Luxembourg at a glance

I finally succeeded in combining my Luxembourg pictures into a panoramic photo, check it out :

Luxembourg old city (3 photos in 1). Click to enlarge

I don't remember the name of this building but it functions like an opera house
(2 Photos in 1) . Click to enlarge

The Babi Panggang story

Last week a friend of Liu Shu came to spend some time here after his traineeship ended in Belgium. He asked me, do i know what is Babi Panggang. I asked "why?". Well according to him Babi Panggang is a famous Chinese food in Belgium. Apparently some smarty pants Malaysia/Indonesian had came to Belgium and introduced Babi Panggang to the Belgian market under the category of Chinese food. Very entrepreneurial of him/her don't you think? But why use Bahasa Malaysia? Anyways, everybody in his LC was asking him about babi panggang and how to cook it and stuff since he was from China. But he hasn't got the slightest idea as to what Babi Panggang was. He added that the LC members told him that most of the Chinese restaurants were selling them and its very famous. Some Belgian people had even searched for the delicacy in restaurants in China, going form shop to shop but to no avail.

It was quite funny since the word "Babi Panggang" itself is not a Chinese word let alone a Chinese delicacy. Babi Panggang is Malay for barbecued pork , but since Malays don't eat pork its impossible that its a Malay cuisine. The only explanation i can give him is it is most probobly a straits Chinese cuisine. They are famous to giving Malay names to their cooking even though it involves pork. Well as they don't know who strait Chinese, i told the whole story of Zheng He and the time he brought Hang Li Po to the sultan and brought along the Chinese who then stayed in Melaka and married the local people and so the straits Chinese were born. Well, actually not quite sure of the facts thats why i told him it was a theory how the straits Chinese came to be. But its better than no explanation....hehe

So, do u think Babi Panggang is a Nyonya cuisine? How did the Straits Chinese come to be anyway?

Objectives achieved

It's been quite a while since I wrote something decent here. Well lately I have been a bit lazy to write for no apparent reason. Well, I'm writing now, so thats what matters.

I have always had things that i wanted to do in life but had not many chances. However in the past weeks i have managed to do a few things that I wanted to do for a long time and in this post i will simplify the 3 things i did in the past few weeks.

Weinstrasse

I had always wanted to do long distance cycling but haven't had a chance because the lack of participants and if there was a cycling "expedition" the timing was not align with my timetable. However , a couple weeks ago,I had the chance to do some cycling along the beautiful Weinstrasse (Wine Route) with a few of my friends. It was a special weekend where the whole 80km of the Weinstrasse was close to cars and other motorized vehicles, which was heaven for bikers. I totaly said yes right away when my friend told me about it. Here is how it went down :

Click on the map to enlarge

As an overview of our trip, here is a map of the Weinstrasse. From Mannheim we took a train to Neustadt (translated to Malay its Kota Bahru and im not kidding). The route going south is about 30-35km and the route north is about 45 km or so. Our trip was divided into 2 parts, 15-20km cycle south to Albersweiler after that, a short trip back to Neustadt for the 2nd part of the trip up north until Bad Durkheim which is about 30km away. Im not sure if u can see the map above, but its all i got.

So after traveling in a bicycle packed train, we finally arrived at Neustadt at around 10am

Alex, Darko and Evgeny were quite exited about the trip as illustrated by the video above. Alex is a member of AIESEC Mannheim and the only one among us to use inline skates instead of a bike. Drako is a trainee in Bonn which was the same place Bonnie Arthur De Souza did his traineeship. Im sure if you ask Bonnie about Drako, he will know him. By the way he is from Bulgaria. Evegeny, of course, is my fellow trainee in TIM consult and he is from Russia.

So after the international team was set, we started our journey down south....

Our journey starts

The sunny weather couldn't be any better!! It was excellent!!!!

Cyclist turned out in their thousands on the Weinstrasse where the whole family could get together for a cycling adventure and an enjoyable weekend. It was awesome.

Well, its hard to put the experience in words, so ill just let the pictures do the talking...

Grape fields like this was the scene throughout the whole trip along the Weinstrasse

and this...

and from time to time u will pas through wine producing towns like this and u can choose to stop to have a sip of their famous wine (of course I didn't drink)

I would love to show you more pictures but if i did, there will be more pictures than words.

But as a conclusion, i can say the no 1 way to experience Germany is not by their beer or castles or parks....its cycling along the Weinstrasse!! it was surely a great experience!!

Go-Carting

The next thing i did was Go Carting! This was another thing i wanted to do for a long time. It was another dream come true. This time i went with my colleagues in TIM Consult. Altogether we had about 16 people and were divided into 8 teams each team with 2 drivers.

So, each driver will go through a test run, time trial and the race itself. The test run is done for 10 minutes to get the driver used to the track and the go cart. Talking about the go cart, its fast! With a top speed of 60km/h it doesn't seem fast, but with a track 3m wide and 360 degree turns plus sitting only a few cm from the ground, u will soon come to appreciate the speed. As I started the test run i was a bit shy on the gas pedal but before long i was doing drifts around the corners (however it doesn't make going around corners any faster). In the time trail i could just manage to do a best lap of 36 seconds, which put me on the last place of the starting grid (8th). It was quite ironic though, While we guys were struggling to even do a 33 second lap, there was this girl seamlessly doing 32 second laps which was untouchable territory for our guys.... But it turned out that she was a pro driver competing in races. She was just filling in the empty spaces of the girls that pulled out of the race. By the way, the picture on the left is me wearing the safety mask. it is worn before the helmet as safety, but i think its just to avoid our sweat from sticking to the inner sides of the helmet.
As for the race, it was in the format similar to Le Mans 24 hour race where in the middle there are 2 drivers for each car. The race is 1 hour long and the drivers can change how many times they like but as i found out, changing more than once is not a good strategy. Although i started at 8th, i managed to come up to 5th by the time i changed with my colleague. and my colleague managed to get 2nd place till the next change. But that change cost us 3 places and we were back in 5th and i didnt have enough time to chase the other drivers. Oh well, it was my first time racing anyways.
All in all it was really a great experience, racing with Michael Schumachers people. The go cart was also really awesome. I can understand why it is the first step to formula 1. I experienced all the experience that a F1 driver would feel but in a smaller and safer scale. it was awesome!

Trip to Luxembourg

For this trip i cant say much. all i can say is :
-we went there by car (Audi A4),
-did 180KM/h on the autobahn,
-got lost in Luxumbourg city centre due to bad signboards that happened to be in rojak language French+Deutsch
-Found out that Asian people speaking French sound rather cute
- the ending of the trip was tragic

Anyways, ill let the pictures speak for themselves:

There are reasons why i don't want to talk about Luxembourg and lets just leave it that way... till next time....ciao!