Well we’ve been in Vietnam now for a few days and it’s not been as bad as all the news we’ve heard from people who’ve been. We haven’t been killed by traffic in Saigon; we haven’t been completely ripped off (only partially, and on several occasions); we haven’t had our asses dragged 5 blocks [...]
In Canada , we almost take multiculturalism for granted. Going for sushi or butter chicken in Vancouver , with a bunch of your friends, every one of them from different ethnic backgrounds, is simply no big deal; you may not even notice. Maybe it’s because modern-day Canada was built by “immigrants”, so that [...]
While the né-Shivjis went to Singapore, the two in-law husbands (Arzoo and I) decided to hit the jungle. Taman Negara National Park holds what is reportedly the oldest rainforest in the world (130 million years) — having never suffered an ice age — and as such is home to all sorts of friendly plants and [...]
There’s a store on the main street in Tanah Rata that sells local handicrafts. Ordinarily we’re pretty blase about these things (overpriced tourist dreck) but something made Nazma stop, and we went in. Then I looked up. Wooden masks on the walls, dozens of statues lining the showcases everwhere, and not the cheapo phony “antiques” [...]
Just a note that the Pai piece has been reposted with photos now. I’m frantically trying to post using the pseudo-modern computers here before shipping off to Cambodia tomorrow: will be too busy clambering around Angkor to write (though I guess we haven’t written much here either). Any posts on Malaysia will be backdated to [...]
(Today’s blogpost by our special guest, Nazma)
My parents are both turning 60 this year. Dad’s birthday fell on February 26, so Farah came up with the idea of treating both of them to a trip. As relatively well-travelled as the Shivjis are, Southeast Asia remained largely unexplored, and so Kuala Lumpur became the meeting point [...]
Realized we’ve hardly posted since coming to Malaysia. Well, the big draw was Thaipusam, a Hindu festival that we rushed down to Kuala Lumpur (KL) for. I can’t say too much about this for the time being: first because we’re still digesting the entire experience; second because we still have a lot of background research [...]
“Kou-FOO”?
“Kou-Foo”.
“KOU-Foo”?
“Kou-Foo”.
We were standing outside the restaurant where (we believed) we were supposed to meet my Nai-Nai’s–or Mother-in-Law’s–brother and two sisters. As Lloyd could not read the Chinese name, we’d used a process of elimination to end up at the fancy “House of Canton” located in Festival Walk, an eight-floor shopping behemoth. While [...]
Having visited Hong Kong a few times, it never seemed as remote or exotic a destination as it may for many others. But as the plane touched down at Hong Kong International Airport, for once I wasn’t at all sure what to expect.
For one, in the past I’d always travelled with my family, so it [...]
While Nazma and I work really well together, almost four months of constant togetherness can take its toll. We, of course, have diverging interests: Nazma seems to like painting her toenails every so often, and I hate feet. So when I found a one-day tour unlike any of the hundreds of cookie-cutter “treks” in Chiang [...]