Cows, Pigs & Human Dung

Saturday, 16 September 2017

The Gloom Begins

The Lion Monument (Löwendenkmal), a stone carving of a dying lion, Lucerne, Switzerland

No mood to write. Also no time. Last week there was a spate of staff transfers out from this Project (Big Boss’s surprise instruction!), but I’m not one of them. Which means my workload just increased triple-fold! Damn!

Now, back to my 2015 Europe trip posts. After enjoying a few days of wonderful weather in Switzerland, we had no choice but to face the gloomy rain and clouds for the remainder one week of our trip. (Yeah, checked the weather forecast a week before we flew off, and found that there’s just no escape on the second week of our trip. Europe sucks big time that way!)

Well, what the heck! We made the best out of it. First stop in the rain, Lucerne!

Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge) in gloomy weather, Luzern, Switzerland

More views of the gloom around Kapellbrücke

We at at the Kapellbrücke, Luzern

Don’t fret, you can still feed the swans if it rains

Lucerne (or Luzern in German, Lucerne is actually the French spelling) is the only city in Switzerland that I visited a second time. On my first Switzerland trip in 1994, my friends and I visited Zürich, Lucerne, Bern, Basel and Geneva. Of that, my favourite was Lucerne, and that’s why I’m back, with the family!

The River Reuss, from the Spreuerbrücke, Luzern, Switzerland

A walk around town - Hirschenplatz, Luzern

Here’s a small guide on what to do if the weather during your Europe trip sucks: -

Skip the countryside, see the towns instead – a no-brainer, unless you like to see fog, soaking wet fields, grey skies and rising river water. The towns on the other hand, contain historical landmarks, museums, shops, restaurants, opera halls, etc where you don’t need the sun to be shining to enjoy! Bring an umbrella.

Visit museums, palaces & churches – What the heck, it’s indoors! It’ll frequently be an architectural wonder. And it’ll contain a whole lot of treasures. (The Europeans know how to value ancient artefacts, unlike those idiots at ISIS).

Go shopping – the streets and squares of the old towns are usually pretty charming to explore, shop and eat! (...If you have money).

That’s it.

Outskirts of Lucerne. Bye-bye, heading to the east. Originally planned to go thru Klausen Pass, to Liechtenstein, and then onwards to Germany, but decided to give Klausen Pass a miss due to the rain! Luckily, …or we’d be bloody tired when we reached our next hotel in Füssen!

Monday, 4 September 2017

Eid Is in the Air

And so is Onam.

The festivals are back. Summer’s coming to an end. Justin will start school later in the week. AND I AM STILL AT THE ABU DHABI PROJECT!!!

Anyway, I got 3 days off (including the weekend) for Eid! That’s better than when I was in the friggin Dubai Canal Project last year. I took the opportunity to …sleep, eat, and find out what my family has been up to all these months! (Working in a project is like staying with the family but not knowing what they’re doing! Yeah, it’s that bad!)

Here’re pictures of a traditional Dubai for the season! Eid Mubarak everyone! And for the Malayali friends (whom I think make up half of the friggin project team), Happy Onam!

Al Salam Mosque, Al Barsha, Dubai – this Al Barsha mosque is a reasonably new building. I kinda like it, that's why I'm posting a picture of it for the second time. (Here's a picture of the same mosque from my earlier post).

A walk in Bur Dubai - Ali bin Abi Taleb Street, Dubai

Close up view of the Ali ibn Abi Talib Mosque, Bur Dubai, Dubai

A Persian looking mosque at Bur Dubai

Bur Dubai adorned with flags of the UAE, on UAE’s National Day in December 2015

Al Fahidi Fort (Museum), Bur Dubai

Views of Dubai Creek

Here’s a 2015 view of Dubai Creek that I’ve photographed and posted way back on our first month in Dubai in 2008. Can you spot the difference?

The things for sale at Bur Dubai Souk (Market)

The walls of the old souk at Bur Dubai - Notice what they’re made off? Chunks of friggin corals collected from the sea!

Sunday, 27 August 2017

In Between Lakes

Casino Kursaal, Interlaken, Switzerland

Here’s another quick holiday photo post – on the city of Interlaken in Switzerland.

Have always wanted to visit Interlaken, since 1994, when our group of Malaysian Cina-Apek students (+ 1 Cina-Aso) from Manchester UK went a-backpacking across Europe. Interlaken at that time was inaccessible to us. No, it’s not banned. It’s just that we were travelling on Interrail tickets (where we could travel anywhere in Europe by rail for a month), but if you wanna get on some special railway, or a bullet train, or things like that, you had to pay extra. And Interlaken was on such a special railway. (Yeah, once a cheapskate, always a cheapskate!) Nah, actually, we were on a tight budget. What, we’re students, using our parents’ hard earned money, OK?! And Switzerland was the most expensive place on earth, even then. We visited quite a number of Swiss cities then – Zürich, Luzern, Bern, Basel, Geneva, and a mountain (don’t really remember, but I think it was Mt Titlis), but we stayed NO nights in Switzerland! NIL! How did we do it?? That’s the beauty of Interrail haha! We hopped onto a train in the evening, slept in the train, and hopped off when it was morning, to another city! We did our toilet stuff in the train stations, but didn’t take a shower even once in Switzerland, in summer. No wonder people stayed away from us!

Anyway, from then, I’ve always wondered how Interlaken would look like. It sounded like it’s wedged between lakes (What? ‘Inter’ means ‘between’, right? Like ‘inter-national’ – ‘between nations’. And ‘Laken’ is just ‘lake’ with an ‘N’!) And the meaning turned out to be correct. Go ahead, Google ‘Interlaken’!

Anyway, we made a short stopover in Interlaken on our way out from the Jungfrau Region to Luzern. In Interlaken, the Swiss people have somehow morphed into Asians – Chinese, Indians and Arabs. (Just look at our photos, not a single Swiss face in ‘em!) Hell, if it wasn’t for the lush greenery, European architecture and the nice mountain views, I would’ve sworn I was back in Dubai!

Although Interlaken is located in between two lakes, you don’t see much of a lake in the town centre. The lakes are connected by this river (or is it a canal?) called the Aare

The Flower Clock, Kursaal Gardens, Interlaken, Switzerland

Kursaal Gardens – Indians love this place, coz it’s featured in some famous Bollywood movie, (or movies?) (Don’t ask me which one!) Anu mustn’t be Indian, as she absolutely refused to take a walk in the place (she stayed in the car with little sleeping Jayden) – I think it’s because her annoying husband kinda pissed her off that time… oops

Höhematte, the central park in Interlaken – quite like the parks in Dubai, is teeming with foreigners picnicking on the grounds – the only missing thing is the smell of barbecued meat!

Justin & a fountain, Höhematte, Interlaken

Grand Hotel, Interlaken

The Streets of Interlaken – Asians all the way, except for the horse coachman!

Wednesday, 16 August 2017

The Ogre, the Monk and the Virgin

Children’s playground at Allmendhubel, Mürren, Switzerland – with, from left to right, the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau peaks in full view (if not for the darn clouds!)

The ogre, monk and virgin are the English translations of the names of the three most well-known peaks in the Jungfrau Region of Switzerland, the Eiger (Ogre), Mönch (Monk) and Jungfrau (Virgin). And you thought this would be a juicy fairy tale about some virgin??

These 3 peaks can be seen clearly in all its glory from Allmendhubel, a hillock with a children’s playground, above Mürren. …On a sunny day that is (ahem).

Here’re the photos. Enjoy!

The funicular railway station to Allmendhubel, Mürren, Switzerland

Allmendhubel, Mürren, Switzerland

“I love to go a-wandering, along the mountain tracks,…” and this time with a friggin pram!

Jayden, trying to wriggle himself out of mommy’s grasp – he still can’t walk at that time, he was 10 months’ old

I think, Justin had the most fun – Swinging on a ropeway with the majestic mountains looking by

Another picture with the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger in the background

You can actually take a train up to Jungfraujoch, at the saddle (the lowest point on the ridge) between the Jungfrau and Mönch as explained in my previous post. It’ll only cost you 212 Swiss Francs return per person from Mürren (bloody 945 ringgit!! The cost of maybe 5 Air Asia flights! For a friggin train ride – that’s Switzerland for you).

Bye-bye Allmendhubel, descending back to Mürren on the funicular train

Allmendhubel-Bahn Station, Mürren, Switzerland

Thursday, 10 August 2017

Little Swiss Mountain Villages

Anu and the kids, Mürren, Berner Oberland (Bernese Highlands), Switzerland

Another holiday photo post coming up! I guess it’ll be holiday photos till at least the end of this darn project. (By the way, the project was supposed to finish by the end of last month!)

More Swiss mountain villages for you! The Jungfrau region was where we went to after our visit to the Matterhorn. We left car-free Zermatt by train to Täsch to collect our car. We then decided NOT to take the car-train (again) (which is the fastest route) but to drive the long way through the countryside to Lauterbrunnen. (We’re not gonna be stuck in some friggin tunnel under the mountains on a beautiful day like that day, OK?) I was glad we drove! We had one of the best days of our trip picnicking along the way, passing over interesting places like Reckingen-Gluringen and Grimsel Pass.

Our destination was our hotel in the little town of Mürren, another car-free town. It’s car-free because it’s friggin high up on a ledge in the mountains overlooking Lauterbrunnen. Go ahead, check it out on Google Earth!

To get to Mürren, we had to park our car at the multi-storey car park in Lauterbrunnen, take a cable car (yes, you heard correctly, a cable car, but a large one that feels more like a train than a cable car actually – technically called an aerial cableway) up to the train station (Grütschalp) high up above Lauterbrunnen (some 700m above!). Then we had to take a train, and voila, we’re in Mürren!

View from our hotel room, Hotel Blumental, Mürren, Jungfrau Region, Switzerland

In the lobby of Hotel Blumental

Justin, with a Dubai Eye flag, outside Hotel Blumental, Mürren – Dubai Eye is a talk radio station in Dubai which I often tune in to while driving (and in Dubai, you drive a lot!) – They held a competition for the best summer holiday photo, where people had to go around taking photos, with the Dubai Eye flag! No, we didn’t win. Some photo from Kenya won, if I remember correctly…

Yours truly in Mürren

More views of Mürren – the snow-capped peak on the right is the Jungfrau, which gave this region its name, and the conical shaped peak on the left, is the Eiger – these two mountains, together with the Mönch (hidden from view by the mountain in front of it) forms the trio of mountain peaks famous in the Jungfrau region

There’re a lot of things you can do in Mürren like hiking, or if you have a lot of spare cash, going for rides up the mountain, like taking a cable car to Schilthorn peak, where you’ll find Piz Gloria, a revolving restaurant featured in the James Bond film, ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, or taking a train to Jungfraujoch, the highest railway station in Europe. The Schilthorn trip will set you back by about (let’s see, …Googling it), a whopping 82 Swiss Francs (today’s rate), 300+ dirhams per person! And Jungfraujoch, get ready for this, 212 friggin Swiss Francs i.e. 800 dirhams per person, bloody hell! (If your destination is Jungfraujoch, you’d be better off staying in Wengen, on the other side of the deep Lauterbrunnen valley, than Mürren. To get to Jungfraujoch from Mürren, you’ll need to change trains / cable cars 5 times and it takes nearly 3 hours to get there).

We were cheapskates, and besides, the weather ain’t too good (just look at the clouds in the photo), so we decided to just hop onto the small funicular train named Allmendhubel Bahn, to a children’s playground above Mürren. (It’s 13 CHF per person at today’s rate, 50 dirhams, …not too bad for poor people like us!) (I’ll put photos of the playground in another post). And when we were done with that, with still some time to spare, we walked from Mürren down to the next village of Gimmelwald and then took a cable car ride back to Mürren! (You think we’re gonna walk all the way back uphill after all that exercise?) We then had some Chinese food at a restaurant ran by a Singaporean / Malaysian Chinese Couple (yeah, in Mürren!), and then headed down to Lauterbrunnen to get our car to drive to our next destination! Bye, hope to see you again, Mürren!