Papa's retirement plans!

A couple of days ago I was having a heated discussion with my parents about retirement and coming back home to India. They are now eligible for senior citizen travel discounts back home and there is no reason why they should continue to work at Malaysia.

Today, I was looking through a family album and I found this -

This picture was taken on a lazy sunday morning at Chempadak beach close to our house. Thats when I realized, sitting at work and rushing through program milestones, that they are leading a retired life!

Giant Spiders and more!

I love going to Ma and Papa's new place. I miss them loads when I am here at Bangalore. That and their new house is on the mountains and a quick 10 minutes drive from the sea! Yeah! I am the ungrateful devil. Spiked tail n' all.

The lazy brat that I am, this time round Dad actually measured my day time on the garden hammock. It stood at a good 80% of my holiday duration. Not bad, huh? Well, you can't blame me. It puts the La-Z-Boy to shame. The dense evergreen forest infront of our garden beckons you. And if you get up a bit early you can play with the clouds floating by. Thats not all! While on this trip, I got lost trekking on a mountain and fought giant spiders; slept on street bench in Singapore for a good 2 hours in the night, but more on that later.

Malaysia is a haven for any nature lover. Tioman, Langkawi, Pekan, KL are all awesome places to flirt by. If you want to fall in love with the country you have to go to the local's favourites: Chempadak beach, where you can fly the most beautiful giant kites and get the cheapest and best foot massage, Panching waterfall, which forms a natural water pool you could swim in all day, and Taman Negara, their 130 million year old tropical forest which takes 10 days to trek across when the weather is clear.

A couple of places in this world have enchanted me yet - State Street at Madison, Chempadak beach at Kuantan and Clark Quay at Singapore. This place is alive. Even at 4 o'clock in the night! You can stroll down the river front, take a boat ride (they even do dinner for 2) and sit on the bridge lining the dusky sky and drink beer with friends. The restaurants that line up the river deck would take a month to sample! If you more of a party person then they even have a Ministry of Sound, which has not 1 but 5 whole discs.

Do visit if you are in Singapore sometime!

My beach vacation!

Hey, this is my first post from our new home in Malaysia. I don't have enough words at my disposal to describe this place. This beautiful city is blessed with mountains and the sea! I get to blog lying on a hammock with starry skies above me and cool waters below (okay, the 'cool waters' comprise of our pond and two goldfishes), laze on the chempadak beach in the evenings, free foot scrubs from the ocean sand and a golf resort I can see from my bedroom window. And incidently, where they won't allow me anymore coz I have richoted more balls off lakes, mountains and bushes than get them anywhere close to the holes. Its so funny!! They just keep sending caddies later waddling down the lake to retieve them!

Our neighbours are chinese. Its wonderful to notice their customs. They have their kitchen out in the back verandah and also their dining table. So they have all their meals out in the open. What an awesome way to spend time with your family. Said hello to them over our walls of trees. Their children play peak-a-boo with us through gaps in the banana and wild, sweet smelling flower beds. They don't speak english much and we are so just starting to learn Malayan, Chinese, Japansese and a dozen other languages. On this island it looks like every other person speaks a different language. Unnaturally they all do manage to communicate with each other quite fluidly with smiles and hand shakes!!! So coming back to the point, in my 15 mins conversation with our neighbours the only work we mutually understood was momos. And yes, well enough we had two steaming boxes of momos, complete with spicy red sauce at our dining table. The momos were over in 10 mins, the finger licking continued for a good 1/2 an hour. The reciepe will take much longer to understand! Mum decided to return the favour with her best gajar ka halwa. The kids loved it. We now have 4 more people to vie with for her delicious sweets. Join the bandwagon please.

Now let me see, the only other chinese words I understand are chicken hakka noodles, chicken satay, talumein soup, cocktail prawns.... umm, or are they?? What the heck... lets give it a try ;)

You always have trepiditions while moving to a new country for a long duration. We naturally had our qualms too. Some of them got washed away last evening. We were driving down a new road, searching for a grocery store. And as it happens in a new city we invariably took a turn on a one way. We stopped in the middle of the road, bound to be on the receiving end of much honking, blasts and angry glares. But nothing happened. The guy infront of us backed off his car, also made sure that others did the same One lone guy awaiting customers infront of his restaurant, walked down the road, stopped the traffic coming in the opposite direction and made sure we were safely on our way back. Is there any surprise then that almost every person on this island speaks a different dialect and yet manages to communicate.

Guitar Classes

Yay! Am so excited..... I finally started with my Guitar classes. Am still struggling to identify where do I catch the F note on the Top String from.... but thats okay, we will get there slowly.Thank you shourya. He is my teacher. You have to struggle to find his compilations, but I suggest you badger him for it because they are worth it. And my Dad is about as excited about guitar classes as I am. He is, as I speak, rounding off his colleagues to hear me play the guitar. I bet they all have been promised free drives in his spanking new car for that. Daddy - not a good idea. The best I can do till now is a distorted version of Smoke on the Water and Deep Purple would go scrambling down to their graves if they heard me play that!

Apart from that, am looking forward to my long deserved family vacation. We have not taken one for 4 whole years!! To make up for it we plan to vacation along the coast lines of Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore this year round.

The eastern Malayan coast is littered with tiny islands - big enough for maybe one mountain, a dozen fresh water streams which wind their way through the dense forests, a handfull of people and vast expanses of clear blue water. Tioman island perfects this to the very detail. Its an hour's scoot across the ocean from Dad's place. You could be daring and get a speed boat for yourself, but small adventures drill some sense inside you. Yeah, we gonna stick to the local ferry this time. But everything else still remains on the list - snorkelling, deep sea dives, swimming with giant sea turtles at their marine park, forest treks along cool mountain streams, walking across the perimeter of the island in a single day and frog legs (have been promised they taste as delicious as yuck! as they sound). In other words do stuff that God really, really send you to earth for!! He never wanted us to work on some brain crunching milestones.. did he?? I keep telling you, we just complicate things for ourselves!!

Friday, please come sooner!