Viva Espana!

Viva Espana 2012

I can happily say that I was in the thick of things when a footballing history was created with Spain winning the euro 2012 and managed to defend the title that she won in 2008 as well as the World cup in 2010. I didn't watch the match but I happened to be here in Kiev (Kyiv) for an official function that I must attend tomorrow as I was an official guest of the Government. When I checked in the hotel, it was a very pleasant surprise when I was informed that the Spanish team was also staying in my hotel. Despite the slight inconvenience of tight security, I am not at all complaining as I was rubbing shoulders with the likes of Torres, Alonso, Alvarro and Mata. Viva Espana 2012!




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Entitlement mentality

I guess entitlement mentality is a common human trait whether you are from the developing or developed world. Given the opportunity we humans will seek the maximum benefits for ourselves at no costs even at the expense of others. The parking space is clearly marked for the disabled but lo and behold, he drives a cls so he is entitled to park anywhere he wants!
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Haziq saturday adventure at Divonne Forest park

Milan on a notebook

Geneva Botanic garden

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Our "Bukit Shahbandar"

This morning I took the kids to a forest trail in Versoix which is a village away from ours. As today is a public holiday, we would have two sundays which means we would have two days of shops closing. It can be very daunting finding of what we can do with the kids with two days of no shops opening. The jungle trek has a small stream running across the little patch of forest which is a rarity in Geneva considering that the outskirts of the city is mainly made up of farmland. I must say it reminded us of Bukit Shahbandar a very popular area for jungle trekking just minutes away from the capital.


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LGB Orchestra and choir Night

Nizam participated in the school choir for the first time. He looked shy probably because he never did this before and singing was not exactly his forte. He asked me how he did and I told him he was ok. I wouldn't want to discourage him..
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Geneve plage

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Tweet from @AmirKhan168

@AmirKhan168: Overheard:an african leader saying oil can be a blessing or it can be a curse. Yes, history is littered with latter. Let's learn frm Norway!


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Sleepy in Istanbul

I'm at the business lounge at Istanbul Airport now...

Beautiful Lausanne

We keep coming back to Lausanne. I really cant stop admiring how stunningly beautiful Lausanne is especially when the sun is out. This city for the students is living up to its reputation as being hip. We can feel the energy come to life when you see men and women in their 70s roller blading mingling in the crowd of students. My kids love the place and thankfully its less than an hour drive from Geneva.

Correction

The building I was referring to is Burj Khalifa
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Mission Impossible? Not in Dubai

If you watch the latest instalment of the action packed movie Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise aka Ethan Hunt with his few sidekicks catching the bad guys and stopped the world from nuclear destruction (rather kicking @**), you will see this sky scrapper which I believe is (or was) the tallest building in the world, the Burj Al arab.

This is one of the prides of Dubai, the small kingdom that is part of the Emirates that is now on the world map as one of the best tourism spots in the world. With the sea of people that I see from every part of the world that thronged the Dubai Mall now, I am really seeing that life is returning to normal after its recent financial troubles.

If there is a will there is always a way and in Dubai, no mission is definitely impossible.

Final Day

Qatar National Convention Centre

The jaw dropping conference hall of the Qatar National Convention Centre. The sheer size and beauty of the Convention Centre is breathtaking. It has the latest technological wizardry that any convention centre should have like state of the art lighting and projection equipments, screen lcds etc. The centre is so huge, any first time visitor coming here for a visit will be struck with awe with its sheer size alone.

I will be here for a week attending a UN meeting.

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Garden Paradise (not exactly)

On the first sign of spring, I was so eager to start my first attempt on growing the garden strawberry. Today after work, I rushed to the little plot of land at the back of the house armed with my garden kit and started digging up the soil and adding up some compost in the hope of creating a small nursery for the strawberry seedlings. I must admit I don't have the "green hands", the dexterity of a master gardener like my Indonesian driver who could turn my backyard into a botanical paradise. But I was so keen on trying to see if I could give this one a shot. I got the help of my two kids, Ameerah and Nizam who were just as excited as I to see if we could turn this little plot into a garden paradise. Ameerah had her hands full of tabby's poop as it turned out the plot she was working out was our cat's favourite pit stop to answer the call of nature. I was laughing so hard when I saw her face cringing in disgust. I told her if she wanted to be a gardener then touching animal's poop would have to be second nature.
Strawberries are known to bear fruits very quickly. Hopefully by June or July, we could reap the fruits of our labour. We are keeping our fingers crossed on this one.

A visit to Paris won't be complete without this photo shoot with that famous tower as a backdrop..

Easter break

We managed to have a stop over in Paris city centre on the way back yesterday. As it was sunday, not all the shops were open except the ones along the busy street of champs elysees. As this year we also happened to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, I promised mrs to get her a present and what better way than let her roamed along the shopping street of Paris and asked herself to choose her own fancy. True to a woman's heart, she chose the LV store (women and their handbags!)

We only managed to spend time at Champs elysees as I wanted to get home early when there was still daylight. Although it was a very short break for us, the kids enjoyed it the most as it was the first family break that we had this year. We only wished our eldest was there. That would have been a whole family break.

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Our easter break

The golf season has begun

The golf season has begun

This is a late entry. I was supposed to post this last sunday but it got holed up on my wife's Ipad but had trouble figuring out how to post it on my blog. No excuse for my ignorance...

This morning waking up, I had this terrible pain on all of my joints from my knees, ankles and down to my toes. I had a round of golf yesterday for the first time in a very long time. As the golf season has just begun after the winter lull, I was actually looking forward to this game when one my ambassador friends invited me to join him with some others. Not to feel embarrassed by the prospect of having to play the game with a respectable crowd, I actually went to a driving range practising the golf swing a couple of times before yesterday trying to remember how golf was supposed to be played. With more than 6 months or so without touching any golf club, it did feel like I just got up from a very long comatose when I tried to swing the clubs. The muscles were just too stiff and the knees very wobbly which if you ask any golfer, not a very good thing. But the point about golf and diplomacy is if someone respectable invited you to join the crowd, you should feel very honoured as there is more to it than just the game. Diplomats often use golf to establish friendship and to discuss things in a more informal and cordial environment. After all you don't wear a three piece suit to a golf course with a gamut of entourage that follows you from behind. So I went ahead knowing full well that I wouldn't return a respectable score. With little exercise before this, walking more than 7 kilometres up and down the hilly fairways felt like the london marathon. The golf course was a walking course up and down on the hill side in a place called Bonmont about 25 Kms from Geneva. It is a beuatiful course overlooking lake Geneva which on a sunny day you can actually see Mont Blanc in the horizon.

My usual macho gait didn't quite hide the pains I had all over. I do feel like a hobbling pensioner with backbone arthritis jerkily making his way downstairs with a permanent expression of misery which is my way of telling mrs and the kids that dad's golf season has just begun...

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What your wallet says about you

Lake Geneva

Today is the first day when we have to change our clock forward to mark the end of winter and welcome the spring. The weather is a perfect 18 c with lots of sunshine.

So as usual our sunday outing is to head to the lake for a picnic...

Simple thinking

Simple thinking

History has shown that the best inventions are usually the result of simple thinking. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably used a Post-it at least once in your life. Those handy little sticky notes actually started as a failed adhesive at 3M - the glue wasn't sticky enough. 3M's Arthur Fry began using the glue to add removable sticky notes to his reports, and fellow employees quickly started requesting them for their own use. There was also another anecdotal story that went around some years ago that NASA the US Space Agency whose annual budget surpasses many nations' spent millions of dollars trying to develop a pen that could work in zero gravity in outer space. Whilst the NASA crackerjacks were busy cracking their heads trying to figure out the solution, the Russians simply gave their cosmonauts the ordinary lead pencil that you could purchase in any stationery shops! Now whether there is a shred of truth in this story, I will leave you to figure it out but I wanted to get my point across that sometimes in life or at work, a solution for a seemingly complex issue would simply just require a simple thinking.

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14 February

14 February
Today is the third day my wife spends her night at the hospital and I am already missing her so much. I guess when people say, absence makes the heart grows fonder, it actually tells you that the person you really love is always in front of you and you will be reminded on how much she means to you if she is absent from your sight.

Last monday, mrs had to undergo a surgery to remove her gallbladder which since we came to Geneva was amongst the hardest decisions that we had to make. When she was diagnosed to have a cyst growth in her gallbladder more than a year ago, we had been monitoring on its growth in the hope that it stopped from growing. Unfortunately just before we came here, the specialist doctor at Bungrungrad, Bangkok whom we had the opportunity to meet for a second opinion advised us that the cyst was growing and advised us to remove it through a procedure known as laparoscopy or a key hole surgery. This was supposed to be a less invasive form of modern surgery. The cyst growth we were told could be cancerous if it went beyond one cm in size. But this was based on statistics and there was no way of knowing if it was cancerous or not without taking the gallbladder out as the cyst growth was inside this organ. I actually wanted my wife to do it much earlier before we came to Geneva but I got the transfer order with little choice but to delay the decision. The specialist informed us that we could perform the surgery in Switzerland as this country has amongst the best hospitals and surgeons anywhere in the world. It was three months before mrs finally took the scalpel partly because we couldn't settle down as the house hunting and registering the kids at school took us awhile and our whole container load of stuff from our previous posting did not arrive until after the new year. And of course this was made even harder as we were not able to have any maid to take care of the kids when my wife was expected to spend a couple of days at the hospital. As a minimum wage for a maid as required by Swiss law here is around chf 2600, there was no way we could afford it. So we had to decide that the best solution was for the surgery to take place when the kids were having their first break of the year when they would be at home taking care of each other. Of course daddy will now have to play the role as the supermum the kind of role that mrs has been doing over these years whose chores include preparing breakfast, dinner and tucking haziq into bed. Fortunately enough Afiqah my second daughter is already big enough to help out. Today she prepared nasi goreng for dinner as I arrived late from visiting mrs. It was tasty and I complemented her.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder and I cant wait for the supermum to come home. I love you sayang. We all wish you for a speedy recovery. Amin.

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Fw: PLEASE GET BACK TO ME THIS IS URGENT.

Another one
------Original Message------
From: FROM MARTIN UGO
ReplyTo: FROM MARTIN UGO
Subject: PLEASE GET BACK TO ME THIS IS URGENT.
Sent: Feb 7, 2012 5:58 PM


--


Dear,

Representing the 50%

I considered your position before I made this consultation. My name is
Mr.Martin Ugo,I am attorney to chief Douglas Harry, an industrialist, Oil
and Gas merchant until his death last month. I have represented his
investment interest for over 25yrs now. On June 13th, 2008, he summoned me
to his office to commence his WILL process. That was when his health
condition became worse. He eventually died on 27th November, 2011, leaving
the WILL uncompleted.

The burial arrangement is in progress now, and according to his instruction,
the WILL will be announced one month after his burial. Chief was a
successful business man, I want to include your name in the WILL as his
foreign business partner who according to him, should inherit 50% of his
account in the UK Bank. I want to do this before presenting the WILL to his
family. The family does not know about the UK account. I will get the letter
of administration for you to represent the 50% of the UK account.I have the
WILL with me and no member of his family has seen the WILL and the UK
account is not yet known to them..Can we work together?

Respectfully yours

Martin Ugo.



________________________________________________





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Fw: DEAR WINNER FIFA 2012

Don't they get tired?
------Original Message------
From: YAHOO FAIR LONDON
ReplyTo: drmrgeorg.keith@london.com
Subject: DEAR WINNER FIFA 2012
Sent: Feb 6, 2012 11:31 AM

SIR DR. MR, GEORG   KEITH  S.A Office: 0027 -73 4 -826 -662
U. K Phone: +447- 035- 909- 023


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Weather Conditions from The Weather Channel

This message was sent from a friend.

Now for Geneva, Switzerland

Temp: -10°C
Feels like: -20°C
Partly Cloudy / Windy
Humidity: 67%
Wind: N 32 kph
For more weather information, visit www.weather.com from your PC or mobile device.

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Sleepless in Geneva

My first night wearing a splint or a night guard is really not a pleasant one. Its already 1.25 am and I am still wide awake as I am not used to sleeping having something in my mouth. it really does feel like someone choking me with a set of dentures in my mouth. I am diagnosed as having bruxism which is a condition of grinding the teeth whilst asleep. The condition if not treated can lead to serious damage to the teeth and also an arthritis to the joints connecting the jaw and the skull just near the ears. In medical term this is known as TMJ disorder and the associated symptoms can include popping sound on the jaw joints, migraine in the morning, headache and a continous toothache. Actually I have all of those nagging pains. So I really am hoping for a cure and my best hope is this night guard that I have to put on every night that is causing me to lose my sleep. If this sleeplessness is going to run for a few days, I will probably lose my sanity...

Weather Conditions from The Weather Channel

This message was sent from a friend.

Weather for Geneva, Switzerland

10-Day Forecast:
Tuesday
(null) -17°C / -5°C
Precip: 20%

Wednesday
Mostly Sunny 0°C / -8°C
Precip: 10%

Thursday
Partly Cloudy -2°C / -10°C
Precip: 10%

Friday
Sunny -4°C / -11°C

Saturday
Partly Cloudy -4°C / -11°C

Sunday
Partly Cloudy -1°C / -10°C

Monday
Sunny 0°C / -8°C

Tuesday
Sunny 0°C / -4°C

Wednesday
Sunny 3°C / -3°C

Thursday
Mostly Sunny 6°C / 0°C

For more weather information, visit www.weather.com from your PC or mobile device.

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ASEAN Family Night

I really love my kids. They are such a joy to watch. They enjoy doing things together. I guess that is the consequence of having to spend away from everyone else in Brunei they end up relying on each other for company. Yes, there was the occasional sibling rivalry but not that serious.

On our first two weeks here, we had the annual ASEAN Family Night. Each country would show case a cultural performance. I asked my kids if they wanted to volunteer and they all nodded yes. Thankfully they had been active at their previous school during my previous posting. Afiqah and Ameerah took part in the singing Idol competition. Syafiq played the key board and my two boys took part in the school choir. I told them we needed to showcase our "joget Brunei" to show that our country is also very rich in our cultural heritage. Thankfully my wife was willing to choreograph the moves and thanks also to Youtube, the kids were able to put up this ensemble in just a couple of days in our small hotel room.

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Its snow again!

My youngest son haziq couldn't find his spelling book tonight and he got panicky. He asked me if I saw it. I couldn't help but snapped at his incessant questioning. he got this habit of asking me for things whenever he lost or misplaced them. I told him he shouldn't accuse anyone if it was his own fault for losing his own stuff. As always I got a comeback. He said to me in a calm voice he wasn't accusing me. He was only asking me if I saw it. I forgot that my son is already 6 years old and my choice of words was clearly off tonight. I laughed at him and gave him a big hug. I told him he has become too clever for my liking..

Geneva rush hour

Now the winter break is over, the normal rush hour has already begun. It is already 6 pm and the rush hour doesn't appear to be abating. I took this pic minutes ago from my office window. This is the reason I would rather stay in the office and avoid the rush hour as I might end up sitting in a car for an hour when I can normally reach my house in less than 10 minutes. If you suffer from bad back, that is the last thing you would like end up doing.

Vevey

If you drive up about 50 mins from Geneva to the northern tip of Lake Geneva, you will find a small town called Vevey. Take a stroll along the lake, you will come across many beautiful sculptures one like this shaped like a giant steel fork standing stuck in the shore of the Lake. Close to Vivey is a city of Montreux which is famous for its summer jazz festival. I will post some pics of the city.