The Adventures of Justin: Year 9

And here’re Justin’s Year 9 photos. And these are only umm… 4 months late, ahem.


Justin crosses a rope bridge, in a rope course outside the Sanctuary of Truth, Pattaya, Thailand – Dec 2017


Justin in the Arabian wilderness (he has picnic-crazy parents!) Somewhere along the new route to Hatta, in an area probably belonging to the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah (the internal boundaries of the UAE are mighty confusing…) – Feb 2018


Posing with a falcon at his school, Royal Dubai School – Feb 2018


Justin comes home! (From school camp in Kalba). The first time he spent a night outside home, without his family – Mar 2018


Yawn... When’s the wedding starting? It’s past midnight… Justin & Jayden at his aunt’s wedding in Rohini, Delhi, India – Mar 2018


Mommy gave me a go-kart! – Jun 2018
(Nearly lost it, he parked it beside a quiet road, but the road is used by construction vehicles, and a scumbag of a bus driver took it seeing it parked there. Spoke to some construction workers in the site, and managed to get it returned to us on the same day. Thank God!)


Justin builds the Burj Khalifa …the replica I mean (still, no easy task especially with Jayden around) – Jul 2018


Justin in Armenia, outside the Matenadaran (book repository), Yerevan – Jul 2018


In the city of Tbilisi, Georgia – Aug 2018


Justin with his Georgian friends, Ana (I hope I got the name correct) and her sister (her name escapes me), at the friendliest guest house we’ve ever stayed in, the Green House in Telavi, Georgia, run by the girls’ grandparents


At the walls of the old city of Baku, Azerbaijan – Aug 2018


Justin starts Year 4 at GRDS, with his class teacher, Mr Brice Dempster – Oct 2018


And this is his guitar teacher, Sayan


Justin finds a star! With a live starfish at Jumeirah Beach, Dubai – Oct 2018


Justin at the Hatta Dam (the smaller one, there’re 2 dams in Hatta, the big one is immensely popular, and crowded to the brim, so we headed to the smaller one) – Nov 2018


Brrr... "Papa, it's cold!" In breezy, wet weather …signs of winter starting in Dubai, a few days before his 9th birthday

On his 9th birthday, we visited the Miracle Garden in Dubai, …but I don’t have any interesting pictures of him there, so …that’s all folks! Till we meet again…

Jayden Year 4 Part 1: The Transformation

Happy Diwali People! Happy Deepavali!


Jayden, Diwali 2017 – Our home, International City, Dubai

October’s come and gone, November’s in full swing, and I haven’t friggin finished going thru Jayden’s photos of the past year. At the rate I’m going, I gonna finish this at the end of November, so I’m putting a stop and posting the first half of his fourth year photos. (By the way, I’m so busy at work, I’ve resorted to doing this only during my early morning toilet time. Sigh, work sucks, life sucks.)


Grrrrrr…. Happy Halloween! – That’s how mom & the kids celebrate Halloween, dress up in scary costumes and make-up. No trick or treat. What? Our neighbourhood kids are all Muslims…


Jayden, as Maui, the Polynesian demi-god (from the cartoon Moana), minus the tattoos – Nov 2017


Jayden takes a swim (He’s terrified of water) – With Mommy at Legoland Water Park, Dubai


Jayden paints a car, Dubai Festival City, Dec 2017 – So that’s where he picked up his bad habit of drawing on walls, table, chair, floor, bed sheet, you name it, …


Jayden meets a girl – With little Thai girl at Ancient City, Samut Prakan, Thailand


Jayden visits his dad’s hometown, with his Koko and Jikor Hazel, Ipoh House, Malaysia


Jayden goes to school – First day of school, Newlands School, Jan 2018


Jayden has a picnic, with Koko – Somewhere along the new route to Hatta (you need an Omani visa now to go thru the old route), in the middle of nowhere (but probably in an area controlled by Ras-Al Khaimah), UAE


Now you see hair


Now you don’t – Jayden has a haircut


The new Jayden at school


Jayden, in Malay traditional clothes, for International Day


Jayden, in Indian traditional clothes, for a wedding in New Delhi

That’s all for now. Here’s an update on his vocabulary: - Shiwish (finish), Dial (die), Stroyal (destroy), Dikiful (difficult), Bitifuel (beautiful), Titember (September), Speckital (spectacles), Serficket (certificate) Pretening (pretending), Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle on the way (all the way), oh what fun is to ride, water on the sleigh (oh what fun it is to ride, in a one horse open sleigh)

The Time When We Were at the Airport

Here’re some photos taken at Delhi’s airport on our short trip to India for the wedding.


Wait, says the Hand! Waiting for our turn at immigration on arrival


But even when the Hand says other things (which are impossible for my hand to do), people have to wait. That is Indian Immigration.
…Hmmm, do these Hands spell out some secret code to some ancient treasures?? (If my Malaysian relatives were here, I’m sure they would have come up with some number sequence to bet on the Lottery…)


On our way out of India – this is umm… the female version of The Thing – “Oh Mighty Ancient Goddess of the Airport, grant me 3 wishes…” Nothing happened. But all of us got dysentery when we got back to Dubai. Moral of the story: Blaspheme at your own risk

Bye-bye. See ya next time Delhi!

A Marriage in the Family

Meet the newlyweds – Amrita and Rahul Maheshwari

Last month we went to India. We went there for a wedding, Anu’s youngest sister, Amrita’s wedding. The wedding was in Rohini, part of the National Capital Territory of Delhi.

Rohini, or more precisely Budh Vihar in Rohini, is a wonderful place. If you like mazes, this is the place to be. Budh Vihar is a real life maze, crammed to its boundaries with narrow streets, walled in by buildings, after buildings, after buildings. It is like the Maze Runner meets the Scorch Trials. I don’t have pictures of the streets of Budh Vihar. When you are attending to a 3 year old kid, in autorickshaws with no doors, or packed like sardines in a car, you don’t have a chance to pull out your phone or camera to snap pictures.

Budh Vihar is so crammed that the Delhi Development Authority (the government agency in charge of urban planning in Delhi) disowned it. (So sez one of my new relatives). Budh Vihar is about 6 sq.km in size (from my Google Map rough estimate), but must have at least a few million people living in it, looking at the amount of buildings and people and all that.

The people in Budh Vihar are very friendly. Especially to animals. In the entire Budh Vihar, there’re only 3 non-vegetarian restaurants (according to my meat loving brother-in-law Gopal, from Silchar, who had been exploring the place since he reached, a few days before we arrived). When we arrived, it was some religious festival, Navratri I heard, and so, even these 3 'non-veg' restaurants became ‘pure veg’. If I were still a toddler on this visit, I would've starved to death (yeah, I was a no-nonsense carnivore a long time ago).

Actually, our kids nearly starved because we stayed in a dharamshala (something like a hostel), instead of a hotel, where we’ve long grown accustomed to (the trappings of staying in a developed place like Dubai). The only food available was SPICY Indian food from the streets. No problems for yours truly and the missus (until we got back to Dubai that was, …that’s when the dysentery started, but let’s not go there…), but for the kids, it was a real ‘mouth-watering’ experience.

Staying in the dharamshala brings back fond memories of the many places we stayed in, in India. Building construction in India is fascinating. The dharamshala looks pretty new. I think the owner must have spent a fortune building it. But the way it was constructed was, ...what can I say, crude. So crude that it’s actually interesting! No, the tiling and the plastering were perfect. But the joinery, electrical and plumbing works?!? That’s an art! The art of ingenious short cuts! The funny thing is that most of the good maintenance workers, including electricians and plumbers in Dubai, are Indians! “In India, do as the Indians do…” I guess.


This ‘Dancing Table’ can be an art piece in some art gallery, but it’s actually a table stacked on top of another in the open-air flat-roof kitchen of our dharamshala. “Hey, kids! Don’t even think of going near that thing, OK?!? It’ll seriously hurt someone!”


The kids in the interesting kitchen, Aggarwal Dharamshala, Budh Vihar, Rohini – We learnt that flat bread (roti, chapatti) dough can have lots of uses. You can use it as paste to stick things together; you can use it as table leg supports for flimsy tables like the ‘Dancing Table’ above; and you can use it as a mat to remove the charcoals from the tandoor (cylindrical oven, seen beside the kids) - You can still see burnt roti on the tandoor’s air vents

Enough about the dharamshala. Here’re some wedding photos.


The bride flanked by Anu and Rini, the girls of Haulawng


Amrita with Ama, Royal Garden, Budh Vihar, Rohini, Delhi, India


Bride and groom on display at the rotating pedestal (yeah, seriously)


The bride’s sisters (2 of them anyway)


Family photo, Royal Garden, Rohini, Delhi


Indian weddings can be a lengthy affair – “Go to sleep Jayden, it’s 2am!”

Finally the main marriage ritual starts …at friggin 4am …Don’t people sleep around here?


Prayers, prayers and more prayers…


Standing, are the groom’s younger sister and brother


Wow, a bonfire!


“Round and round the fire, while we bless the pair. This side, that side, click selfies and share.”


Back at the dharamshala… Yours truly and bro-in-law, Gopal (on phone) in a photo with the Selfie-Kings (cousins of Rahul), Sekhar (in white), and ummm… I dunno his name. Between the two of them, they must've taken a thousand selfies, in a day!


Later that night was Ladies’ Folk Dance Night, on the roof terrace of the groom’s parents’ house – That in the middle in yellow, is the groom’s mother

There, one long post done. An achievement in times like these, huh?

Some Goodies from Delhi

Connaught Place, the heart of commercial Delhi, India, Mar 2013. To me Delhi has two hearts, one is this one, and the second is India Gate. Just look at the map of Delhi and you'll know why I feel like that. Both are huge roundabouts with, I think 12 roads radiating out. Connaught Place is a circle with buildings all around it, and under it. The middle of the circle is a park.

Here are some pictures of Delhi, a place I’ve not posted about for ages. This was my first port of call in India. I still remember the first thing that struck me when I stepped off the plane, the smell of diesel fumes, and the bleach that the cleaners used for disinfecting the marble floors of the airport. This was the old airport. That was March 2003, and it was near midnight when I arrived.

Since then, I’ve been there uncountable times. Stayed there for the first two years of my life in India. OK, it was not exactly Delhi, but Gurgaon (in neighbouring Haryana state), but c’mon, that’s like an extension of Delhi. Heck, it’s nearer to the Delhi international airport than the rest of Delhi.

And we keep coming back. Delhi’s where we ran to when I and Anu decided to elope. Do it the Bollywood style as my Indian colleague advised. And it’s the place we stop for flight connections, but the one main thing that Delhi’s got, that no other place in India has, …the scores of embassies around. And for an Indian, you need darn visas to just about every place on the face of the earth (with the exception of maybe Nepal and Bhutan). That’s why Anu’s passport is filled so fast. We Malaysians rarely have a chance to fill up our pages in the five years’ validity that we get.

The last time we were there was in March. We stayed there for about like 6 days, just for one purpose, to get Anu a Malaysian visa! We tried the new metro (subway) system, which was pretty good. And that’s about it. Every place that the hotel travel desk recommended, we’ve unfortunately visited before!


India Gate, side view, Aug 2007. This is an even bigger roundabout than Connaught Place. Unlike Connaught Place, there’re no commercial buildings around, only acres of parks, fountains and government buildings. See my old post for a frontal view.


The gates of Rashtrapati Bhawan, the presidential palace, Dec 2006. Nope, couldn’t enter.


Qutub Minar, the 13th century victory tower of the Muslim invasion of Northern India


Anu at Qutub Minar, Dec 2006


Yours truly, at the Qutub Minar complex, Oct 2007


With fellow Malaysian, Ranaith, Leighton's Safety Manager of the Agra-Bharatpur Highway Project


Dilli Haat, a bazaar selling arts and craft from all over India, Nov 2006. And there're food stalls representing the various states of India, if not you think I'd be interested, hehehe


The Lotus Temple, worship house of the Baha'i Faith, New Delhi, Dec 2006. People of all religions are welcomed to any Baha'i House of Worship, and the best thing about the Lotus Temple is that it's free, there's no entrance fee!






Scenes from the Lodi Gardens, Oct 2007. This is the jogging ground of New Delhi. It's filled with trees and old tombs, a nice escape from the chaos outside


Birla Temple, Delhi, Aug 2007


Anu's elder sister, Manju and her son, Kunal at the Red Fort, Delhi, Aug 2007

There's another very interesting place in Delhi, the Akshardham Temple which unfortunately, does not allow cameras and phones, what a spoilsport!