Colors of India: On The Road

The boss was off for his very much anticipated Sandakphu-Phalut trekking in Darjeeling, India. All in all, the journey took more than 10 days including the overnight transit in KL, the stay in Kolkata city pre and post trekking in Darjeeling, India. The boss was scheduled to return to KL on the 10th Nov 2011, before catching a flight home to Sdk on the 12^th Nov 2011 evening. We managed to catch up with each other from time to time with the boss’ newly acquired India cell number. Thus, I was sort of roughly aware of his itinerary but there was one thing he deliberately kept away from me. Not until the Saturday night, when he was about to catch a flight from KL-Sdk. He dropped me a text that night from the airport asking if I have any tasks for Sunday School on the following day, or shall I have any errands to be carried out on that day to which my answer is no. That certainly arouses me to quickly reply and ask if he was scheduled to come over to KK that night :P. To my expectation, well, he said ‘Nope, I am returning to Sdk’. Not until few texts down our conversations, the boss replied ‘But pity someone who has to fly over to KK again tomorrow morning’. I definitely need not to elaborate how did I feel. LOL. By the way, that’s very very t-p(cal) of him! :P

So, fast forward to the boss’ November’s spot-check entry on the following day (131111). We did the normal stuff from eating, eating and more eating as well as some shopping apart from lazing while letting the boss to do all of the talking. I made him talk and talk about his trip and trekking journey along with the photos he took from his camera; which was indeed a rare sight to someone who let me to do most of the talking all the time :P So, here’s a snippet on some random photos on what can be found on the road in Kolkata, to which i find interesting. I’ll leave the honour to the boss to go round with his itinerary journal in his figurines and scale modeling oriented blog :)

Kolkata city is formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal.  The city is also aliases as ‘Cultural Capital of India’, ‘The city of Processions’, ‘City of Joy’ and so forth. Picture 1 from left to right:  If you were born in the 80s era, you would probably be very well versed with Dr. Bombay’s famous song ‘Calcutta Taxi’ which was a hit when I was in my early teenage. I remembered the whole class can hum away with ‘Calcutta, taxi taxi taxi in Calcutta’ almost whole day long. :) When I did my research a while ago, I have just discovered that the singer, Dr. Bombay was not an Indian in person. Jonny Jakobsen (famously known as Dr. Bombay) begun his career as a country artist, but was famous only after his metamorphosis into Dr. Bombay. So, this is the authentic Calcutta's taxi ;) Picture 2: Another type of taxi in the form of van apart from Kolkata’s trade-mark taxi. This is better known as mini bus in our country. 

Picture 3: I first came to know about what trams are only in uni during my Highway and Transport subject. In my definition, trams are literally train on asphalt road :P From some of the websites I visited, I learnt that this transport evolution debuted with horse-drawn trams as early as 1881 and subsequently evolved into steam tramway in 1882 and eventually into electric trams that India has to offer today. The Kolkata tram is the oldest operating electric tram in Asia, running since 1902. Tram lends Kolkata an old world charm and add to the romantic element of the city. This slow moving, electrical transport in narrow and crowded streets, completes the ultimate attraction of the city. Having glided down the rails as a historian witness, tram has itself been turned into an immemorial heritage, of which all Kolkatans are proud of (via).

Picture 4: A typical looking 4x4 jeep like what we have in Malaysia. But, what made my jaws dropped was the fact that this jeep can actually engorged up to 14 adults there!. This jeep ferried 10 trekkers in a group along with 4 porters tagging along for more than an hour  or so ride from Darjeeling to the site *roll eyes* :) Picture 5 & 6: An auto rickshaw (i.e tuk-tuk, baby taxi) and the conventional runner pulled one, respectively. It’s almost unbelievable to find such traditional lifestyle in the latter still exists amidst the modern transportation technology in the country. Talking about rich culture, valuable history, I think Kolkata had it all. From all the photos can be found in the boss’ memory card, I think I can also safely assume that the city is also animal-friendly :). Picture 7: A living stallion probably has lost his way standing in the middle of the road, somehow do look like a statue in a roundabout. If you squint hard enough, you'll see public buses in the background. Picture 8: The picture may not do its justice. There was a tribe of more than a hundred of goats by the roadside.

Enchanting Vienna

For the second time in 10 years (first was back in 2002), the world renowned Vienna Boys Choir was in Sabah, courtesy of Rotary Club Kota Kinabalu who spent literally two full years in order to make this rare event to happen. Besides bringing one of the world’s best to Sabah, one of the main objectives were to raise funds for the dialysis project that the Rotary Club is organizing, more particularly the International Polio Plus, avoidable blindness as well as the community gravity water project. (Excerpted from Daily Express, our local dailies). 

The Vienna Boys’ Choir, originated more than half a century ago, sang exclusively for the court, at mass, at private concerts and functions and on state occasions in Vienna until the 1920s. Due to insufficient funding after the end of the monarchy, the Vienna Boys Choir was privatized in 1921 and started to give concerts outside of the chapel which immediately turned out to be a great success. Since the 1920s, the choir has collected all kinds of different music styles on its travels (via). The inarguably the oldest and best known boys' choir in the world and was on stage here in Kota Kinabalu on the 29^th and 30^th October 2011 at Sutera harbor Resort and Chancellor Hall (UMS), respectively. We opted for our tickets on the latter. It feels so good to be able to go back to the uni again :). Tickets were ranging from RM250, RM100 and RM50 for the show in UMS. 

The boys are selected from all over the world, China, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Europe, Germany as well as Canada with a total of 25 boys aged between 9 and 13, turning to 10 and 14 based in Vienna in a boarding school. Today, there are around 100 choristers between the ages of 10 to 14 which are divided into four touring choirs. The four touring choirs (by the name Bruckner, Haydan, Mozart and Schubert) are performing around 300 concerts every year. They visit virtually all European countries, and they are frequent guests in Asia, Australia and the Americas. The choir's repertoire includes everything from medieval over classical to contemporary and experimental music as well as children’s operas.

One thing that captured my attention (excerpted from the daily) on a press conference between Daily Express and the boy’s choir 32 years old conductor was that; at the boys’ age as young as 9 (to 13) as a touring group at the same time studying in a boarding school, when do they actually go to school? According to Kerem (the conductor), there were 3 semester in a year whereby the first one is the touring semester. The second and third one will be from January to March, and April to June respectively. They go to school in the morning for four hours and two hours of rehearsal, mid break, lunch break and resume with schooling from 2.30pm to 6pm before dinner and leisure time.

He added, since the boys will be touring 2-3 months in a year, by singing for all big presidents and prime ministers, holding press conferences worldwide, speaking to waiters asking for a fork, meeting fans singing for autographs and taking pictures are also a form of education, which I couldn’t agree more :).

Throughout the performances, photographs and video-taping were strictly prohibited and everyone as far as I can see seemed to adhere to the regulations. Thus, I was a little disappointed that time as I was practically geared up with all-formatted memory cards, summing to a total of 25 GB from both DSLR and compact in all but I didn't muster up enough courage to whip out my camera at all :P.

The night started promptly at 2000hr sharp with a short customary speech by the Rotarian representative and brief introduction about Vienna Boys Choir by the conductor. The choir, which went by the theme "Enchanting Vienna" making a debut with Ach, Lieb, ich muss dich lassen (My darling, I must leave you). The performances promptly followed on and lasted for about an hour or so before taking a short intermission before resuming with the second half of the program. Most of the songs were presented in French and Italian. Thanks to the booklet we were asked to buy for RM2 each (in buy one free one basis), which comprised a complete compilations of the songs presented along with English translation. Throughout the performance, there were barely any pause or brief introduction between each songs, thus we could hardly trace where which song were we in until the 10^th song which was carried out in English with a frequent repetition of ‘Moses, Moses’, which was also its title :P

Since there were two empty seats on my left, a brother in Christ who was about the age of the boss, also a close friend of ours who came for the performance alone joined us during the interval and was seated next to me through the second half. I finally whipped out my camera thinking that I have someone big whom I can count-on covering me on the sideway when I start snapping and video-ing away. Funny thing was that the first sentence he asked was ‘why are you guys bringing so many cameras?’ (little did we know that photography were prohibited earlier) and the sentence he repeatedly mentioned was ‘don’t put on your flash’ and went on ‘else, we’ll both be caught’. LOL. So, I kept it minimal with the aid of the shawl I brought along :P. 

The choir infixed a couple of Chinese songs by the title “Bang Chhun-hong” (Longing for the spring breeze) in Taiwanese Hokkien and “Xiang Jia Le” in Mandarin. The crowd was very much livened up when the choir ended up the performance with a famous local song, Gunung Kinabalu; which was not included in their repertoire earlier. We were told that the songs were practiced in a mere span of two days. Audiences were clapping along in glee and started to sing along. We were allowed to have our photos taken with the choristers but we gave that a miss because we didn’t want to be caught in the post-performance congestion (both traffic and human) :P

Personally, I was very impressed with the all the boys that they manage to memorize what seemed to me to be a rather long speech with very minimal referring to the notes (only for a few number of songs). Not to mention, am utterly amazed with the angelic voices they had. They seriously deserved a pat on their back for putting up a really good show and it was an enchanting Viennese evening indeed :)

Little Darlings

It had been quite some time since I last made konnyaku jelly. It was because it requires high meticulous effort with my previous moulds. I have quite a collection of trays/pans for jellies but have never been really happy with them. Some were either too small in size. I have to pop in two cubes into my mouth to get the satisfaction (read: gluttony) out of it and down through my throat within a couple time of chewing, a couple of trays have narrow bottom and the jelly were unable to penetrate thoroughly to the bottom after small fruit cubes were placed, those mould with silicone push-able bottom somehow yielded a plasticy-stink (despite soaking it with water overnight). I have only used them once, prolly the stink will diminish after a couple of usage but I don’t think I’ll be using them anymore for this purpose.

But, I am one happy konnyaku-maker now and am so glad that I have finally found the purr-fect mould (I just can't love them enough!). I have been seeing almost everyone (literally) using this kind of mould but have never took the effort to search nor ask around for it. I am so pleased with the reasonable size for each jelly. I stumbled upon them by chance from the bake shop nearby my house (which only operates during weekday office hour) during one my impromptu trip to a bookstore which is located at the same row :).

I regained my mojo for konnyaku making and pronto fetch home a packet of local strawberries when we were dining at the nearby restaurant few nights after that (Not easy, I only know one store selling these fruit on a constant basis throughout our humble city). Personally, I would always prefer a fresh approach rather than having canned fruits for its filling. I am one hardcore fan of strawberries. How I wish I could grow these little darlings right at my own yard :P The sour-ish taste resulted from the berries complement so well with the sweetness of the mango-flavored konnyaku =). 

Sushi Bonanza

The first quarter of December is almost down, but I still have one, perhaps two or maybe three posts more to be covered before calling it a year (Nah, I wish so too!). I am still slowly crawling from the beginning of October 2011. This post is meant to pen down the boss’ visit in October 2011. A very typical dining spot, but for this round the boss’ work call visit this round coincides with the Sushi King’s RM2 Bonanza :) It was our very first time patronizing Sushi King during their bonanza fair. 

The both of us had 9 plates of sushi(s) in total and that made me a full stomach bliss. On top of that, we shared a set of Yakiniku Bento before leaving with our cup runneth over :P So, these are among the salvable limited number of sushi photos.  Clockwise from top left are ebi ten (prawn tempura), unagi (grilled eel) slice, chicken cheese roll, salmon sushi, chukka lidako (seasoned baby octopus) and fry roll. Among the photos cannot be retrieved after recovery were chukka kurage (seasoned jelly fish), tsubukko (fish roe) and Yakiniku (pan fried beef) Bento.  

With this, I am hoping to close down the blur prawn-headness syndrome in me *bummer*. To top that up, I have been practicing to double back-up my photos and not to mention, my 500GB external HDD is almost full in no time now, and I am depending solely on my 500GB hard disc size in my lappy. Time to invest for a new external HDD. Let’s hope that there’ll be no more whining nor crying over split milk. More on this day in future posts :)