Violin Class

I have always wanted to play the violin ever since i was acquainted with Vanessa Mae's' music back when i was in high school. But since i hate music when i was in primary school and basically had zero knowledge of music whatsoever, i didn't think seriously about learning music again. But a few years back i have been seriously thinking of learning the violin. Sounds crazy but i have owned a violin for almost 1 1/2 year now.
Yet, Only now I'm taking my interest seriously. I have been learning violin for the past month now. Even so, i still haven't learnt how to play a single note. Im still getting myself familiar with how to hold the bow, how to move the bow on the strings and stuff...but not the notes, well at least not yet. Well, i have learnt the violin quiet fast i must say, considerd how much i practice a week (only 2 hours per week max, which is like "not even showing any interest" kindda attitude..haha). But im now stuck at the part where i have to play 2 strings, one after another, but the strings are far apart...for example, the g-string, andthen the E-string...pretty tough and i still haven't got it....

but that's the least of my worries. Remember when we were small.....what was the number one reason why we, as children, hated music.....Most of us might answer..because the teacher was very "garang".....I mean how many of us got whacked by the music teacher when we were small
just for playing the wrong note? But what could i do. I hated music back then. But strangely, however hard i tried (or rather, didn't try), i didn't fail the exams even once...I guess the whacking did shove some musical notes into my head.

Unfortunately, my current violin teacher is showing symptoms of the primary school music teacher reincarnation :P Although i haven't been badly scolded yet, but i've seen her "potential" with other students, one of them is also an adult learner like me. So now i feel under pressure to get it right on the spot and deny her any room to explode..haha... a little comment here and there i can live with..but i don't want to be scold like a 7 year old kid. I hereby take up the challenge.... I guess she has been teaching too many children.....

Lets hope i don't break before i reach the other side..

Ciao!

google Maps

In my previous entry, i mentioned that in google maps, there is no map info of Malaysia. Well i checked yesterday and i discovered that they have launched the google map for Malaysia. Obviously someone in google had read my previous blog and came up with the map :P hahaha.

Anyway, just wanted to let you guys know, if u want to know lah...

Tchuss

THe Great Adventure back home : Episode 2 : Getting out of the Airport

I arrived at Heathrow airport at around 1030pm...with empty hands. What i mean by empty hands is without anything that can facilitate me to find a place to stay such as a map or guide. I basicaly had to find the infomation i want right there and then at Heathrow airport. (this is where the interesting part starts).

So there i was on unfamiliar territory, Heathrow airport, unsure where to go from there. But luckly i did my homework (i just didnt print it out). From the research i did beforehand i knew that i could get to central london via the Heathrow Connect train. I knew that The Malaysian Hall is located near one of the train stops, and also the cheap hostel i searched for in the internet, but the major problem was i didnt know exactly how to get there without a map. There were some maps at the airport but they were just tourist maps (which were useful throughout my travel in London) and didnt show the exact roads and trains or bus stations. The information counter was closed since it was way past office hours. Besides, i think my flight was the last flight into Heathrow. What was opened was only the cafe. "How do i go from here?" i asked myself.

(this part of the story is the most memorable part of the trip. Looking back, i cant stop smiling just thinking of it)

Well the major problem now was how to get information that can help me find the way to the Malaysian Hall. Thats the main objective for now. The internet was the answer. Walking towards the cafe, i came across a breakthrough. There were these coin operated internet kiosks in the airport waiting hall. These beautiful pieces of technology were my final hope for survival. But as they were operated by coin, and i didnt have any, i couldn't access them. I had to change my notes into coins. By the way, the internet costs 1 freaking pound for 10 minutes... 10 MINUTES!!! oh well, on the positive side, if u were given more time you will appreciate it less. Anyway, I went to the cafe to change my notes for some coins. I surely couldn't just change the note to coins, i had to buy something. thats when i realized the price for a bottle of 500ml coke was 1.50 pounds!! I mean, even in Germany its (just) 1.30-1.50euros (1 pound is 1.5 euros), so that was a really "(not)value for money", but since i really needed the coins i didn't complain.

So, with internet access, the first thing i did was to check my email an write down my friends address and phone number, which i also forgot to write down. As for finding the way to The Malaysian Hall.........maybe you guys can guess it...GOOGLE MAPS!!! I tell you google maps are a gift to the traveling world. Im not surprised if you can even find Osama Bin Laden with Google Maps. You can find your way anywhere as long as you are not traveling in Malaysia or any other unpopular third world country. I mean check it out for yourself, google maps does not have maps for Malaysia. Even Indonesia has its major highway mapped in Google Maps, but not Malaysia.

So i searched for The Malaysian Hall and took out a piece of paper and literally drew the map with a pen! It was a simple one and i took notice of all the landmarks and roads leading to it. Besides that i tried to get every possible information i can about traveling during that 10minutes of internet access and i was really proud to have utilized the 10 minutes to the max.

It was about 11pm when i finally got the information i wanted. By this time a curfew in The Malaysian Hall was in affect, so if i got there i couldn't get in anyway and i didnt want to be wondering alone in the middle of the night like a homeless guy. Knowing that, I decided to stay overnight at the airport.

Heathrow is a small airport as compared to KLIA. At night it is as quiet as a library, just the occasional chatter at the cafe counter. Although its quiet, it never cease to have "happenings". Im an observant person by nature. I like to sit quietly sit and watch my surroundings and watch peoples everyday activities (this part of my blog illustrates that). I was not alone at the waiting hall though. There were many travelers like me staying overnight at the airport. many trying to get sleep ahead of their journey the next day. Some would try to get some sleep on the uncomfortable seats at the waiting hall (which are made solely for sitting, not lying down) while others said "what the heck" and took out their sleeping bags and slept there as if it was a camping site. Soon the whole hall was full of people just sleeping there on the floor and now it started to look like a refugee camp. As for me, since im too shy to just sleep on the floor like everyone else and sleeping on the seats were like sleeping on a rocky mountian , i decided just to kill time by reading my book. This book was given to me by my trainee trainee from Netherlands back in Malaysia 2 years ago, but i only finished reading it at the airport that night. Finally!!!

Since i would be there at the airport for about 5-6 more hours, might as well take my sahur.... no time for luxuries so i just had an egg sandwich since that was the only thing im confident enough to eat. Two police officers complete with body walkie talkies, handguns and body armor stole my attention for a while, obviously they were looking for a suspicious character roaming around the airport. It seemed like the bloke they were looking for was in the crowd in the waiting hall. so they had a long chat with the guy before a struggle broke out and the police had to forcefully detain him. If u ask me it was unnecessary force since the guy wasn't that aggressive. The police had even dragged him on the floor before handcuffing him. Talk about police brutality. It cause quite a commotion but everybody was too sleepy to care.

I tried to get some sleep but only got a few minuts of it. Hours passed and now the airport was reopened. it was about 5.00am or so and people were seen coming in to check in their baggage and stuff. The airport was alive!! But that means i also have to make my way to the Train station to get myself to London. It was about a KM away but maybe due to my lack of sleep, tiredness and not to mention heavy bags, it seemed like 10km. As i arrived at the station i bought myself a ticket and waited for the train.

Many things went through my mind while waiting for the train, will i be able to find The Malaysian Hall armed with a hand drawn map with can only pass as child's work? If i do find Malaysian Hall, with there be any vacant rooms? Well i cant afford to think negatively at this time can I? I must believe in my map and also hope for the best that there are available rooms in the Malaysian Hall......

To be continued.............

The Babi Panggang theory

Previously I posted a post regarding babi panggang and how it was popular in Belgium....well i made a mistake....it was not Belgium, it was The Netherlands...sorry for the misunderstandings.

I told this story to my brother and dad and quite surprisingly they were able to come up with a theory on how it came to be...

enter : The Babi Panggang Theory.

My dad's theory was during the fight for Indonesian independence from the dutch, there were the Nationalists that were fighting for independents and there were also Indonesian people that favor dutch rule.

the story is, when the Nationalist finally got there independence, these dutch loyalist were in a tight situation. If they stay in Indonesia they will face the wrath of the nationalists for "betraying" the country. So the somehow persuaded the dutch to bring them back to Holland. And so they did...

So through the years, the Indonesians integrated with the locals and their culture and cuisine has became popular around western Europe and Scandinavia. I think the Indonesians who came to Holland were Indonesian Chinese, thats why their food was mistaken as Chinese food. This eventually caused the Dutch who went to China searching for Babi Pangang to be puzzled not to find it anywhere in China. Its not that there were none, but its not called Babi Panggang in China.

Cheers

The Great Adventure back home : Prologue & Episode 1

I know that i should have wrote this entry almost 2 months ago, but due to some issues regarding re-integration and stuff, i didnt. It has been resolved though, but lets just leave that story for another day.

I left you guys with my entry about my trip to Luxembourg. Actually all was not going according to plan but thats history and time to move on...

fast forward a few weeks......

I discussed with my manager to leave the company and end the traineeship a week earlier so that i can go traveling. I have already planned a trip to the UK and have bloody sacrificed a lot to get the ticket there. I had also planned my trip in advance so that my travel plans are in conjunction with the Frankfurt Auto Show , one of the worlds biggest auto show.

Before i go further, its probobly best to inform you that the trip to London was the most successful, exciting and adventurous trip i have done in my whole life where everything went wrong in the beginning but i managed to pull it off. In fact, it was the best thing i have been able to pull of so far. Here's the story.

Well, the plan was to go to the Frankfurt Auto Show on Saturday, 22nd of September and later on the night of the same day fly to London on my Lufthansa flight. My brother has a friend working in London who agreed to accommodate me during my stay in London, so it seemed like a perfect plan. Mind you, I had booked my flight a month in advance in the German spirit of "planning in advance" and changing the flight time or date is as bad as buying a new ticket, but, oh well, i have planed the trip in advance, what could possibly go wrong? Beeeep...I was sooooo wrong!!!!

I think the biggest flaw in my plan was i planned according to the best case scenario. I booked a night flight to London since i didnt want to waste my precious daytime on a plane instead of traveling around. I also expected my brothers friend to be guiding me through London Heathrow (if not picking me up himself), but i soon found out that my expectations had betrayed me big time! About one week before going, my brothers friend emailed me saying that he will not be in town on the weekend that i was supposed to be going to London on...including Monday of the following week. Danggggg! that was a big blow to the head. And London is also not a cheap place to stay at. This new development meant that i had to find a place to stay for saturday night, Sunday night and monday night before my brothers friend will be back in London . And mind you this was the Ramadhan month (i was fasting).

However, he did give me the suggestion of booking a place at the Malaysian Hall in London which i did via its website (on which later i found out that the booking sytem was not functional). The Malaysian Hall houses the Malaysian High Commission and the Malaysian Student Department. It has room in which MALAYSIANs can stay for a relatively super cheap rate, with Malaysian STUDENTs given the priority when it comes to room booking. But, I soon came across a scary announcement which read "Tempahan bilik bagi bulan September dibekukan untuk memberi ruang kepada kemasukan pelajar baru", which basically means, there will be new Malaysian students coming to start their studies and meanwhile they will be staying in the Malaysian Hall, so nobody else can book the rooms. Yet i booked it online anyway, who knows i will get lucky. But rationally it wont be safe just to depend on luck so i dedicated the last few days to find the cheapest hostel in London apart from making my travel plans in London.

Well, not everything went bad. Something rather unexpected happened. A good thing. On the final day of my traineeship, i was told that i am given a special bonus of 1000euros. Surely that was a pleasant surprise. so on top of my normal salary, i will be getting 1000euros extra (but one third of it will be lost due to taxes)..Yahooo! this means gifts for ppl back home, which i didnt planned for in the beginning. But i wouldn't be too excited coz i still have debt to pay when i get back to Malaysia, but that is also another story for another day.

So, very soon the day for me to depart came. I had great parties and outings leading to that final day, so i was pretty sad to leave all the place. Mannheim is a very cool town, not to small, not too big, just nice and i had made good friends with the people there, including the Malaysian students there. I felt reluctant to go but everything good comes to an end i guess.

The final day was spend with packing up and cleaning my room (which i fail miserably). I was supposed to clean it the night before but was too busy partying.. :-P But that was not the only thing i didnt do. In the midst of a busy day cleaning my room before returning the keys to the house master, I forgot to do 1 important thing : I didnt print out the plans i had done so carefully, in which i only remembered before boarding the train to Frankfurt. This also means traveling with the absence of London maps and also means not knowing how on earth i should get to the Malaysian Hall. So much for planning in advance.

Well i didnt want that to ruin my mood for the Frankfurt auto show, which i enjoyed a lot. The thing about exhibitions in Germany, be it car exhibitions or even fashion exhibitions, the quality and quantity of the exhibition is always worth the money you have payed...unlike some countries in the world which offer peanuts for the price of Ferraro Roche. Im sure you know some examples.

The exhibition centre was GIGANTIC! As a comparison, imagine KLIA was the venue , and all the hangars were the individual exhibition halls. It was that big....only maybe all the halls were closer together. The theme for the exhibition was an eco-friendly one, where most of the cars on display had listed their carbon emissions per KM. Yest when it comes to sports cars, this aspect was almost forgotten..hehe

The event was so big, that some transformers decided to join in

One of the technologically advanced concept cars

The new Subaru Imprezza WRX - one of the most awaited cars of the year.

A good thing about The Frankfurt Auto Show was the minimum number of female models, as compared to , say, the KL Motor Show where there were more attractive girls as compared to attractive cars, which I find ridiculous. True men will come to motor shows to see the cars not the girls.

This picture shows exactly how big the event is. Mind you this is only Mercedes presentation hall and its only showing half of the hall. And look at how many people there are! You can easily loose sight of your children here if your not careful.

In short, the event was well worth the 15euros spent to enter. Although completely warn out after the event, i was happy to have conquered the whole venue even during the fasting month. hehehe.

OK....moving on....

Since i have finish touring the event a bit early i spent some time around Frankfurt to see the city and to kill time, since my flight was at 9.30pm. Sadly my camera battery had betrayed me a few hours ago at the end of the Auto Show, so i could not take pictures of the place. But its OK since i think Frankfurt is too urban to be interesting. Frankfurt is the Financial capital of Germany, so all you can see is skyscrapers, banks and financial institutions. There are not many skyscrapers anyway. But there is something ....... "interesting" about Frankfurt. Before i went to Germany i had some good advice from my uncle who is a chief flight steward in MAS. He said if you go to Frankfurt you dont have to worry about food since there are many muslim restaurants in the area of the city. In fact there is a whole street full of Muslim traders. Turkish, Arabic, Iranian and Bangladeshis etc. But what the "interesting" part was the location of the street in Frankfurt.

If you have read my blog a few months earlier, you probobly noticed the post about the amount of Erotic shops in Mannheim city centre, right? Well, now its a little bit more "interesting" in Frankfurt. Directly across the main road in front of the Frankfurt Main Train Station, there is a street. in that street there are full of these erotic shops...it even had a erotic cinema! Its like shopping to Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman , only most of the shops are erotic ones, if not restaurants...talk about a centralized red light district with direct access to public transport :p

What do the muslim traders have to do with this little red light story? Well, I knew there were mosques in the area near the train station, but i didn't know there was also a red light district there, so i stumbled across the red light district while finding the mosque. The street where all the muslim traders was exactly to the red light street! So once one has finished doing ones hanky panky business, one could always have the choice to repent ones sins. After all the mosque is just on the next street.

Anyways, i finally did eventually find the mosque. Quite disappointingly though, the people there were not as friendly as i expected...but I have no right to judge people i dont know...well i just wanted to pray, tahts all, so i didn't really mind.

After that i took the train to the Airport and checked in my baggage. but still i had to wait for a couple of hours for my flight and i didn't have much to do there. It was really a long time to be waiting......i spent my time thinking of what will i do if I could not get a room in The Malaysian Hall because in a couple of hours I will be on the flight to uncertainty..................

To be continued....