 18 hours from Silchar to Guwahati (which is incidentally only 335 km) through a road so bad, they should’ve featured it on National Geographic or something, in our brand new little yellow Tata Nano car, and the same distance back for nothing (because we didn’t manage to get an appointment at the passport office online!).

We wouldn’t have gotten our brand new car damaged by the insane Gypsy taxi driver from hell at Khliehriat. (Gypsy is a type of jeep, and Khliehriat is a town roughly halfway between Silchar and Guwahati, characterized by bad roads and even worse traffic caused by coal laden trucks.) We wouldn’t have spent 2 nights at Shillong and a night at Guwahati for nothing. And most important of all, we wouldn’t have flown all the way back to Guwahati again, (this time from Singapore! via Kuala Lumpur and Kolkata) to finish the unfinished business, causing me to lose the chance that I’ve been waiting for, for so long, to vote in the upcoming Malaysian General Elections! And all this because India, being a high tech country that is known for its IT industry, has to have its passport appointment system online. Never mind that there’s only 1 friggin office in the whole North East India (i.e. 7 friggin states, in an area the entire size of Peninsular Malaysia TIMES 2!), with a population of 38 million. Never mind that there’re only 40 measly slots available in a single day (for express passports) and the slots are typically filled to the brim in approximately 1 minute and 10 seconds (yeah, it really feels that way, because if your friggin line is slow, by the time it finishes loading, all the slots would have been filled – so sorry, please try again at 3pm tomorrow). The result is we tried for 10 friggin days at Silchar, and failed to get any appointment. We finally got our appointment in Singapore!

And China (or the State Construction & Engineering Company of China, my soon-to-be employer) for being absolutely vague about when they want me to join, and when my visa will be done, and therefore gave me lots of excuses to embark on our crazy adventures and passport making journeys. (By the way, I just checked the mail and saw my visa in the mailbox!!)

There, I think I’ve written a little more than enough to cover for the 2 month absence in blogging. I’m leaving a photo of our passport journey thru hell, one of the very few that we took on the way.


Church at Khliehriat, Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya