The Emirates Road Project

The Emirates Road with Dubai city in the background

OK, here’s to giving everyone a glimpse of the highway project I’m at everyday.

The Emirates Road is the highway running north-south across the UAE, much like our North-South Highway in Malaysia. Unlike Malaysia, where the current 4-lane highway is being expanded into a 6-lane highway, causing road users to hurl abuses at the Highway authority and whichever Contractor is carrying out the works (due to their tendency to close all but one miserable lane and effectively defeating the purpose of having a bloody highway in the first place, and having the guts to continue extracting ridiculous amounts of toll money from already recession-hit users), Dubai is expanding the Emirates road from an existing 6-lane road (note: not highway) into a hu-friggin-mongous 12-lane super road (note: again not highway) which is absolutely toll-friggin-free. Our Project consists of about 10 km of the said road (not highway) and 3 enormous interchanges with 10 flyover bridges and 2 underpasses. It’ll cost Dubai about a billion dirhams (approx 950 million ringgit) and generates incomes for people like me, and the others working here. Thank you very much Dubai for your foresight in developing your city.


Our office compound (the circular building behind is Dubai's Cricket Stadium, not part of our office)


Group photo of China State Construction, Emirates Road Project team

Dubai Update: Plodding On

View from our villa’s roof top in Al-Barsha 3

A short mid 2009 update on life here. Dubai is boiling hot. A usual thing every summer, but I hear this year’s hotter. So much so that washing dishes after lunch at home has become a hazard, to your hands (ya, the water is steaming hot).

I am growing up extremely fast now, 6 more months to being a father, 6 more months to doubling my responsibilities. Anu’s tummy is beginning to show the bump, her usual clothes don’t fit anymore, and I’m starting to notice pregnant women around, there’re actually lots of them in Dubai, …or they may just be fat (ok, I mistook one friend of my friend).

My attention (on women around) has been switching from being exclusively on pretty and sexy, to a broader pregnant and fat selection (in addition to the pretty-sexy types of course, can’t live without ‘em). And I never noticed (until now) that there’re actually a lot of special clothes here in the departmental stores for pregnant women. (But there’re not cheap). And the stores for kids… don’t even want to think about it for the time being. Looks like shopping just grew ten-fold.

Work-wise, nothing has changed, same Quality-related position, but getting to like the Quality role now. Sort of like being a critic, we can give our comments, give our ratings, behave like an expert and not needing to take care of the shit ourselves, not bad a job huh?

Anyway, very busy, time to get back to work. Until the next update, here’re some photos of our current home (the 3rd in Dubai, the umpteenth since getting married, lost count after the seventh).


Our ‘villa’ in Al-Barsha 3, Dubai – it has 3 humongous apartment-type rooms, 4 normal type bedrooms (all with attached bathrooms), a dining room, a laundry room and 2 enormous halls in the main building; and a kitchen, 2 servant’s rooms, 2 shared toilets and a laundry room in an annexe building. It also has a small swimming pool (that’s not working, and filled with sand & slimy water) and lots of space for parking your limousines, Hummers and Ferraris.


Views from our villa’s roof top – our neighbourhood mosque


On the extreme left is Burj Al-Arab and the slide-type building on the right is the Mall of the Emirates


Anu in our bedroom


Anu pretending to wear a burka ala Dubai


The Mall of the Emirates (about 40 minutes by foot from the villa), that bizarre looking slide-thing contains Ski Dubai, the artificial ski-slope-in-a-mall.

A Desert Oasis Town

I’ve always imagined an oasis to be some sort of a lake or pond with a few palm trees flanking it surrounded by acres and acres of barren sandy desert. This apparently ain’t so. Not here in the UAE anyway.

Here’re pictures of Al-Ain a typical oasis town in this part of the world (I presume). It’s a part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi and is about an hour’s drive inland from here in Dubai. It sits just across the border with the Buraimi oasis of Oman. There're no lakes, no visible water body of any kind as far as I’d seen. But yes, there’re palm trees, date palms to be precise, swaths of it all over town, especially at the location that looks like the middle of an oasis in the map. Went all over the place looking for the oasis, and what do I find, a freaking date palm plantation that looks almost exactly like our oil palm estates.


Al-Ain Palace Museum – see those palm trees at the back just behind the palace wall? That, is the oasis of Al-Ain.


This place used to be a palace for the ruling clan of Abu Dhabi (hence the name Palace Museum)


Anu and a museum / palace guard


The road to Jebel Hafeet, a hill of crumbling rocky outcrops that’s a tourist attraction near Al-Ain. What’s of interest there? Well, it’s a friggin HILL OK? You don’t get no hills for leagues around this place.


Development at the top of Jebel Hafeet – Fancy that, a tower crane?


A restaurant, or more like THE restaurant at the foot of Jebel Hafeet

Grandma's Birthday

Happy 92nd Birthday Grandmama (93rd according to Chinese reckoning)

Long overdue post – pictures of Grandma’s birthday in March as promised to all at home. As a bonus (or more like to make up for the long delay), I’ve thrown in last year’s birthday pictures as well. And I WILL get down to doing something on Facebook for me and Anu …soon. Lazy, and am becoming …err resistant to change and new technology, yet another sign of aging shite!


Dad and Mom


Gary, Granny, Auntie Choo and 3rd Auntie (Sanh-Ko) Lucy


Jane, Anu and Granny


Jason, Mark, Kim, Granny, Jamie and Hazel


2nd Uncle (Jipek), Jamie, Rachel, Kim and Ben


Anu, Daphne and Jack

Well, here’s a lunar-solar calendar I found in the net of the Year 1917, Year of the Snake, Grandmother’s supposedly birth sign and therefore birth year. This was a leap year in the Chinese Calendar and it had 2 Second Months. Taking the Chinese birth date of Granny as the 15th day of the 2nd Month of the Chinese Calendar as what we’ve been using so far, the Western Calendar equivalent would be 8th March 1917 (same birth date as yours truly) or 6th April 1917 (if she’s born on the repeated 2nd Month). By that reckoning, she’d be 92 years old now according to the Western Calendar.



Granny’s Birthday 2008 – Big Auntie (Tua-Ko), Kok Seng, Granny, Small Auntie (Seihan-Cim) and Small Uncle (Seihan-Ceik)


Granny’s Birthday 2008 – Kim, Mom, Gary, Anu, Dad, Hazel and Granny


Granny’s Birthday 2008 – 2nd Auntie (Jiko), Mark, June, Granny and Jamie (front); Patrick, Rachel, Jane and Chee Kan (back)

A Little Bit of Darjeeling

The Druk Sangak Choling Gompa in Darjeeling

For the time being, here’re some pictures of Darjeeling taken 2 years back… Darjeeling was at the centre of a protest movement to create a separate state called Gorkhaland (the majority of the people in Darjeeling are of Nepali decent, and Nepali, or Gurkhali, the Indian version of Nepali, is the main language in Darjeeling).


Somewhere in the heart of Darjeeling


The Japanese Peace Pagoda, Darjeeling


In contemplation, at the Peace Pagoda


Darjeeling in the monsoon


A lama manning the prayer wheel in the Gompa (Tibetan monastery)


Anu and her Guardian Monks


Prayer flags at Observatory Hill, Darjeeling


Making an artwork out of roofing


A protest on water supply in the streets of Darjeeling

For Quantity or for Quality?

This (blog update) is what you resort to when you run out of ideas, or time. Actually it’s time that’s killing the imagination nowadays. I’ve been a perfectionist my entire adult life (can’t recall much of my childhood times), a trait that’s both advantageous and disadvantageous I find. On one hand you strive to produce good quality work. On the other, because you want to produce only good quality work, if you can’t, you’d choose to produce nothing at all. Which is bad for your friggin working life, and so for a long time I’ve been fighting against my perfectionist tendencies. At work, the boss looks for output. If you sit around daydreaming for three days with no output just because you can’t kick-start your friggin inspiration, you’d better have some super excuse up your sleeve. My quest against perfectionism seems to finally be producing some results; I’ve been churning out blog entries more than I care for the quality of ‘em, just to keep up with my ‘New Blogging Strategy’ for example (see previous entry Sep 2007).

But I find that there is a price to pay for this – the birth of practicality and the slow death of the nonsensical. Is this how the child in you begins to disappear, how the practical aspects of life start to replace the imagination, how the fairies and elves start to be replaced by the pretty girls and the parties, how the Orcs start to be replaced by the annoying wife of your boss, how your humour start to give way to sensitivities where you never knew existed? I have no answers.

A Much-Bombed City

Ahem… as usual, my end of the month blog…


Guwahati, Assam

This is Guwahati (or Gauhati in colonial times), the de facto capital of Assam state. (The real capital is actually Dispur, a suburb of Guwahati). Guwahati is named after the betel nut – ‘guwa’ means ‘betel nut’ and ‘haat’ means ‘market’ in Assamese (according to Wikipedia, I don’t know Assamese). Assam and betel nut are practically inseparable. The betel nut culture is so entrenched that Assamese actually sounds like a language spoken with a mouth full of stuff …betel nuts I suppose. As the largest city of North East India and the gateway for the North East to the rest of India (and the world), Guwahati has become the favourite place for local separatists to bomb.

North East India is made up of many types of people with different cultural and religious backgrounds. Many of these people have their own terrorist outfits so that if they’re bombed they can retaliate by bombing back their bombers. An eye for an eye! The most well-known terrorist group currently is ULFA (or the United Liberation Front of Asom), which is the Indian Army’s favourite suspect for everything that is not right in Assam.

At times of peace, Assam can be very interesting because of its diversity. The original Ahoms who ruled Assam for 600 years were ethnically and linguistically related to Thais but are Hindus. The Bodo and Dimasa people are also Hindus but are of Tibeto-Burman stock. The Khasi who are mainly Christians are related to Khmers (Cambodians). And then there are the Bengalis and the Assamese who are mainly either Hindu or Muslim. Add a few dozen more tribes and communities and bang! you get present day Assam, land of diversity, beauty, terrorists and bombs.


The mighty Brahmaputra River that flows across Tibet, Assam and Bangladesh




Kamakhya Temple – Temple of the Mother Goddess, where sacrifices of goat and doves are an everyday thing.

Legend has it that when Sati, the wife of the god Shiva, died, he became so grieved and furious (at her father for forcing her to commit suicide) that he took her burnt body (she died of self-immolation) and began prancing around heaven in sorrow. In the process, different parts of her body fell onto different parts of the Indian subcontinent, and in time became prominent places of worship. Her vagina (yeah, you read correctly) fell onto the site of the Kamakhya Temple.


Anu & her momma at the Kamakhya Temple


Anu on the Brahmaputra


Mom-in-law on the banks of the Brahmaputra


Gary & mom-in-law at the Umananda Temple, on an island in the Brahmaputra

Look beyond the terrorists and the bombs and you’ll find that the majority of the people of the North East are peace-loving and rather laid back. North-East India has tremendous potential (according to me), it is abundantly fertile and rich in natural resources. The diversity of its people creates a cultural mix so rich that it’ll be hard to find anything close to what you can find here. (And the varieties of food? Simply unimaginable …fancy dog meat!!!?, pop into an everyday restaurant in Aizawl, Mizoram). The diversity also means that the command of English and other languages (as a means of communication between different types of people) is better than many other parts of India. The main problem of this area – remoteness and inaccessibility. Wanna travel by road from Aizawl to Kolkata? – 3 back-breaking days when the weather is good. (It takes 1 hour if you fly! Yes, when the weather is good).

A Long Time Ago in Thailand

Nothing much happening and have not explored new places for quite some time, so here’s something from the past – our family gathering in Bangkok in 2005.


The Grand Palace, Bangkok
(From right: big uncle (tuapek - dad’s eldest brother); big auntie (tuako - dad’s eldest sister); dad; granny (dad’s mom); big uncle’s wife (a-mm); and on wheelchair: second uncle (jipek - dad's second eldest brother)


The Floating Market in Damnoen Saduak


Granny & Jipek at the floating market


A Jedi Warrior (Gary Siteworker) in Ayutthaya


Pickle Art in the Ayutthaya Market

Thailand is seeing a little bit of unrest currently. Isn’t it strange that beautiful and peaceful places like these could sometimes become quite scary? I noticed that many of the places we’ve been to have had their violent spells at one time or another. I can recall a few more – the Mumbai terrorist attack, the bombing of Jaipur (May 2008), the frequent bombs in Guwahati (last one just last week), the Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan (June 2008), the never-ending Kashmir unrest, the riots in Darjeeling (June 2008), the on-going war in Sri Lanka.

Let’s just hope that violence does not spread to our own homes. On a brighter note, Anu’s 1 month pregnant. And for those celebrating their new years at this time whatever they’re called – Songkran, Vaisakhi, Thingyan, etc – Happy New Year!