City of Flames

Since we’re on low places, here’s the lowest capital city in the world, Baku, capital of Azerbaijan. It is 28m below sea level. Don’t believe me, Google it!


Flame Towers, Baku, Azerbaijan

I’m doing another quick picture post. On the work front, I have suddenly been thrown back into the ITS Project fray… for reasons still unclear. I’ve been out of the ITS Project from May. The last 5 months have been a nice, refreshing less hectic time. I hear the project’s running OK, so why, oh why, disturb yours truly here???!!! Guess that’s good-bye to my alternate Saturdays off, for the time being… WTF!

Baku’s nickname is actually the City of Winds as it is supposedly windy all year round. Heck, Baku’s name is derived from its old Persian name, Badkube which means “Pounding winds”. But we only experienced the wind in all its fury on the third day, on the day we flew out of Baku back to Dubai. The first two days, was just a little breezy. Why I call it the City of Flames is because it is a city of oil and gas, its city symbol are flames, its most iconic building is the Flame Towers, which has dancing flames projected on it at night, it has a naturally burning hillside called Yanardag that’s permanently burning due to gas deposits underneath the surface, it has Zoroastrian fire temples, and it has mud volcanoes all over the place (yeah, you read correctly, mud friggin volcanoes)… I rest my case. Here’re the pictures.


Jayden playing aeroplane, by the shores of the Caspian Sea (Bulvar), Baku


The Caspian Sea, Baku


Azerbaijan flag pole, Bulvar, Baku


Mini-Venice, Baku


Maiden Tower, Old City, Baku – Is it part of the city fortification? Actually, no one knows for sure. Scholars now think it’s a religious structure… There’s a museum at the tower that explains it all, but… as usual, I didn’t read them, ahem


View of Baku from atop the Maiden Tower


City walls of the Old City (Icheri Sheher) – Our hotel was inside the walled city, where most of the roads are still cobblestone roads, cool huh?


Nizami Museum of Azerbaijan Literature – Anu looks like a giant standing beside some miniature humans. She’s actually atop the stairs, while the others are below


Fountains Square (Fevvareler Meydani), Baku, Azerbaijan


The bustling footpaths around Fountains Square – They’re all coloured beige by the way. Wonder what it is with Baku and the colour beige?


Philharmonic Fountain, Filarmoniya Park, Baku


Another well-known landmark of Baku, the Heydar Alivey Centre, designed by the renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid


I HEART BAKU – This was the day, Baku lived up to its name, the wind-pounded city


Heydar Aliyev International Airport (Yup every other thing is named after Heydar Aliyev) – Bye-bye Baku, see ya again hopefully...

The Lowest Land on Earth

Sunset on the Dead Sea, Jordan

Yup, the Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth which isn’t under water. It is friggin 1,300 feet (400m) below sea level! If you like plop the Petronas Twin Towers here, sea level would be at where the towers’ top spires are.

I am continuing from where I left off in Jordan. After Petra, we headed for the shores of the Dead Sea. (How can we not visit the Dead Sea?!?)

Here’s the post, in pictures. (A picture speaks a 1000 words after all, hehe)


Road between Al Tafilah Town on the King’s Highway, and the Dead Sea Highway (Jordan Valley Highway). Far off in the gloomy horizon, on the lowlands you can see the Dead Sea

After our full day picnic in Petra, and a night in our hotel in Wadi Musa, we made our way north again on the King’s Highway. We drove past the Dana Biosphere Reserve (no, there’s just too little time to visit), and turned off at Al Tafilah, towards the Dead Sea Highway. Once there, we drove on the lowest highway on earth (well, it’s the lowest point on earth, so I figured this would also be the lowest highway on earth, right?), bought some food from the lowest grilled chicken stall on earth, and had a picnic, at the lowest picnic spot on earth, ahem…


Picnic by the Dead Sea


Yippee, the gloom’s lifting – Dead Sea, near the outfall of Wadi Mujib


Finally, our hotel, the lowest hotel on earth (one of the many anyway) Dead Sea Spa Hotel, Jordan – Far off across the Dead Sea, are the shores of Palestine


Hello Jayden, are you cold? 1 year old Jayden at the Dead Sea


Sunset on the Dead Sea …See the salt crystals on the pebbles?


A dip in the Dead Sea


Honey, why don’t you take your shoes off? This water is supposed to do wonders for your skin. And it’s stickyyyy…


Salt encrusted rocks! Check out this old post for Justin mucking around these rocks


Dead Sea Mud! Comes free with the stay in the hotel. The hotel has a spa and even a medical centre! Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to do any of that. We stayed only one night, and decided to stay in Amman on the next night to be nearer to the airport as we would be flying off on the day after. On hindsight, we should’ve stayed at the Dead Sea one more night, as the journey from the Dead Sea to the airport would only be 20 mins more than that from Amman. Heck, then we could’ve dug up our own Dead Sea mud! Do you think they’ll let us take it back home??

This is my last post on our Jordan trip of the winter of 2015. From the Dead Sea, we went on to visit Bethany, the place where Jesus was baptized, then stopped at a souvenir shop to snap up some Dead Sea Mud (yeah, they sell the darn mud! It’s supposed to be great for your skin), then headed to Amman’s Rainbow Street for our last night’s stay. Amman was blustery cold and drizzling that night and we realized only then, that we left one of my shirts and Justin’s jacket in the Dead Sea Spa Hotel. Damn! If only it was snowing, rather than drizzling. What a Christmas it would've been...

Of Food & Celebrations

Happy Durga Puja! Happy Dassera!

That’s Anu’s main festival, and it’s today. I’m gonna post a short picture post about food. Because Anu would almost always come up with some amazing food preparations on festivals and celebrations like these. (She’s just wonderful to have around. I love you honey. And not just because of the food you cook, OK? It’s everything you do…)

But this time, there’s a catch. We’ve shifted to our new house, which comes with only a blasted electric cooker (NO, gas stoves are NOT safe, says the developer). For me, whoever cooks with an electric cooker, don’t know nuts about food. How do you do a proper Asian stir fry with a bloody electric stove?!?!?? I could like heat up 4 friggin dishes, all at one time, in 5 minutes, in our old International City house. Now, the dishes have to take turns, coz if you set one stove top to ‘9’ (hottest), the other stove tops can’t turn on for some reason or other…, and it’ll take at least 3 times longer to heat up the same things as a gas stove. Plus, I wonder how much power we’re friggin using! Hope the electricity bill doesn’t give us a heart attack when it comes…

Anyway, here’re some food Anu churned out and some we ate outside thru the years. …Somehow or other, the outside food always falls short of our expectations, besides being bloody expensive. Here we go!


Last year’s Durga Puja dishes – All that for our tiny family of 4, plus 1 niece. Still reasonable, compared to the 13 dishes for Chinese New Year earlier this year! Among the dishes I can see – chicken parts, mutton soup, french beans in soya sauce garnished with fried onions and a sprig of dill, gundruk salad (a Nepali pickled vegetable), kangkung, fish crackers… (not really Indian, right?)


More Indian dishes… although Anu’s not too fond of ‘em. Yeah, no kidding! In 2007, we stayed in the 5-Star Marriott Lakeside Chalet in Mumbai for 40 days (compliments of the company I was working for then, ahem), and we ate almost every dinner in the hotel's Chinese Restaurant. We dined in the hotel’s Indian Restaurant only once (and that too at my prompting), and she didn’t like it. Here’s some keema matar (mince mutton & peas, one of my favourite Indian dishes), pudina (mint) chutney, pickled onion, salad (the white slices with the red fringe are red radishes) and chapatti (of the instant kind… frozen chapatti, Kawanku brand, of Malaysia). What to do? Anu hates kneading dough…


Here’s something we imported from the North East (of India) – Anu calls them New Potatoes (I call them baby potatoes). These are our chips of choice, and they’re only available in season (winter I think). Fried with a pinch of turmeric, cumin and dried chilli (hope I’m correct)

Moving on to other food –


Rice with prawn & petai sambal – Anu loves petai, and sambal. We love sambal so much now that almost every meal, we have some form of sambal or chutney


Here’s Anu’s version of the Hainanese Chicken Rice that we get in Malaysia, and it can pass off nicely as the real thing! The only problem is that Anu cooks, and she forgets. So the next time you asked for it, she may cook a different thing or it may not taste exactly the same… (hence the pictures, hehe)


And this is Anu’s version of Nasi Goreng Kampung, complete with nice table decorations…


Salad is what we mostly eat at home for dinner for some time now. (We love herbs!) Here’s chicken and sautéed mushroom with kangkung salad oriental style (tastes like the Sotong Kangkung we get in Malaysia)


Fish (I think it’s Sea Bream …or is it Bass?) with potato & lentil salad


Lamb patties with 2 types of salads – Avocado salad (I call it Guacamole Assam-Style, because it has chillies… everything has chillies) and strained yogurt with cucumber and umm… I dunno (I call it Tzatziki ala Anu …Hey Honey, don’t you know that this is Tzatziki? What’s that? It’s something the Greeks eat)


Something incredibly simple, but nice – 2 types of garlic bread, salad and tea for breakfast. 2 types? Ya, one with olive oil & garlic (Anu’s preferred way, she’s psychologically averse to butter), and the good ol’ loaded ones with butter and cheese


Pasta! Ala Anu. One of my favourites – with chicken, mushroom, black olives, pasta sauce, a few dashes of soya sauce, black pepper, chilli flakes and parmesan cheese…


One of the many quinoa dishes Anu makes. This is black quinoa with lamb chop. We usually have white quinoa with chicken… She also makes couscous & salad with salmon, but I don’t have any pictures of that


This is the best paella I’ve eaten. Far better than the ones we’ve tried outside. Maybe it’s the white wine that Anu uses?? Plus, there’s chutney! Radish chutney…

Now for some outside fare…


Quesadillas and burger at Chili’s, the Market, Dubai Investment Park 1 (DIP 1) on Durga Puja 2017


Seafood buffet at the Crowne Plaza, Deira on Anu’s birthday in 2016, a nice treat from niece Karishma – How’s the lobster?


And this is one of my favourite Arabic dishes, Chicken Mandi from Al Mandi & Al Madhbi House – all this for AED 13 at the Abu Dhabi Petrol Stations between my Project and our head office in Dubai. Can’t get anything more value for money than this nowadays, here in the UAE

That’s all for today folks. Enjoy your puja! (And for those who're not celebrating, ...just enjoy!)

Petra!

The Treasury, Petra, Jordan

Finally. The Petra photos, after 4 long years of sitting in the friggin hard disk drive. (We visited in Dec 2015). This is a continuation of my recent post on Jordan.

Petra has always been in a place I wanted to visit. Since I saw it in the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade movie, way back in the 80s. And I’m not waiting for some crackpot terrorists (like the Taliban or ISIL) to come and blow the place up for absolutely no reason. No, although Jordan is absolutely peaceful without a hint of trouble, I’m taking no chances, so Petra here we come! That was 2015. Here’re the pictures, hehe.


The first view of the Treasury… after travelling thru 1.5km of a narrow crack of a walkway called the Siq (that’s Anu trying to take a picture of the treasury with her phone). The Siq is definitely one of the main allures of this place. Just imagine you being some medieval traveller (or better still, Indiana Jones) and you were trying to get to Petra for the first time. You see nothing, only rock hills, and then you enter a narrow chasm in the 300 – 500 feet high wall. The narrow path, squeezed between the towering mountains, is dotted with mysterious chambers on its sides. And then, lo and behold, you emerged onto this opening with the Treasury in front of you!


Papa and little 1 year old Jayden at the Treasury. No, you can’t enter the Treasury. There’re guards there. But I heard that it’s empty, so what are they guarding? The Holy Grail? (as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). The Matrix? (as in the Transformers Movie, Revenge of the Fallen). Those horse carts in the picture are for transporting tourists from the ticket counters to the Treasury thru the Siq, and back, if you choose to do so. (You have to pay extra). Otherwise, it’s a 2km walk, with 1.5 of that in the mysterious Siq. We chose the horse-carts. We’d have walked if we weren’t with the kids. Justin pinched his nose the whole time we were in the horse cart (c’mon, it ain’t that smelly). Justin’s just not a fan of animal rides…

We spent the whole friggin day in Petra. We reached at about 9am and left only at 5pm. Some people do just the Siq and the Treasury, and zoom off to another place. We met 2 Malaysian ladies (in another place in Jordan) who did just that! Petra in 30 minutes. Heck, what sort of tour is that? We, on the other hand, packed our bags full of food so that we could picnic in Petra. Most people on group tours do a one day trip from Amman, the capital. They’d typically get on the tour bus at 7 in the morning, trudge thru 3 hours of bus ride to Wadi Musa (where Petra is), see Petra, and then trudge through another 3 hours of bus to get back to Amman by 7pm. We’re not big fans of group tours. We had screwed up one too many to try another group tour again (we’re serial late-comers), at least not until the kids grow up a bit! The last time we successfully did a group tour, was when Justin was a wee 5-month old baby, in Cappadocia, Turkey.


Here’s our home for the first part of our day. A chamber / cave directly opposite the Theatre. We had to find a suitable room / place to breastfeed Jayden. There wasn’t a lot of people there at that time. …Later, (after we left, thankfully) swarms of tourists would clamber all over the many caves / chambers… This was not the first time Anu had to breastfeed in a cave. She did it with Justin in Cappadocia, Turkey


The Theatre… See those steps there like those of a stadium?


The crowd’s coming. Let’s go explore another place. Justin, holding our picnic mat, climbing up the stairs (to the High Place of Sacrifice). I think Justin enjoyed the most in this trip. He was looking for treasure. Every box or chest that he saw, was a treasure chest to him…


Finally, the High Place of Sacrifice (left of the photo, it’s just a broken wall)) …this is the view looking down from where we came from. Far in the distance, you can see the houses of Wadi Musa


View of some of the Petra Tombs (yeah, they’re all tombs… scary, huh?) from the High Place of Sacrifice. We made another picnic stop on the way going down… lunch, and breastfeeding the baby


Camels at Petra – Justin, do you want to ride on a camel or donkey? No, Papa, they’re smelly! But the Monastery is quite far away, and it’s up lots of stairs. No, Papa. OK, then let’s give the Monastery a miss (…but, but, that’s where they found the Matrix in Transformers!) Nope, we didn’t make the trip… (the adults were also tired walking, hehe)


Bedouins in Petra, guardians of the donkeys and camels, that Justin turned down…


Let’s just hang around and explore something on ground level, OK? – Anu and the tombs, Petra – It was a pretty windy afternoon, as you can see from Anu’s hair


Colonnaded Street, Petra


See everyone’s on donkeys, sure we don’t wanna go? Alright, let’s go to that tea shop ahead then …Emm, how do we keep the blasted sand off our coffee?? And my shoes are full of sand!


The mouth of the Siq – Back at the Treasury, waiting for our horse cart to go back


Wadi Musa, where our hotel was – See you Petra!