Thoughts on a trip to San Diego

San Diego this time of year is typically colder, the driver says. The driver drives a van that bears me toward the airport, where I’ll take a flight to Los Angeles, then Tokyo, then home. A few turns into what he promises would be a short drive, he notices someone on the pavement – a flustered woman lugging along a check-in bag and a carry-on – and exchanges some short quick gestures with her. Having determined something from this wordless back and forth, he stops the van – he knows her, he says by way of explanation – and leaves his seat to help her with her bags. I do my bit, sliding open the door. She gets on and settles beside me, grateful to the driver, but not overly so – his does not seem to have been a totally unexpected act of kindness. I learn that she had headed out to the airport via public transport, but her train had been delayed, and she had missed a bus, and was looking for a cab when we pulled up.

A couple of hours later, in LA, I have some time to daydream, and I come to wonder if a driver with the same job in Singapore – sending a hotel guest to the airport – would stop to pick up someone like this, as a kindness. My instinct tells me no, because the traffic in Singapore is too dense and hectic, and everyone wishes to get to some place quick, and there isn’t the space for you to safely stop and not obstruct the traffic behind you. Or at least that is what you would tell yourself, in Singapore, I think.

And I come to think, as I have thought a few times on and off since I’ve had the opportunity to travel to other cities around the world over the last couple of years, that space is an essential part of what makes a city liveable.

The tremendously agreeable weather – a blue sky; smears of cloud like white from a minimalist painter’s palette; a crisp coolness that makes sunshine a tangible, almost benedictory thing – that San Diego has had for the past week would help too.

***

A couple of days before my trip to the San Diego airport, I am in Phoenix visiting a friend. We get along well, but are not close, so the visit is slightly awkward the way something not altogether laid down in the bounds of social norms can sometimes be for me. I bring gifts for her, one from a mutual friend, so that lubricates things. She is touched by the mutual friend’s gift: a piece of wood which is shaped not unlike a snow-globe with an elongated base and which opens up to reveal carvings of the buddha.

We talk a lot. She talks about her research into spirituality and materialism and how the two intertwine. She is doing her PhD. For a while, I had thought about academia as a career too, and now I feel a pang of jealousy, but it is distant, buried deep under current comforts and indolence and inertia; I know too much now about my disinclination to withstand discomfort and homesickness to be genuinely envious. I think.

She warns me about the leeching dryness of the desert, tells me that drinking water is important, and that if I have a headache, it is probably caused by dehydration. An image of my brain squelching to a stop from lack of water makes me laugh.

We talk about companionship for the long term. She had recently parted ways with a long-time boyfriend. I mention how I am lazy to do things that I like when I am on vacation because there is no one to share the joy with – as my tongue rolled to form the words, I am a bit surprised; I had not known I thought this – and she says she understands.

***

She says that this process towards a doctorate, including the research into the intertwining of spiritualism and materialism, is part of her self actualisation.

My self actualisation mainly takes the form of satisfying my appetites for food and goods, I say as a glib half-joke, then as a realisation. Compared to my haphazard and aimless daily meanderings, her introspective and purposeful search for who she is, in itself a process of self definition, is a worthy pursuit.

What is self actualisation to you, she asks.

I think about it. How do I actualise me, maximise me, bring out the potential in me, express the desires in me to be… a me I am happy with.

Hm…

***

She brings me around to places she frequents, to supermarkets and food places, to where she works. I meet her advisor, the professor for whom she decided to come to Arizona and who now supervises her work towards a doctorate. I shake the professor’s hand; she holds a chihuahua in her other hand, maternally cradling the dog to her chest with her arm.

***

Days before I go to Phoenix, I am at work meetings and staying in a La Jolla resort alongside a beautiful bay scooped into the side of California, with the calm Pacific waters lapping and mildly frothing at its edge.

The road leading to the resort is lined with palm trees, ridiculously tall and straight, and understandably so, given the abundance of sunshine. Ducks and geese roam the resort, and one of the sights of the trip was a small flock of ducks silently and suddenly bursting into the air, then turning left, becoming a different entity as the rays of light catch their feathers in a different slant, heading off to another part of the resort to enjoy the afternoon.

On the last day of the meetings, I am told that “La Jolla” means “the jewel”. Quite right.

Later in the trip, the flight to Phoenix brings me out over the waters off La Jolla. At that height, the deep blue is stippled by waves and the glint of sunlight, and looks like a luxuriant swathe of leather.

Since Bali

So, I haven’t blogged since that last past about Bali.  That’s a gap of more than eight months.

I’ve wondered why.  Simple laziness is the tempting and probably substantially correct answer, but I feel there’s more.  Maybe part of that is busy-ness, though goodness knows I haven’t been too busy to eat a lot and sleep a lot and read a bit and cruise the Web in near-obsessive, increasingly desperate hunts for pointless utterly pointless sports news.  Maybe part of it is the sort of busy-ness that squeezes mental stamina out of you, the sort of mental stamina that then has to be replenished by idly allowing your face to be tanned by the light from your desktop LCD screen over the weekend.  Maybe part of it is just lack of inspiration, or the self-perceived version of same (but when is something not self-perceived anyway?).  And maybe part of it was the (self-perceived) meaningless-ness of whatever I would have written.  Or maybe, the question is the wrong one: I wondered why I haven’t blogged; maybe it’s more apt to ask why I should have.

Hmm.  Well.  I should have, because I thought I liked to blog.  I think I like to blog.  It’s troubling that there was that long period of time during which I apparently did not want to blog.  *thinking thinking thinking* Blogging is writing, yes?  So, maybe I wasn’t writing well at work.  Or was writing too much.

(Heh, funny how I came to “work” as a reason for not blogging.  But maybe it’s not so funny – “funny” as in “strange” – maybe it’s not so funny, since we work for so much of our lives.  If there is a reason I haven’t blogged, it’s probably linked to my work, just based on the universe of reasons in my life it can possibly be linked to.)*

###

Anyway, while I have not been blogging, I’ve collected some thoughts to blog about.  A lot of these surfaced during my various work trips.  I was in Brussels earlier this year, and when I came back home and cleared out my suitcase, I found a red-tipped matchstick, nestled amongst my clothes.  I don’t smoke, the hotel room I was in was a non-smoking one, there was no sign that anyone had tampered with my suitcase, so it was a complete mystery how a red-tipped matchstick ended up in my suitcase.  But maybe what happened was, the lady who cleaned out my room smoked and carried around loose matchsticks and inadvertently dropped one in my open suitcase.  Something innocuous and non-esoteric like that.  Maybe.

###

I think it was during the second-leg flight to Santiago.  I ran through the in-flight entertainment system’s various contents, and there were two Jason Mraz albums, a studio album and a one with songs he performed “live”.  Both had the song “I’m Yours”.  I’d of course heard the song several times over the radio by this time, but listening to the “live” version in a artificially closed personal space – with the crowd going wild after the first two notes of guitar twang and Jason Mraz’s free-wheeling slightly raw style – was a more moving, more buoying experience, and something I credit for keeping me sane during that flight.  (I then listened to it on repeat nearly the entire way back to Singapore.)

I saw a few sides of Chile.  Santiago looked a little unmaintained, but walk-able and open, with wide wide streets.  Wine tasting at the Concha y Toro vineyard was an… experience, with the sommelier brandishing his classic sommelier’s nose and the likeably pretentious sommelier’s jargon, and truly in my view enriching our enjoyment of the bottles of red and white on show.  Valparaiso looked in many ways like a modern European seaside town, with posh developments all around.  We had lunch at a restaurant along the Valparaiso coast, and the appetiser of lightly blanched white fish, clams, crab meat, prawns and squid, fresh from the sea and drizzled with lemon juice, hit the spot!

###

Long-haul flights offer one time alone, to be introspective.  I think that’s the only enjoyable bit about them.**

###

I spent many hours with my bosses during these work trips.  One of them, retiring soon, is a generous, opinionated man who’s been doing his job for longer than I’ve known about Transformers.  Recently, back in Singapore, he was in a meeting, at which several briefings had been scheduled for very important and busy people who’d just joined the ministry.  The briefings were overrunning, as they do, and near the end of the day, even though it wasn’t his turn, my boss gave his briefing.  What he did not know was, there were some colleagues from another department outside the meeting room, who had been waiting and waiting for their turn to brief, and that in fact they had been scheduled ahead of my boss.  When it turned out that my boss’s briefing would be the last one these very important and busy personages would be around for that day, the colleagues from this other department were understandably quite upset.

This department is located on the same floor as ours, and, once he’d settled some matters in his office, my boss walked over to this other department to apologise to each and every colleague who had waited for their turn which never came partly because my boss took up some time to do his own briefing.  His was the good-natured sort of apology, “sorry about it”, with a smile, unreserved, un-phony.

I gave my boss a hard time about skipping the other department’s turn (well, as hard a time as I could – I know my station in life) – how could you!, I said to him.  When I heard about his apology afterwards, I really had to shake my head, in admiration.  Will miss him.

###

The influence I wield over the lives of colleagues that I supervise/manage/lead is unexpectedly heavy.  This struck home when a conscientious new (well, sort of new) colleague called me on the phone to tell me, in between choking sobs, that her dad had been diagnosed with cancer and the doctor had given him only six months to live.  As I held the phone to my ear and listened to her crying, I could only cast about for something to say, something comforting and decent and supportive and helpful and which did not betray the fact that one of my first thoughts in the mess of things, as I remember it, right alongside “what must she be feeling now?”, was “how about her work?”.

###

A couple of things I have enjoyed these months, that I’d like to share:

1. Theme song from “Cheers” – Over the years, I think I’ve enjoyed other sitcoms more.  But not other theme songs.  Poignant and meaningful and true.

2. 戒不了 – I enjoy this Malaysian writer’s little pieces of whimsy and philosophy.  (They are in Chinese, which in my opinion can carry boundless nuance in a small space in a way that makes one marvel at the human capacity for creating meaning.)  Try these two: http://kitcheah.blogspot.com/2011/09/blog-post.html (title loosely translated as “Only for a little heartbeat”, about why one writes) and http://kitcheah.blogspot.com/2008/05/blog-post.html (“Reason for being happy”, about how one is no longer another’s reason for being happy)

*There have been some changes at work – five new colleagues since March.  And more changes to come.  Big, scary monster-type ones.

**On one of these flights, I saw a flight attendant who behaved in the same way I’m sure a colleague would have if this colleague had been one.  (It’s times like this when I think there may well just be a finite number of types of people in the world.)

Letter to next occupant of Villa No. 10, Villa Bali Asri

Hi there.

You probably don’t know me, and that’s okay. I just want to tell you a little bit about the time I spent at this villa – I’ve just come back to Singapore after a week-long stay here with my family.

Things to know:

1. The villa’s amenities include wireless broadband. The password can be found in the brown information binder you’ll probably find on the dining table or coffee table at the sofa.

2. Prepare for surprise visits by critters. We saw leeches – my brother pried a fat one off his foot, and there were a couple of rather more slender ones looping around – as well as a titanic gecko that, amazingly, moved along the walls as agilely as its smaller brethren. It looked as if it should plod rather than skitter. There were crabs scuttling all over the place – some like to play dead, and then once you seem to have lost interest they would skedaddle away – and many frogs and toads “serenaded” us every night.

3. Prepare for mosquitoes. I don’t quite know how – I just treated mosquito bites and itches as a matter of course – but maybe a malaria jab may be useful?

4. The locals were friendly and helpful. I never once felt in danger from them as I walked along the streets and paths at night. If anything, the condition of the streets and paths and the fact they were typically poorly lit were more dangerous – so bring a torch.

Things to try:

1. The villa’s very own barbecue dinner is worth it at around 60 USD for our family of five. Try the seafood one (there’s also a just-palatable beef option which my non-seafood-eating sis had) which for us came with king prawns, red snapper and squid (oh the squid!! *drool*), as well as steamed rice, stir-fried veggies and sauteed potatoes. Worth trying just for the squid, which was grilled to mouthwatering just-rightness :)

2. There is an Italian restaurant called Ultimo’s that opens at 5pm. It’s about a 30-minute slow walk from the villa, along Laksmana. Try it. The spaghetti vongolle (with other seafood – when I was there, it turned out they didn’t have vongolle and substituted with squid *grin*) came in a generous portion with many whole (small, but whole ;p) scallops and freshwater shrimp and diced capsicum, and was very yummy. The almond parfait was perfect the first time we were there, but was a bit soft when we next went, likely because it was a busy night and the fridge the parfait was kept in was opened too frequently :p

3. Tanah Lot is worth visiting. Great views. Pity about the tourists and their littering.

4. And one thing to not try. The babi guling (roast pig) at Ubud is overrated, and not worth the aggravation of queuing for and the poor service, in my humble opinion :)

That’s about it I guess. All the best for your stay :)

P/S. I would likely not have written this if my sister had not written an actual letter to the next occupant of the villa and left it in the bedside drawer of her room.

 

Happiness and other musings

I was quite early at a colleague’s wedding last month, and picked a good spot, directly looking at the live band.  And so I got to see the live band play, and it was a good band, versatile, could sing in a few languages (appropriate since my Malay colleague was marrying a Chinese), enjoyable to watch. 

About two thirds into the night, the band began to ask for guests to join them on stage to sing.  One guest did, performed ok for an amateur; and then another went on stage, and really just stole the show.  It was clear that this middle-aged chap was used to performing with a band, and this band all strangers were just another group to jive and make music with.  And so he did, improvising a jazzy up-tempo version of some song I’ll remember later, and he did it so joyously, he was so into it, that the band, bland and professional earlier in the night, began to flex and stretch themselves too, and put their energy into it, so that, when the second and last song ended with a flourish and the chap departed the stage to rapturous applause from the band and an audience roused from its postprandial doze, I couldn’t help but think that, if the bride and groom find the sort of happiness this mat rocker did making music with his newfound friends, they would be together for a long time indeed.

*****

I was in Solo, Indonesia last November for work.  And was disproportionately joyous when I saw bolsters on my hotel bed.

*****

My pal got me a CD of instrumental renditions of some of 梁文福’s most memorable songs and I love it to bits.  My pal got the same CD from her pal, and found that she didn’t like it much.  Darned.

excerpts

One of the reasons I set up this blog was to help me learn – learn to write better and learn through processing experiences.  And so I’ve been thinking about setting up a new blog focusing on lessons and happenings at work.

But till I do, I’ll be blogging about stuff at work here.

***

I’ve been blogging irregularly and infrequently.  I’m not certain about the reason; it’s probably related to how busy I am at work.  Or maybe it’s the one-dimensionality of what I can blog about, since most of what I experience and think about is work-related.  (And I don’t want to seem one-dimensional?)  Or maybe it’s the lack of time I’ve have to think about things.  (Or to think about them deeply enough to come up with things worth writing about.)  It’s a curious thing: what motivates my blogging?

I note down things I want to blog about on my E71, and then transfer them to a virtual Post-It note on my desktop (via this application called Stickies).  And since I haven’t blogged for a while, I have some stuff that’s been on that Post-It note for a while.  Time for some culling.

***

A while back, I shifted seats from one directly perpendicular to the corridor facing the rooms of some senior colleagues, to one further back, separated from the corridor by one or two work-stations.  I miss the proximity to the corridor traffic, the saying “hi” to more people.

***

My work trip to Hanoi in November last year was an eye-opener.  While the views from my hotel – the InterContinental Hanoi Westlake, a beautiful hotel/resort overlooking Hanoi’s largest lake – at sunrise and sunset were quite sublime, the most memorable moments came during the trishaw rides we took amid Hanoi’s rush hour.

I can no longer remember the trishaw rides I must have taken in Singapore.  In any case, I’m not sure they would be a comparable experience.  Not when the trishaw-man was manoeuvring haphazardly through steady streams of cars, motorcycles and other trishaws, all the while keeping up a conversation with any fellow trishaw-man within hearing distance; not when part of the route was a roundabout where the traffic lights were observed only through blithe nonchalance and where the streams of cars, motorcycles and trishaws mingled and miraculously sorted themselves out without significant incident; not when, to turn right, an impatient car-driver would go round the trishaw’s left and cut in front of it, all the while without any sort of visual signal whatsoever, leaving the chap manning my trishaw to mutter darkly under his laboured breath; not when the pollutants in the air left tangible evidence in one’s respiratory system; not when the air itself reverberated with the rhythmic pulsing of car horns – yes, instead of bland blasts, car horns here pulsed almost musically, perhaps because instead of acting as alarms (“watch out!”), they served more as a constant reminder of where a vehicle is (“I’’m here, I’m here, I’m here”) – which would make them an innovative adaptation to a situation where near-accident proximity to other vehicles is a given.

***

On 7 December 2009, I travelled to work on the MRT, and someone smelled strongly of lemongrass.

***

Some time in January this year, I was in a meeting at which we were trying to describe to some overseas guests how tripartism (dialogue, consultations and collaborations among a country’s social partners i.e. employers, unions/workers and the government) works in Singapore.  I explained that it was a framework that Singapore’s social partners worked in.  Another colleague said that tripartism was Singapore’s modus operandi.  And in between us this other colleague said that it was in Singapore’s DNA.  And as I sat there listening to the discussion, it struck me that either “modus operandi” or “DNA” – more the latter – was a better, more easily identified with illustration of the way tripartism works in Singapore than “framework”.

***

Recently, I dreamt I was in a nail spa.  Disclaimer: Having never been to a nail spa, I can only guess where I dreamt I was at, but it looked like what I expected a nail spa to look like.  Why I was in a nail spa in my dream, I have no idea.  I do recall that a couple of days before the dream, I had seen a lady with an elaborately manicured set of nails on the MRT.  Maybe I just needed to cut my nails (which were long-ish when I had the dream).  For the record, I didn’t get a manicure in the dream… probably because I didn’t have the imagination to dream it.

***

Just last week, or maybe the week before, on the way to work, I saw a lady wearing really beautiful shoes – classic oriental design, like something you’d see on a cheongsam – but with bloody scrapes above her heels.  The shoes were the unforgivingly hard sort, and that might have been her first time wearing them.  I could so empathise with that, and with the realisation that she was stuck with those painful, heel-raking shoes for the rest of the day.

***

And just last Wednesday, I ate at Breakthru’ Cafe with my mum and my dad.  I really enjoyed that  :)  And we enjoyed the chilli (with spicy dried shrimp) that came with the glutinous rice.

***

Recently I have been thinking about my influence on people I manage.  Someone thanked me for being a “nice and appreciative” boss.  And my instinctual reaction to that, was that I don’t want to be known as nice and appreciative – I’d rather be associated with competence, with intelligence, with industry… and then I thought, would I really, as a boss?

Geneva (again) – a stuffed weekend and unhappy Heathrow

I was just in Geneva again – got back the two Fridays ago – and, apart from some stressful work involving the chaperoning of a couple of important personages, it was a rather fun trip.  (Although, thinking back, I still wish I felt less stressed and more prepared.)

The only free weekend we had, we rented a car and drove all the way to Tasch, from which we took a train to Zermatt, from which we took another train to snow-capped Gornergrat.  The thing I remember about Gornergrat, along with the snow and some unexplained swathes of bluish-green water that looked vaguely reminiscent of sulphur pools I saw in New Zealand, was an absolutely giant Saint Bernard – it was sitting there, tongue lolling, with another less impressive specimen, and would have made for a scary sight, except that like all Saint Bernards it looked utterly benign (if more or less ignorant of your presence) and bereft of ill will.  I think if I got lost in the Swiss Alps and one of these trudged up to me with whiskey in the keg attached to its collar, I would be quite assured :)  On the way back from Tasch, we had dinner at a great Italian restaurant at Montreux.  (I’ll try to find out and post its name.)  Now, I’m not a salad fan but the seafood salad – with an appetising vinaigrette and generous portions of grilled littleneck clams, octopus and squid – was absolutely delicious.

Speaking of Italian food, if you are ever in the old town part of Geneva – that’s across the bridge from Gare Cornavin – you may wish to try the seafood (fruits de mer) spaghetti at the Spaghetti Factory.  It’s good too :)

And so after about 10 days, the work was over, and a colleague and I made our way back home via Heathrow.  Okay.  (I’m taking deep breaths now as I gather myself to talk about this objectively.)  I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re flying SQ and you fly back to Singapore via Heathrow, you have to claim your baggage and then check it back in.  In other words, you have to go through immigration so that you are in the London side of the airport for a good half hour to an hour and then check yourself and your luggage back in.  And go through snaking queues leading up to metal detector gantries and the most un-chipper security personnel I’ve ever seen.  Not a happy experience.  The 13-hour plane ride back was comfortable – I was lucky enough to be on a flight that was about 75% full, and I was the only passenger on my set of three sets next to the window; I think that says something about the economy, no? – but I really wouldn’t want to fly through Heathrow again, ever.

P/S.  Oh don’t think I did not take photographs – I did, but I stupidly updated the software in my phone without making back-ups.  Sigh.

Anzac-bound Part Two

More about my New Zealand trip.

31 Aug, Fri

After the work part of my trip, my brother joined me in Wellington. I had been looking forward to this part of the trip for a long time.

While waiting for my brother at the one arrival gate, I saw an airport officer speaking with an old Chinese couple. It was clear from the way he was speaking (slowly, and with an emphasis on each word, in English) and the expressions on the Chinese couple’s faces (dogged bewilderment) that they didn’t quite understand each other. So, after a rather lengthy bit of apathy, I walked up to the little group to offer to translate. It took me a while to get up to speed. Essentially, the airport officer was trying to tell the Chinese couple, who were from Melbourne, that they had not paid the international departure charge of 25 NZD each. The Chinese couple, who had been reassured by their travel agent back in Melbourne that all fees related to the tickets had been paid for, were understandably unsure about this. Eventually, between us the airport officer and I managed to convince the Chinese couple that they could take the issue of the departure charge up with their travel agent back in Melbourne, but that they had to pay the charge before they could fly back home. And so they did.

I have to admit, being able to help these folks out, and actually doing it, made me feel really good!

Feeling flush with goodwill, I went back to standing against a pillar, to wait for my brother to walk out of the departure gate. His plane had already landed, so the wait would be a fairly short one.

The lady beside me was waiting too. She was from a local university, she said, and a batch of foreign students was arriving today for an immersion programme, which would see them learning English and then working in New Zealand for a few years. She said they had had folks from Germany, other parts of Europe, South America, even once a Japanese chap who was over 60 years old. I thought this was interesting, the way New Zealand assimilated its foreign workers (even in these admittedly small numbers).

So, when my brother came, I had two more stories to tell him :)

And after we got my brother settled in at the downtown hotel we’d picked for its location and relative economy, we went for a bit of a walk. The temperate weather was made for walking; if Singapore was like this – temperature in the teens, sunny, not overly dry – I’d walk a few kilometres every single day. (It was windy though – Wellington at this time of year, winter just giving way to spring, is characterised by bracing wind – and when the wind blew into this harbour city this far south of the equator, it got bone-chilly very quickly.) We walked around Lambton Quay, Wellington’s retail belt. We got tired, and had a small lunch at Wishbone. Then we went for another walk near the harbour area, and came across a book fair. We went in for a look, just curious, but came away, after browsing the stacks and stacks of second-hand books for more than two hours, with an eclectic bounty of 11 books, most of them for 2 NZD each: fiction by P D James, Lawrence Block, John D MacDonald and John Grisham, and Jan Carlzon’s detailed and engaging account of how he turned Scandinavian Airlines System around.

(We didn’t know it then, but being the fairly sedentary folks that we are, there wasn’t a lot to do after dinner in New Zealand, and we would have plenty of time to enjoy the books.)

Anzac-bound

Went to New Zealand recently for work, and decided to go on a vacation after that. Drafted blog entries there, but did not have a chance to post them, so will be posting them over the next few days.

26 Aug, Sun, 2203 hours

The powers that be who decide these things would know, but why Singapore Airlines would fly directly to Christchurch and Auckland (granted, two of New Zealand’s largest cities), and not Wellington (New Zealand’s capital) is beyond me. This particular SQ flight is winging me to Christchurch, where those of us going to Wellington will board something propeller-driven en route there. I will be making a few presentations at a small conference (okay, tiny conference) in Wellington, and I was a little worried about it before the trip, but up in the clouds in a flying metal tube, I am somewhat less concerned.

Note to self: when you are worried about something you can’t really control and it dominates your thoughts, imagine you’re in a plane…

Small aside: I realise I think, write and talk about food a lot. Recently, I asked someone about food (either what she had had or was about to have), and this expression that combined distaste and impatience flashed across her face. That got me to thinking: I’m actually quite a boring person.

I don’t remember having been on a rockier plane ride, but then, I like my plane rides slightly turbulent, so it is enjoyable, if unexpected.

Busan, Korea

So it’s been… wow!… nearly a month ago now since I went to Busan, Korea for a working trip. I’m not one for photos, so there aren’t any pics of the great hotel rooms I stayed at or the wonderful views from these rooms or the absolutely mouth-watering presentation of Korean food – so, sorry for that: I know photos would help tell the story, but I just didn’t take any. (If it’s any consolation, to prevent this from happening again, I recently invested in a hand-phone with a fairly good camera; at least that’s what I told myself when I bought the hand-phone. Heh :p)

Okay, so, on to some thoughts and feelings about the trip:

• Little Angels – Was treated to a stunning, magnificent, bravura performance by the Little Angels, a children’s performing arts group. They danced, they fanned fans, they sang, they played drums, they yodelled – all in a coordinated pageantry of rouged faces, painted lips, megawatt smiles and smooth, practised movements. One of the songs they sang was 甜蜜蜜, and they sang it touchingly, and with warmth and an understated joy. I really enjoyed the performance. It’s a pity I can’t share a video clip or even a photo, but you can find out more about the Little Angels here.

• Galbi – My dinner that first night, and my introduction to how replete with side dishes the typical Korean meal is. Galbi is beef rib, but along with that there was kimchi, and a soup, and tofu with some roe on it, and rice, and more kimchi, and a round charcoal grill in the middle of the table, on top of which our server soon spread long thin slices of beef (cut close to the rib) and fresh chunks of garlic and mushrooms of assorted sizes. Apparently galbi is supposed to be marinated in fruit juices. Now I didn’t know that when I ate it, but the beef slices were moist and tender and flavourful – there just weren’t enough slices to satisfy the group of us, who would have I think gladly gone without the side dishes. The beef slices were supposed, our server kindly demonstrated, to be wrapped with the grilled garlic and mushrooms and fresh sweet onion rings in lettuce and mint, but believe you me: the galbi is good enough by itself. However, good as this was, it wasn’t my favourite meal in Busan.

• ??? – I don’t know what this dish I had is called; I just did a search on Korean food, and I suspect that it was a version of maeuntang. Anyway, this was my favourite meal in Busan, and I’ll let an excerpt from an email I sent to some colleagues describe it:

“Just back from a humongous seafood steamboat. Think about this: piled on top of a lot of bean sprouts and kangkong with a dollop of concentrated kimchi seasoning are big scallops, half a big flower crab, tiny shrimp, big prawns, tiny clams, a shellfish whose name translated from Chinese means “elephant’s tusk mussel”, big mussels, and lots of sotong, all sitting in broth. Now think about high heat bring applied to all these: the big prawns slowly turning red whiskers first, the broth slowly being supplemented by the juices from the seafood and then stirred up so that the kimchi seasoning turns the broth orange red.

We had this with plain rice, and it was very very good.”

• Book your seats early! – It pays to confirm your flight early, and to book your seats through the Internet or the phone. If you’re like me, you want to be able to control when you can go to the washroom, and getting an aisle seat instead of being assigned to a window seat can make a gigantic difference in terms of how much you enjoy your flight.

• By the sea – Busan is supposed to be a seaside resort, and the excellent seafood was a sign of that. (I had a fairly forgettable sashimi meal though – the raw fish slices themselves were rubbery and too fishy, and there was this dish presented in a delicate French way, and as far as the group of us could make out, the dish consisted of whelk slices, some gooey mass that was conceivably an aggregation of eyes, and two other small piles of unidentifiable stuff, all bracketed by two halfs of a black sea urchin-like thing.) And I also had a hotel room facing the sea, and near enough to the sea so that if i jumped hard enough, I just might make it into the shallow part at high tide. Imagine this: Your eyes are closed, and you are becoming aware of the last tendrils of your dream even as you start to stir awake. You hug your pillow a bit tighter as your senses reopen, and you feel the creases in your bedsheets and the arrangement of your limbs on the bed. In the background there is a relaxed rhythm, a back and forth sashaying sound, a lapping and frothing, oddly familiar. And you remember you heard it the night before, lulling your closed eyes to sleep. And you wake up almost completely, to the sound of the rush and hush of the waves.

There is just something about going to sleep and waking up to the sound of waves that touches one’s core I tell you. Go try it if you haven’t :)