Monday, January 31, 2005
Monday, January 31, 2005
false alarm relatively unbusy day at work today.
back to bk:
don't want to go into a lousy itenary account of our trip. i'll hurdle past all our arguments and fallouts and expected outbursts/suppressed spurts of irritation and just pull out those worthy memories, like packing 200 over kilos of girls into a minuscule tuktuk and crazy insane tuk tuk drivers laughing sardonically with evil amusement at the squeals from the poor harried girls in the cramped backseat hanging on for dear life as the tuktuk reached 80km/h, rounded sharp bends without slowing down and the alarming feeling of being on a capsizing tuktuk. if i'm reading this years later and would be visting thailand again in the near future heed this advice:
take a taxi now that i think about it, i can't imagine what possessed us to throw our lives away like that, travelling by tuktuk and the worst: climbing from one tuktuk to another along a busy busy main road.
in thailand, roads are for cars buses taxis lorries all conventional modes of transport and all kinds of unconventional modes of transport like pedestrians tuktuks and bicylces. in thailand, the arrows on the lanes don't mean what they should mean. it is typical to be travelling on a lane whose arrow points in the opposite direction. guess i should be thankful we didnt lose our lives on those tuktuk rides. imagine being on a tuktuk, tuktuking at 80km/h,
in the opposite lane, and meet headlong with a lorry transporting poultry. oooh. uglyugly sight that would have been.
but boy:) the tuktuk rides are something i'd never forget.
curiously, the best time of my trip was visiting that morning market and that fruitful albeit brief shopping stint that followed, on the morning of our last day in bangkok. the morning market was a window into bangkok life, a somehow powerful, yet gentle statement that in all its development, bangkok is one city where old and new are laid side by side. where hopelessly old dilapidated crumbling ruins wilt like dirty brown dead grass accompanying tall green new grass, impressive skyscraping modern architecture.
walking through the morning market, the quaintness ofit all was almost like a choreographed documentary, only that i was really there and that i knew beyond a doubt all that i saw could not be prearranged. there were modern 24 hour convenience stores alongside the roadside old stalls, and everywhere i looked it was a headon clash of old and new, konica camera films against fresh honey combs(i mean REAL honey combs with the bees still buzzing around) and a hawker selling shiny metal knives on a tarpsheet placed on the ground alongside a fishmonger displaying his catch in a most primitive manner, piled haphazardly, looking, for all the world, like a scene out of the early 1930s. that morning market and its strategic location epitomised that vision of bangkok i had in my mind, more than any floating market or ayutha temple could.
it is no wonder sarah and i went trigger happy, taking pictures of eels and fish and food and bemused hawkers smiling apprehensively, yet endearingly into our camera lens, laughing goodnaturedly when we squealed at pink eggs and gushed about the single ray of light falling into a side street where the both sides of the sky was framed with skyscrapers while the street seemed to be left behind in the 1930s.
more on that morning market later zipping back to work for a while
lately i have been disorganised. i find myself lapsing into my slacker mode, contented with feeling contented and satisfied with feeling satisfied. so much has happened since my last angsty hateful entry in which i think i dispelled all good notions anyone might have had of me hurhur.
bangkok trip:
it was a wonderful three nights two days in disguise of the original four days three nights tour we booked.
anyway a brief (not) acount of what happened, so i'd never forget:)
our trip was fraught with mini disasters, tsunamis and tornadoes and hurricanes.
met with our first one when zhi was late at the airport and ta's name was printed wrongly on her air ticket. it was just a minor discrepancy but the stupid idiot retard who was the immigration officer just had to make things difficult and not let her board our plane.
it wasn't over in a blink of an eye but yet it all seemed to fly by in a blur. perhaps we should have extended our stay, as long as our baht supply lasted:)anyway i don't know about the rest, but for me, the shopping and bargaining and shopping and food and bargaining and sightseeing lifestyle definitely definitely fits me like a skin tight body suit, made to measure in every way:)
if there were any loose seams in my body suit, it would have to be the day at Chatuchat(however one spells it)where ta lost her phone and we lost yingzhi.
i would say i walked through the fires of purgatory worrying about yingzhi and her whereabouts during that four long hours, it was
that agonising. so you could imagine the how two worried stiff girls sat in the backseat of a crv jerking violently like puppets whose strings were drawn at the welcoming ring of sarah's handphone. a frantic struggle for the phone and a hopeful, breathless 'hello' later, we ascertained that zhi was safe and sound back at the hotel, not in the hands of kidnappers or some evil thai tuktuk driver ready to drive her off into some wilderness and sell her in an underground slave black market.
right bk trip account to be continued
sudden influx of cases i gotta zip back to work
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Thursday, January 20, 2005
it has been a long time ever since i ranted
it's time for one of those humongous outpouring of anger frustration and all the bad feelings i keep in a GIGANOMOUS file labelled
F*** in my mind, in my heart.
can be bothered to explain. even if i wanted there wouldn't be enough space in the entire world wide web to hold my grievances.
you know what? i have to get this off my chest and to hell with my 'blog eloquently' rule, so FUCK.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Thursday, January 13, 2005
i have my own desk own pc and i have drafted some legal documents today. if i had to describe work/attachment
i would do so in two words, aches and addiction
i could be cruel and not explain those two descriptions, but since work ends at six and i am done with work for today iwould enlighten blogreaders, and myself, when i come back to read this months later, on my working experience, as of the past two days
aches: i type alot and refer to documents as i type, and in spite of what others might think or disagree or refute, it is
hard work, therefore i ache.
addiction: i am doing something i am interested in and though i might not get paid, being the pessimistic soul i am cause it is only the second day into my attachment, i am still happy and very much content to continue working:) on the other hand, i would like to correct my pessimistic self because i know i
wouldget paid.
the kind soul who decided to 'attach' me is not one who exploits.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
all that unrelenting emailing and calling might have paid off yesterdayand though i'm keeping in mind the saying :
don't count your chickens before they hatch
i can't help feeling a little....alright...a huge wave of euphoria.
i start today and i am so nervous happy excited everything rolled into one.
got to rush now. i don't know what to say
i just hope this stroke of good luck would not use up all my good luck:
i need it for the A's.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Monday, January 03, 2005
this is going to be a typical day i forsee
i have this constant feeling of trying to rein back time wishing i could stop time such that i never have to face any major life changing moments, like the release of my A level results and the realisation that i might have ruined my own life. ominous predilections aside, i suppose this is just the childish sentiments in me. sometimes i feel that i am a constant battlefield where good sense evades reality, where the battle of whether i should hope or just face the the world as it is, the battle of the advice of my better self against the childish wilfulness of my lesser self, rage incessantly, every waking moment of my life.
i suppose in a way i am growing up. whoever remarked ' the pains of growing up' has hit the nail right on . growing up
is painful. am i the only one who experiences all these conflicting internal forces?i guess not, but somehow i feel, being the indecisive soul that i am, makes growing up all the more painful for me than for the rest.
i am trying to make sense out of this, why i only started really growing up at eighteen when the rest of the population around me started around sixteen. what i ahve gathered sofar is that i was, in fact, more grown up at 16 than i am now and that confuses me: whoever heard of
growning down? anyway i have arrived at a hypothesis, that perhaps growing up is a neverending process,and the answers to my questions suddenly so clear like lamps illuminating a path, lighting up one by one to show me the way...
we can never be entirely grown up, nor can we ever stop maturing,
for growing up and maturing is intrinsically the acquisition of wisdom.
i only have to look at my parents to see, how "grown-up"s can still have so much room to grow up:)
