Pilgrims are everywhere

Pilgrims are everywhere!

For the past 2 weeks while walking through the city streets, my path is confronted by swarms of foreign speaking youth, proudly waving their country’s flags, singing, dancing and cheering through the streets.

Isn’t it a little too early just yet for the world cup? Since when does Melbourne even hold international soccer events let alone have frenzied young fans going berserk through the streets?

As you can see, I am not one for keeping up with current affairs and what’s going on in the immediate world at hand. I have enough activities and things going on in my daily life to create my own reality of the world I view myself in.

It wasn’t until I tuned on the news that it clicked, these kids were here for World Youth Day 2008 and the big papal honcho of the Christian world is here in person to bless the masses in person, through TV and believe it or not, through SMS for the more tech savvy amongst us plebs.

Quoted from 'The Age':

On Friday morning, the gaggles of tech savvy pilgrims were excited to receive the latest SMS from Pope Benedict XVI.
The pontiff has sent daily messages to World Youth Day pilgrims all this week, complete with modern abbreviations - referring to himself as "BXVI".
Friday morning's message read: "The spirit impels us 4ward 2wards others; the fire of his love makes us missionaries of Gods charity. See u tomorrow nite - BXVI."

I bet even the holy spirit couldn’t have that far a reach back in Babylonian days.

As I went came back from lunch yesterday, I was confounded by the sight of a group of teens surrounding a street light. Posters depicting Christian themes were pasted up on the pole and everyone was merrily holding hands, dancing and clapping around the pole with such fervour that it would put the Mormons to shame.

Meanwhile, up the street, a group of Hari Krishnas are making their daily noon walk through the centre of the city, beating their drums and singing about (God) Krishna. The paths of these 2 groups would inevitably cross and I secretly prayed for an ensuing fist fight between the 2 groups.

I’ve got my bets on the Hari Krishnas, they look like they’ll fight dirty.

The Witching Hour

'2.37am'

reads the little blue screen as I squinted with one eye and brought my phone a little close to my face in the cold darkness of my room.

Fuck. I can't sleep.

Its been 5 nights in a row now that I've been awoken by my overactive mind racing with too many thoughts.
Like clockwork, I'll awaken somewhere around the 3am mark. The witching hour.

Work has started for me on Tuesday. New role, new project, new industry. This looks promising, it'll be a role that will benefit me. More on that later as things becomes more apparent. I'm somewhat relieved that at least there's one less aspect of my life to worry about as mentioned in a previous post.

No.
I know exactly what's keeping me awake tonight.

Miss Sam is making the permanent move from Sydney to Melbourne this weekend. I'm flying up on Saturday night and we'll be making the arduous 800km+ drive to Melbourne in her tiny white Daihatsu Charade.

The plan was in the works for the future and this was supposed to take a long time to fruition over a few more months. However, she was made redundant in her job a month ago and this threw a spanner in the works and accelerated the whole process before you can even say 'I can't breathe'!

Nothing will change. Or will it?

What happens when you take the 'distance' out of a 'long distance romance'? The yearning, longing and simmering lust that builds up to a frenzied climax in between visits; melt away into a lesser degree of normality as both parties exist within each other's life and space on a more frequent everyday basis.

I certainly don't know.

What I do know.... is that the tiny white, slim rectangular tablet of Stilnox I'm popping into my mouth, will blissfully kick-in in 10minutes and effectively knock me out for the count, giving me some desperately needed sleep and quieten down the voices in my head. Before the witching over is over.

Andy,
Zzz

The blue of Sydney

Having a week's worth of time off owing to me from work, I escaped Melbourne for some R&R up in Sydney, with Miss Sam's lovely company.


I love the sea.


There is something special about the beaches in Sydney.


Driving down lush green hills, you suddenly see the tree line break and a deep blue colour captures your gaze in the distance.


The view clams me as we weave down the road and reach the bottom of the hill to see the vast expanse of ocean fighting to get to the shore.


Islets of rock jut out into the sea, forming a natural cove.

So... what next?

I hate this feeling of not having any direction. It's been gnawing at the back of my mind even though I know I ought to be relaxed and happy, however, it is in my nature to be happiest when I'm focused or fixated with a goal in mind.

One weekend ago, the 18month project I've been working on in my short career at Accenture came to its official conclusion at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon. The role wasn't something that I wanted in the first place, but I bit the bullet and got the job done nonetheless. I'm glad to get it out of my system.

So what's been bugging me now is the uncertainty of my next role. The make or break deal. If I can't get into another generic role for another year, it just wouldn't help me the slightest. I need something that will give me specialised experience that I could market myself with in the future. So, fingers crossed for now.

And the washing powder goes in here!

I think one of my house mates has been adding washing machine powder the incorrect way.

Came home slightly drunk last night and put a finished load into the dryer, only to have a whiff of stale sweaty socks waft through the laundry area. I almost dry retched and thought, what the hell? I just took a clean load out! Upon closer inspection, there was a big chunk of laundry powder in the fabric softener dispenser.

This has happened a few times before, so what better way to send the message across than for Andy to draw up an educational clip on our fridge whiteboard.

MUTO

This takes graffiti and animation to a whole new dimension and level.

This artist- Blu is pure genius !!!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Acne woes

I've been sick. Thanks to my flatmates passing their filthy germs around the house the past month, I inevitably caught a whiff of it and had a sore throat / flu hybrid bug that put me down for a week. Poor Miss Sam was staying over the weekend before so she had to endure the better half of it observing me transform into a sick puppy.

Sick week was a productive week though, I took 3 days off work and indulged myself watching all the episodes of Underbelly. For something that was produced locally in Melbourne, it was surprisingly slick and well polished for a Australian TV Series!

Life's been pretty good of late. No more crazy hours at work ever since our project went live. Now I leave work at 6pm or earlier, take a longer lunch break (because I know I deserve it) and have time to fit in all my other essential activities during the week like gym, salsa and cooking dinner for the house.

On Thursday, I paid a visit to a Dermatologist. Last year, due to work stress, I had a bout of adult acne blow up on my chest of all places! It was ugly enough to warrant a visit to my GP to get prescribed a course of antibiotics which over the course of months, eventually cleared up any new instances of acne occurring. However, that initial outbreak has left a few nasty lumpy scars across my chest.


The Dermatologist injected the scars on my chest with an ampule of a corticosteroid to break up the scar tissue.

All I can say is: "Ouch! Motherf**king Ow Ow Ow !!!"



Imagine having a fine needle pushed under the skin of a scar, then a bubble of liquid injected in between the skin and scar tissue.

The dermatologist assured me that this will break up the scar tissue and gave me some Retin-A cream to apply every night until we have a follow up session in 6 weeks.

:o(

Sleepless in Sydney

Sydney oh Sydney! What a beautiful city with its sprawling concrete skyline interspersed by the deep blue waters of the harbour. I had a wonderful time there over the Anzac day long weekend.

Admittedly, one of the main highlights of my Sydney visit was to see the lovely Miss Sam.
The first time we met, there were instant sparks between us and Miss Sam had visited Melbourne twice more since then.



Could this be the beginnning of something serious?



The Sydney aquarium was a really nice attraction.


The shark display captivated the masses as visitors walked through an underwater tube with these predatory kings of the sea swimming above your head.


I also had the opportunity to catch up with an ex colleague, Vik and his wife over dinner at the Chinta Ria restaurant on Darling Harbour, which just had some of the most authentic south east asian food other than asia itself.


Andy & Miss Sam messing around with our camera outside the QVB building in Sydney's central



The taronga zoo was absolutely amazing. Not so much in terms of the quality of the displays and variety of animals on show, this zoo if nothing else has breathtaking views of the city and the harbour.

Amnesty International - Signatures

Sorry for the long lapse in between posts;
Andy has been away for a holiday in Sydney for the past week, more of that to come soon.

In the meanwhile, I stumbled upon this ad and its just way cool...

Ready Steady Salsa !

Its something that everyone should do once in their lifetime.

Last Friday I celebrated the lead up to my 28th birthday by taking part in an amateur salsa competition.

Jasmine, my dance partner and I only got together a few weeks beforehand and jokingly said that we dance so well together that we ought to take part in the beginner's competition at the Copacabana club.

It was great fun, we didn't win anything or get into the final round but we had heaps of fun, considering that we only had a few months of lessons under our collective belts and 2 nights of practice before entering into the competition.

Enough said; here's the video - enjoy!


P.S.
Check out ninja dancer and his anorexic partner.... somebody please feed her a cheeseburger!

Dust ! Anybody? Dust !

Bloody hell, I just been out in the city for a walk at lunchtime and was hit by gale force winds and clouds of dust particles getting into my eyes and mouth!

Had to come back and go to the bathroom to rinse the gritty bits out of my teeth as it felt like I was crunching on something that definitely didn't come from the curry I had for lunch earlier.

Weather report seems uncannily accurate for once: "Blowing Dust"

Hahahaha!!!!




-------
[Edit: 5.15pm]

I stand corrected, the weather only got worse today...
Headline news about Victoria's killer weather responsible for:

• Woman killed by falling wall
  
• 200,000 homes, businesses lose power
  
• All metro train lines severely affected

Yikes...

Ready, Steady.... Go-Live !

Its finally over! The project I've been working so hard on the past year and busting my chops from sacrificing weekends at work and 12hour days during the week has finally come to an exhausting anti-climax this Monday afternoon, during the last day of the Easter holiday long weekend.

The national managers came together for a conference call and came out announcing to everyone that the "go-live" decision was made, meaning that as of Tuesday morning we will be able to start billing Queensland customers. This would no doubt make Origin the 2nd biggest utilities company in Australia's contestable electricity market, since the Queensland electricity market got deregulated.

I need to get my life back to normal again. I woke up late Saturday morning and for a brief moment was confronted with a sudden feeling of unease, as if I had to do something or be somewhere. Force of habit; I thought to myself as I made breakfast and pondered what to do with the rest of my free day. For once, I didn't have to check my emails or run into work.

It was just nice to sit around the house all afternoon, potter around, watch a movie or two, go grocery shopping and then cook a late lunch.

In a random act of spontaneity, I signed up for an amateur salsa dance competition, held in 3 week's time at the Copacabana.
Jasmine, my salsa dance buddy at Thursday's class has agreed to partner up with me and train for the event.

We've booked in Liz, our salsa instructor for a private lesson next Saturday afternoon. So bring it on, oh yeah !

=)

hotter and hotter

Jesus Christ!

What the hell is wrong with the weather in Melbourne the last few days!???

Thur - Warmish
Fri - Hot
Sat - Pretty hot
Sun - Pretty Fucking Hot
Mon - Still Pretty Fucking Hot

Its 11pm and the mercury reads 34 degrees Celsius, even the plastic on my keyboard feels hot to touch, everything is melting, including my brain.

Walking outside during lunch, my skin feels like its peeling off in the sun and I could see little pet dogs combusting into balls of charred furry flames as owners walked the poor creatures in the searing heat.

Our air conditioning at the Bellagio decided to kill itself.
The unit probably knew a heatwave was about to strike last weekend and thought to itself "Die now you bastards, I shall start spitting out warm air while you sit around sweating in your underpants!"

Ok, end of rant.

I'm going to sit in front of my fan and sweat in my shorts...

:(

Stuff White People Like

Oh my, this blog seriously had me laughing in stitches, only because it is so true.

In most situations, white people are very comforted by seeing their own kind. However, when they are eating at a new ethnic restaurant or traveling to a foreign nation, nothing spoils their fun more than seeing another white person.

Many white people will look into the window of an ethnic restaurant to see if there are other white people in there. It is determined to be an acceptable restaurant if the white people in there are accompanied by ethnic friends. But if there is a table occupied entirely by white people, it is deemed unacceptable.

Ameriquest

Youtube fridays!

I'm tired and too lazy to post this evening, but this caught my attention as a couple of very cleverly done ads.

Australia Day Weekend - Redux

Its rare that I get a quiet moment nowadays to write out my thoughts. Everything at work has been crashing down at once like a wobbly stack of cards built a little too high.
4 weeks before our project goes-live and honestly from my point of view I can see things going pear shaped. However, leadership are pretty good at showing powerpoint presentations to repackage the pear as an apple to the businesses.

Nonetheless, my whinging aside, life has been great of late. I did have an amazing Australia Day long weekend (yes, I know its been that long since I last posted).

My 72hrs of hedonistic pleasure started on Saturday evening where we packed ourselves picnic baskets loaded with food and bubbly, walked down the street to the Fitzroy gardens for a picnic in the park with the night's entertainment provided by 'The Soul Connection' a funk and soul band playing music from the 60s.
It was absolutely brilliant stuff, people old and young were running around barefoot on the grass and dancing in the twilight as the sunlight faded into the city skyline in the backdrop.


Sunday we celebrated Emily's 28th birthday during the afternoon at our apartment. Drinks and a BBQ were the order of the day and it stretched into the night when we all headed down to the Nightcat; a salsa club on Johnston street. A live latin band and couples showing off their slick dance moves on the floor.

A shot with Sam, Emily's cute friend from Sydney

After a rather interesting night out, the next day I went to the Alumbra on docklands. Miguel Migs and Julius Papp (Both whom I had the pleasure of catching in Singapore 2 weeks earlier) were playing, with live vocals by none other than Lisa Shaw!

The club is situated right in the middle of the pier and standing on the dance floor inside, I realised that the dance floor was made of glass and you can see the sea below your feet.

Me and Greg




Sam got persuaded heavily by me to come for the party, as no visit to Melbourne is complete without a party with class...



Enjoying the sunshine in the outdoor area



Marika dropped by late to the party, but in time for the main acts

The music was incredible, the crowd was great, this was one of those unexpected parties where everything was unplanned and you have one of the greatest nights of your life!

Dress Rehearsal 1

This will be my affirmation of the day: (borrowed from the Hay House Calender)
I am the perfect age right now. I have been younger and I will be older. I will never be this age again, so I make the most of this time and enjoy myself to the fullest.

This may sound cheesy to some, but somehow I find this line a source of great inspiration.
We need to live in the present.

Last night I was out at a singles event with Emily. This event was organized by dating website rsvp.

We had heaps of fun talking to random strangers, making some new friends and getting the odd number here and there.
There's a strange phenomenon I noticed that I like to call social proofing.
If a guy enters a singles bar by himself and stands in a corner nursing his drink in his hand while checking out the women in there, he does get noticed by the women. By the time he drinks enough dutch courage to approach a girl to say hello, they'll be less responsive as the women would have already noticed creepy fella standing by himself checking them out.

On the flip side. I walked into the venue, arm in arm with Emily in tow, we stood at the bar, got a drink and then proceeded to dance a few moves on the empty dancefloor while everyone else in the room looked on. After leaving the floor, I walked up to a bunch of girls and opened the set; launching into a conversation effortlessly because we've already established a few facts:

1) We were the most fun people in the room having a good time
2) Social dynamics will draw others to hang around fun people because they want to have a good time too
3) I wasn't behaving in a predatory fashion checking out targets from a corner before making my move, I was just there to have fun irregardless.

So there you go, social dynamics!

----------------------

In case you're thinking what is a "dress rehearsal" (the title of this post).

Well, sadly I'm at work this fine rainy saturday evening and am typing out this post while nobody's looking over my shoulder.

9 weeks to go on the project and we're having a trial run over the weekend working 24/7 in shifts as we run all our programs to migrate the 800,000 electricity customer and billing details over from Queensland.

Exciting times indeed.... although I'd rather watch paint dry if given a choice

So I'm was on call today and had to go into the office from 3pm till 6pm.
I finished up and just only got home when I got called back again at 8pm because something didn't load properly and had to be fixed.
Lets hope it doesn't pan out into a long night.

Good news is, one of our managers; Sarah is in charge of ordering dinner tonight.
We're having Thai... Yum !

Harder Better Faster Stronger

This is absolutely brilliant stuff !

Just wait till the lyrics start speeding up and realize how ingenious these girls are.

The end of a great holiday

1.30am on a Monday morning / Sunday night (depending on how you're looking at it)

I am dreading having to face waking up for work in a few hours.
I had a fun Wednesday night at this club/bar - Thumper @ the Goodwood Park Hotel.
Kyo was teaching an hour of basic beginner's salsa and there was such a big turnout that I took the lead and led the men's side of the class in the basic moves while he led the ladies.

It was good fun and when the class ended, the social Latin night started with a live Latin band playing some seriously sexy music for everyone to dance to. These people on the floor were amazing! Doing some beautifully executed salsa moves left, right and all over the place. I took a chance with this cute girl, Eugenie but warned her that since I was a beginner, any mistakes made would only be her fault

Lina the air hostess from last week came by as well for a dance and we had an instant group of new friends made there. After the gig, the lot of us went down the road to Emerald Hill for some drinks at an outdoor wine/bar.

Following that we adjourned to Pure, the white side room of Ministry, Singapore. It was a one off party in the middle of the week with local DJs Has and Angela Flame. I've known Angela for a while now since she visited Melbourne in 2006 and it was the first time I've actually heard her play a gig. Damm, not only is she hot looking, she's an awesome techno DJ!

Had an overnight flight on Thursday and arrived in Melbourne bleary eyed and exhausted on Friday morning. Pat & Emily were my official welcoming home committee at the airport. I love my housemates! =)

The Cure and the Cause

I spent Saturday night dancing away at Velvet Underground, the classy house sideroom of Zouk club. Miguel Migs and Julius Papp were at the helm of things, playing a delicious selection of deep house tunes. Happy times indeed, as I caught up with various groups of friends scattered all over the club.
I totally lost the plot when Julius Papp dropped the track "The Cure and the Cause" by Fish Go Deep.
My god!!! I really LOVE this track and it was the first time I heard it out in a club, and no better club than Velvet with its new sound system designed by Gary Stewart himself.

So, I cannot resist but to post up the video of this track to share with you all below....



Kyo was teaching Salsa at the Xenbar on Monday nights. I came along with the intention of getting some lessons and met the lovely bar owner, Emma who let me in for free!
It was a pretty slow night, so I had 2 hours of practice with another girl, followed by an additional hour of private lessons from Kyo to correct the minor flaws that I'll never be able to detect while taking group lessons.

I have much to learn about this dance, the weekly lessons I have been taking with Nic, Lisa and Kylie will never be enough to learn this dance effectively. I'm considering increasing that to twice weekly lessons now if time permits back in Melbourne. =)

2 more days to go in Singapore, I feel like there isn't enough time to do everything I'd like to accomplish here!

5am on the island that never sleeps

I'm back home in Singapore!

Christmas 2007 was brilliant, with me spending the eve with my lovely housemates (a separate post coming up on that with photos)

Much has happened since then, I was trying hard to get home to Singapore for New Years on the 30th December and it was a last minute stroke of luck that I managed to get a seat on Singapore Airlines.

Prog girl came by early on Sunday morning to help me pack (it was more like supervising and then falling asleep on the bed than helping really....) and drove me to the airport.

8hours and many thousand miles later, I'm back in the tropical jungle heat of Singapore and going straight into the crowds and traffic to dinner with the family. It was mum's 60th birthday dinner which officially makes her a senior citizen complete with benefits like cheaper public transport and discount movies during the afternoon.

So far, I've been living the good life. Visiting the gym in the afternoons, eating the cheap and plentiful local food, and catching up with friends in the night.

New Year's eve was spent at Zouk with no other than French marathon DJ extraodinairre Laurent Garnier at the helm of things, bringing us on a 10hour journey of house, techno and everything in between.

Last night, I went to meet up with my buddy Kyo, who was teaching Salsa at the O-Bar. We ended up dancing a few rounds with 2 cute girls there and turned it into an instant mini double-date when we went out for a late dinner at 2am (Nobody seems to sleep in Singapore!). Turns out they were stewardesses with Singapore airlines who were in town for a few days.

So here I am, 5am on a Saturday morning and I just got back from another night out of hanging out with friends at Zouk and its time to get some shut eye to recharge for another big weekend in the Lion City that never sleeps!